There is a scene in the second season of Mad Men that sums up everything. Don Draper walks into a meeting with a difficult client, says almost nothing for twenty minutes, and when he finally speaks, everyone in the room reconfigures their positions. Not because what he says is particularly brilliant. But because the preceding silence created the conditions for anything he said to sound like a verdict. That is power. Not what you say, but where you say it from.
Mad Men is many things. It is a series about advertising, about the sixties, about marriage, about identity, about alcohol as the operating system of a professional generation. But if you strip away all the layers, what remains at the centre is a treatise on power in enclosed spaces. Sterling Cooper is not an advertising agency. It is a Renaissance city-state with whisky and ashtrays.
The Rules of the Game
The first thing you notice when looking at Sterling Cooper with political eyes is that the formal rules mean nothing. There is an organisational chart, of course. There are partners, directors, account executives, creatives, secretaries. But the org chart is what the Constitution is for many countries: a decorative document everyone respects in theory and nobody consults in practice.
Real power at Sterling Cooper flows through other channels. Through lunches, through who plays golf with whom, through conversations at the bar of the Hotel Roosevelt, through the glances exchanged during a presentation when an executive says something stupid. Real power is relational, not hierarchical. And Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, understood this with a precision most business schools fail to articulate.
In political science there is a useful concept: the difference between formal power and effective power. Formal power is what appears in the statutes. Effective power is what is actually exercised. In most human organisations, from the Roman Senate to a contemporary multinational, the distance between the two is enormous. Sterling Cooper is a perfect case study.
Bert Cooper is, formally, the founding partner. The patriarch. But Bert Cooper hasn’t exercised power directly in years. His function is something else: he is the arbiter, the legitimiser. When an important decision needs institutional weight, someone goes to Bert’s office, where he is sitting barefoot reading Ayn Rand, and asks for his blessing. Bert almost always gives it, not because he particularly cares about the matter but because he understood long ago that the power of the one who legitimises depends on not refusing too often. He is the corporate equivalent of a constitutional monarchy. He reigns but does not govern. And like any constitutional monarchy that works, his value lies precisely in that abstention.
Roger Sterling, or the Weight of Inheritance
Roger Sterling is the most interesting character in Mad Men from a political perspective, and he is so precisely because he appears not to be. Roger is funny, shallow, alcoholic, a womaniser, and delivers the best lines in the series. It is easy to see him as comic relief. But Roger is much more than that.
Roger is an heir. His father founded the agency with Cooper. He became a partner not because he was particularly good at advertising but because his name is on the door. And what is remarkable is that Roger knows it. He doesn’t kid himself. That is his form of intelligence: total lucidity about his own condition.
Roger’s humour is not decorative. It is strategic. It is how an aristocrat manages the discomfort of knowing himself undeserved. Every one of Roger’s jokes is a small confession wrapped in cynicism, and at the same time it is a weapon. Because the person who makes people laugh controls the tone of the conversation, and the person who controls the tone controls more than it seems. Roger doesn’t win arguments with arguments. He wins them by shifting the register, by making the other person feel heavy and solemn for insisting.
There is something deeply political in this. Real heirs, the ones who last, never compete on the terrain of merit because they know they lose there. They compete on the terrain of style, of belonging, of social capital accumulated over generations. Roger doesn’t need to bring in new clients. Roger is the relationship with the old ones. His presence at a lunch is worth more than any creative campaign, because what he is selling is not advertising but access to a world, a class, a code. In international relations terms, Roger is Britain after Suez: the empire is over, but the manners and the connections still open doors.
What Weiner does with Roger is something few writers manage: showing that frivolity can be a form of power, and that charm can be a form of violence. When Roger says something devastating to someone while smiling with a glass of vodka in his hand, what he is doing is reminding the other person that he can afford not to take anything seriously. And in an environment where everyone is desperate to be taken seriously, that is a lethal advantage.
Pete Campbell and the Tragedy of Merit
If Roger is the aristocracy, Pete Campbell is the frustrated meritocracy. Or more precisely: Pete is what happens when someone understands the rules of power before anyone else but lacks the natural talent to apply them.
Pete arrives at Sterling Cooper young, ambitious, and with a surprisingly accurate reading of how the place works. From the first season, Pete sees things others don’t. He understands before anyone that the African American market is an untapped segment. He understands that television is going to change advertising for ever. He understands that Don Draper is vulnerable. In terms of pure strategic analysis, Pete is probably the smartest person in the office.
Pete’s problem is that strategic intelligence is not enough if it doesn’t come with something harder to define. Call it grace, or charisma, or simply the ability to make people want to be around you. Pete doesn’t have it. Pete is tense, anxious, transparent in his manoeuvres, and genuinely unlikeable in the most mundane sense. Every time Pete makes a political move in the office, the move is correct but the execution is clumsy. He is like a chess player who sees the winning move but knocks over the pieces reaching for it.
