David Brooks is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and author of the forthcoming book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (click hereto buy it). Michael Elliott is the editor of Newsweek International.This week they debate whether Washington, D.C., has lost its vitality.
I love Washington. I lived there for the better part of a decade, from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s. My younger daughter was born there, and I made—and kept—far more friends there than I ever have in New York, where I now live. The capital’s climate, at least if you come from the weeping skies of my homeland, is one of the glories of the world; a Washington spring day, when the light flits from bud to leaf, can be achingly beautiful. And—here’s a surprise—I’m prepared to stipulate that Washington can be fun, too; within a rather small town, you can find a generously wide range of intellectual debate and stimulation.
All that speaks to Washington “the place.” But Washington “the concept”—I can’t think of a better way to put it—is dead. By the concept of Washington, I mean a set of institutions that shaped the course of American (and global) political discourse and which provided a focal point for American national identity. That Washington—the Washington that dominated the nightly news, that made stars of White House correspondents, chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, and assistant secretaries of this, that, and the other—has lost its glamour and sense of purpose; it just plain doesn’t matter as much as it once did. The proof, I thought, came during last year’s impeachment proceedings. Here, by any standard, was what should have been one of the great, compelling moments of the republic’s constitutional history; the first time an elected president stood trial in the well of the Senate. But as we all know, the nation as a whole tuned out. Why were we all not either outraged by what Clinton had done or appalled at the indignity to which his pursuers subjected him? Because the presidency—the epitome of Washington, the concept—had declined in importance so much that we rationally concluded that Clinton’s troubles were of little consequence for the things that really matter.
This waning of Washington shouldn’t come as any surprise. If you take the long view of history, the Washington that dominated our political lives was shaped during a 60-year period marked by three overlapping American crises: the Depression, wars both hot and cold, and the struggle for civil rights. “Washington,” if you like, was born at the time of the stock market crash of ‘29 and died on the miraculous night in November ‘89 when the Berlin Wall collapsed.
These crises shared a common trait. Each of them could only plausibly be ameliorated by a strong, dynamic central government, whose driver—doncha hate that word?—was assumed to be a chief executive of vision and determination. In all cases, neither the states nor the private sector could be entrusted with the job of putting the world back together (indeed, to some extent, they were the problem, not the solution). Only New Deal, alphabet soup Washington could tackle the sources of economic disaster; only the crisply suited, militarized Washington of FDR and Ronald Reagan could defeat Germany and Japan and face down the awful specter of Soviet communism; only the button-downed, string-tied, wonk-and-egghead Washington of JFK, Lyndon Johnson—yes, and Richard Nixon, too—could frame and implement the policies that outlawed the most egregious forms of racial discrimination and which ended the South’s long century as a nation within a nation.
These were great accomplishments, which we should still celebrate. But the crises that they addressed are over. The economy hums along nicely, we face no implacable national enemy and are unlikely to do so for decades, and the nation has signaled pretty decisively, I would have thought, that whatever the state of racial and ethnic relations may be, it does not want Washington meddling in them. We can leave our political life, such as it is, to state and local governments; we ask the private sector to handle our economic concerns.
So that’s where we now are: Washington has nothing left to do. I could go on and say that this is the true tragedy of Bill Clinton: that a man who had prepared remarkably well for the duties that went with “old” Washington arrived in town just at the moment that such skills were no longer needed. But I await David’s rebuttal—full, no doubt, of paeans to the revivification of the economy by AOL, the vibrant economy of Northern Virginia, the reclaiming of the old downtown. True, true, as that Budweiser commercial says. But beside the point.
