the show needs to telegraph awareness that ‘this is all very complicated and fraught with moral peril – yet we are doing it with clear eyes.' So you need to spend some time gesturing in that direction, but it would be annoying if these gestures slowed down the action. So those bits get outsourced to the political side of the narrative. So a subdued sense of how the game actually ought to be played, cleanly, gets played as a sort of steady accompaniment, with the left hand, while the right is banging out a rousing, martial tune. It would be a good bargain, if the reality-based liberal community could strike it: in exchange for liberal control of actually existing institutions and policy-making, conservatives could be ceded total control of a network of powerful but strictly mythical agencies, headed by omnicompetent, albeit non-existent agents.
