I came to The West Wing late. Not when it first aired, in that long forgotten world before 9/11 when liberal democracy felt like the direction of travel rather than a rearguard action. I found it about five years ago, the way you sometimes stumble into exactly what you needed without knowing you were looking for it.

Every year, I have watched it several times. My wife has opinions about this.

I am not going to pretend that watching a twenty-year-old American political drama is a political act. But I want to make a genuine case for why it matters to me. Not as escapism, though it is that too. As an articulation of liberal values that I have not often found dramatised so clearly or so honestly anywhere else.

The West Wing is not subtle about what it believes. It believes that public service is a vocation. That the people drawn to government at its best are not there for the salary or the proximity to power, but because they think the work matters. It believes that competence and compassion belong together: that doing your job well and genuinely caring about the people your job affects are the same impulse, not competing priorities. And it believes that idealism is not a phase you grow out of when you become serious. It is, in fact, the most serious position available.

I think that last part is the one that resonates most with me as a liberal. There is a particular kind of political tiredness that presents itself as wisdom. The knowing shrug. The weary insistence that this is how things are, and anyone who imagines otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. The West Wing refuses that. Not naively, not by pretending the obstacles aren’t real, but by insisting that the obstacles are not the whole story.

I came to my liberal and humanist values before I came to party politics. The conviction that human dignity is not contingent. That people deserve lives of meaning and security, not because they’ve earned them through the right choices but simply because they are people. That freedom matters, and so does the material reality that makes freedom possible or withholds it. That government, properly constituted and properly motivated, can be a force for genuine good in people’s lives.

These are liberal values. They have a long and serious lineage in this country.

When Toby Ziegler stands over a dead homeless veteran in a park in the small hours of the morning, a man who served his country and was failed by it, the show does not explain this away. It sits in the wrongness of it. It is furious. And then it asks: so what are we going to do?

That question, I think, is the animating one for anyone who takes liberal politics seriously. Not what is the politically achievable minimum. Not how do we manage this problem to acceptable levels, but what are we going to do?

There is a phrase the show returns to, usually in Bartlet’s mouth: “What’s next?”  It is partly a management tic, a way of keeping the room from stalling. But it is also a philosophy. The work does not end. The next problem is already waiting. You feel the weight of what you didn’t manage to get done, and then you get up and try again.

I find that genuinely motivating. Not because it erases difficulty, but because it contextualises it. Of course, this is hard. Of course, the political weather is hostile, and the media cycle will eat your best idea before breakfast. The question is not whether those things are true. The question is what you do next.

I do not think a television show made me a liberal. But it named something I already felt, and gave it a shape I could hold onto.

The shape is this: government can be good. Public service can be honourable. The gap between what is and what could be is not evidence that change is impossible. It is the reason to keep going. And when you lose, and you will lose, more often than feels fair, you pick yourself up, and you ask, “What’s next?”.

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.