What Washington, DC, means today
I recently got to spend almost a week in Washington, DC. I’ve been thinking ever since about what Washington symbolizes, both to those who work there and to the rest of America.
To the rest of America, Washington has become synonymous with corruption in government. For a politician, to have spent too long “inside the Beltway” is a political liability, a sign of being out of touch with reality. Yet the architecture of DC still plays this symbolic role, reporters always standing in front of the Capitol while talking generally about American democracy. Americans love what these monuments to the Constitution symbolize, they are just deeply distressed about how low the art of governing has descended in recent decades.
To those who I’ve talked to who actually live in DC, the experience is considerably more multifaceted. First of all, there is the mass of citizens who have little to do with how the Federal Government operates. They watch the shenanigans of the government on TV with the rest of us, feeling vaguely embarrassed. For those in the government, at least the majority who are career civil servants (not to mention those idealistic folks in different NGOs), they feel rather hurt by the low public opinion of Washington. The work done by these civil servants is mostly non-political, the dull but extremely important task of administering a large country. Waves of political appointees come and go (most of them never really seeing Washington as anything other than a symbol), but beneath them the civil servants continue. This is both a very positive thing (a government needs continuity) and a sometime negative thing (the ship of state turns very slowly indeed).
I thought about all this as I wandered about the Mall and L’Enfants Washington. For me, it was personal, for I am seriously thinking about leaving Harvard’s ivory towers and going to work in DC at an environmental NGO. I feel at peace with this decision professionally, for it’s where I think I can do the most good for the environment. Yet it is indeed a weird time to move to DC, morally. The government, particularly the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s phrase, not mine), is arguably more powerful and more corrupt than ever before. I wonder sometimes what Cicero felt working in Rome (before his exile, at least). I suspect he felt similar to how all those career civil servants feel today: proud of their own work, still optimistic about their country’s potential, yet vaguely worried that more powerful tides are slowly pulling the ship of state toward dangerous shoals.
To the rest of America, Washington has become synonymous with corruption in government. For a politician, to have spent too long “inside the Beltway” is a political liability, a sign of being out of touch with reality. Yet the architecture of DC still plays this symbolic role, reporters always standing in front of the Capitol while talking generally about American democracy. Americans love what these monuments to the Constitution symbolize, they are just deeply distressed about how low the art of governing has descended in recent decades.
To those who I’ve talked to who actually live in DC, the experience is considerably more multifaceted. First of all, there is the mass of citizens who have little to do with how the Federal Government operates. They watch the shenanigans of the government on TV with the rest of us, feeling vaguely embarrassed. For those in the government, at least the majority who are career civil servants (not to mention those idealistic folks in different NGOs), they feel rather hurt by the low public opinion of Washington. The work done by these civil servants is mostly non-political, the dull but extremely important task of administering a large country. Waves of political appointees come and go (most of them never really seeing Washington as anything other than a symbol), but beneath them the civil servants continue. This is both a very positive thing (a government needs continuity) and a sometime negative thing (the ship of state turns very slowly indeed).
I thought about all this as I wandered about the Mall and L’Enfants Washington. For me, it was personal, for I am seriously thinking about leaving Harvard’s ivory towers and going to work in DC at an environmental NGO. I feel at peace with this decision professionally, for it’s where I think I can do the most good for the environment. Yet it is indeed a weird time to move to DC, morally. The government, particularly the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s phrase, not mine), is arguably more powerful and more corrupt than ever before. I wonder sometimes what Cicero felt working in Rome (before his exile, at least). I suspect he felt similar to how all those career civil servants feel today: proud of their own work, still optimistic about their country’s potential, yet vaguely worried that more powerful tides are slowly pulling the ship of state toward dangerous shoals.
