I was in New York all summer, making a big fuss about DC to all those sophisticated cosmopolitans. They think it’s boring. They assume it’s full of squares and policy nerds and they’re right, but that characterization doesn’t do the capital justice. It’s my job as a Washington ambassador to accurately portray the city to the snobbish coastal elites, even to sex it up a bit (though it really doesn’t need my help in this respect). Regardless, it’s a job I take seriously.
The obvious hook is, of course, espionage. Espionage is chock-full of charge and my choice motifs are all borrowed from the weighty catalogs of 007 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal – wiretapping, martinis, guns, honeypots. What other totem of life in the capital can evoke such romanticism as intelligence and its agents? Fifty years of Cold War cultural artifacts have left their imprint on the public imagination and, as America will never be a country without enemies, there will always be someone to spy on – so, the culture lives on. “I think he’s a spy,” I’ll say surreptitiously to a friend, about the most humorless man in existence. “He fits the profile.” But all this is a little obvious and thin, even to a Washington outsider. It’s a vestige of the past, and clearly not the animating force of present-day DC.
The second, perhaps more obvious, hook is the elephant in the room – the President. Clearly, the same city that hosts a UFC fight on the White House lawn and sustains three scandals a week (one per branch of government) is hiding more than just wonkery. But at this point, nearly halfway into Donald Trump’s second term, can you call it hiding? We’re all well aware of the theatrics of his administration. It reads as little more than window dressing, a static hum wrapped around the city, far less surprising than it was two or even six years ago. No fruit to be harvested there.
Get a layer deeper, past the camp, and the urbane New Yorker thinks he’s encountering the sad reality: a city of concrete brutalism and fresh-pressed khakis. Washington’s visual language immediately casts any mid-century romanticization as cope. This is the point where I ask my interlocutor to press a little further. Where there are no rules, where all is id, you get the sameness of vice. For all Leo Tolstoy’s wisdom, he did not encounter New York City in the mid-2020s, where every hedonic impulse has been flattened into the one-note stretch of alcoholism, ketamine and casual sex. Take those away, add a nuclear core of power and compress the whole environment within the strictures of security clearance and some semblance of propriety, and things start to get interesting. The nature of man is constantly at war against monotony.
It’s no use explaining this to a New Yorker – the architectural beauty of our metro compared with their cavernous subway, the Old-World charm of Dupont Circle compared with their Upper West Side facades, their legions, their rats, their progressive mayor, their all-day delis and cafés and topsy-turvy schedules. But when you can’t tell, you can show. Last month, I took a DC friend to a literary reading on the Lower East Side – forgive me, this may be a display of my own provincialism – a man who works at a government agency, constantly traveling internationally, dealing with diplomats and dignitaries. I was struck by the room’s reaction to him. “He has a real job,” a girl said, as though she’d spotted an exotic animal.
Eroticism, ambition and corruption, festering and roiling under the surface of restraint
I’m not saying DC’s political theater is any more real than tapping at a keyboard or living off a trust fund. But DC work requires you to run into the world as it is. Boring policy, unhappy constituents, unflattering chinos. DC is not more authentic than New York, but life in DC forces power into the foreground. In DC, you become conscious of power as something that is acted on in the real world, with consequences that land further than the boundaries of a few blocks.
“DC attracts people with conservative dispositions,” I’ve said time and time again. “But that doesn’t mean they’re boring.” Legibility is both a liability and an asset here, when power is on the line. Your interior life should always be inscrutable, even as your tribal allegiance is above reproach. The tension between the two is where eroticism lives. Eroticism, ambition and corruption, festering and roiling under the surface of restraint, hiding the undeniable – the truth all people in DC know: that every other person is reaching for power. How exciting! What else is a row of buttons but an invitation to unbutton?
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