There is a specific cruelty in this that the series captures very well. Pete comes from an old-money New York family, the Dykmans, but one in decline. He has the pedigree but not the fortune, and he also lacks the ease of those who were born truly secure. He is a faded aristocrat trying to play the meritocracy game, and he never quite fits in either world. In the political taxonomy, Pete is the impatient reformist: he sees the system’s problems clearly, proposes the right solutions, but proposes them in a way that irritates everyone, including those who would benefit.
What is notable is that the series never fully redeems him or fully condemns him. Pete is unpleasant, yes. But he is also right most of the time. And Mad Men is honest enough to show that being right doesn’t count for much if you lack the skill to make the other person think the idea was theirs.
Lane Pryce and the Cost of Decency
Lane Pryce’s arc is the saddest in the series, and possibly the most political.
Lane arrives at Sterling Cooper as an overseer. The agency has been bought by a British firm, Putnam, Powell and Lowe, and Lane is the man they send to put the books in order. He is a proper, formal, competent man. An accountant in a world of salesmen. And what happens to Lane is what happens to every decent person who enters a system that was not designed to reward decency.
Lane does everything right. He manages the numbers with rigour. He earns the professional respect of his colleagues. When the moment comes to break from the British firm and found Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Lane is the one who makes the legal and financial manoeuvre possible. Without him, the new agency doesn’t exist. And yet Lane never quite belongs. He is the useful foreigner everyone needs but nobody adopts. He eats with them but he is not one of them.
Lane’s tragedy is fiscal, literally. When personal problems lead him to commit a minor fraud against the agency, Don Draper’s reaction is merciless. Don, who built his entire life on a lie of identity, who is probably the least qualified person in the building to judge someone else’s dishonesty, asks Lane to resign. And Lane, who has neither Don’s moral flexibility nor Roger’s cynicism nor Pete’s cunning, cannot process the fall. His suicide is the darkest moment in the series, and it works as a political thesis: systems of power do not destroy the worst, they destroy those who cannot adapt. Morality is a luxury the system tolerates as long as it doesn’t get in the way, and when it does, the system shows no mercy.
Lane’s fate is, if you think about it coldly, a corporate version of something that happens in real politics all the time. The honest official who falls for a minor mistake while people around him with far worse records thrive without consequence. The difference between Lane and Don is not that one is more honest than the other. The difference is that Don knows how to operate in the grey zone and Lane does not.
Don Draper as Sovereign
And then there is Don. Don is the centre of the series and the centre of Sterling Cooper’s power system, but his power is of an entirely different nature from everyone else’s.
Don has no inherited social capital like Roger. No political cunning like Pete. No technical competence like Lane. What Don has is something rarer and harder to replicate: aura. Don walks into a room and the room changes. Not because of what he says, not because of what he has done, but because of something intangible, something to do with the way he occupies space.
In political terms, Don is a charismatic sovereign in the Weberian sense. His authority comes not from tradition, like Roger’s, nor from institutional structure, like Lane’s. It comes from himself, from a personal quality that others recognise and submit to without anyone forcing them. This makes him enormously powerful and enormously fragile at the same time, because charismatic power depends on perception, and perception is the most volatile thing in the world.
The genius of Mad Men is showing that Don, the most powerful man in the agency, is also the most precarious. His entire identity is a construction. Dick Whitman, a nobody from a small town, became Don Draper through a lie he maintains with the discipline of a spy for his entire adult life. And that secret fragility is, paradoxically, the source of his creative power. Don understands advertising better than anyone because he understands fiction better than anyone, because he himself is a fiction. He knows what people want to hear because his entire life has depended on knowing what people want to hear.
There is something almost theological about Don’s condition. A man who invented himself from nothing, who sustains his creation through a permanent act of will, and who lives with the constant terror that it will all collapse if someone discovers the truth. A secular version of the Cartesian God, holding reality in place at every instant through sheer effort.
The Office as International System
If you look at Sterling Cooper as a miniature international system, the analogies work with uncomfortable precision.
Don is the United States: the most powerful actor, the one who sets the rules without admitting he sets them, the one who can afford to seem disengaged because everyone knows what happens when he gets angry. Roger is Western Europe: relevant by inheritance, charming, increasingly ornamental, surviving thanks to an implicit alliance with the dominant power. Pete is an emerging power, China or India, who sees opportunities the others ignore and grows despite nobody wanting him at the table. Lane is the international civil servant, the one who balances the books and makes the system function, but whom nobody defends when things get difficult.
And Bert Cooper, barefoot in his office, reading philosophy while the world moves around him, resembles the Holy See more than anything else.
What makes Mad Men a work of art and not just a good television series is that it understands something most fictions about power do not: that power is not a resource you either have or don’t. Power is a relationship. It exists in the space between people, not inside them. Don is powerful because others decide he is powerful. Roger is relevant because others accept he is relevant. Pete is marginalised because others choose to marginalise him. And Lane dies because, when he needed it most, nobody chose to protect him.
That is the greatest lesson of Sterling Cooper, and it is the same lesson you learn from watching any real political system, from the Congress of Vienna to a boardroom in Manhattan: power is not what you have, it is what others believe you have. And maintaining that belief is a full-time job that admits no rest, no mistakes, and above all, no decency.