We were between talks at the American Enterprise Institute, and it was lunch so, of course, there was an omelette station. As silver heating dishes steamed away, chefs in puffy hats turned delicate mini-omelettes on the grill, and the queue formed quickly.
In front of me, a very young kid in a blue suit was talking too loudly to a very young woman with long Gloria Steinem hair and gleaming, frameless glasses: “Yeah, I mean, I get the point Hamilton’s making in Federalist 15 but I said in the paper it doesn’t countermand a usufruct argument for…”
Braying think tank speak, a little too loud, a little too fast, starting your next sentence on the foot of the last so no one gets a chance to grab the conversation. No one else was this loud, but no one else was this young either.
In his red tie and crisp white shirt, he looked 12 years old. He started wolfing that omelette down when the young woman began speaking. It may well have been his sole meal of the day. Waitstaff were suddenly packing up the lunch, and we were being shooed into the session titled “An Overview of the Midterms”.
I looked over the crowd. About 80% white. The waitstaff were all Black.
Washington, DC, again, in what our American friends call the fall… and perhaps before the fall. This city of Athenian poise, or the image thereof, at the centre of the sprawling bedlam grounds of the United States. City of walkable spaces, harmonic layout, rows of shops, inspiring architecture looming up before you, taxis you can hail on the street, a… well, look, the hilarious fact is that this country, this whole burning tyre-fire behind a strip mall of a country, is governed from the most un-American city on earth.
It’s a disjuncture you never get used to. DC is the worst place to be if you want to understand what the country is really going through.
But it’s the best place to understand how the elite, or a certain elite, think about what the country is going through. Nothing, least of all something like a midterm election, is going to stop the endless round of meetings and discussions in the shadow floating world of the commentatorati — academics, pundits, advisers, grizzled veteran strategists, and occasionally an actual member of Congress.
The AEI, Brookings, the Cato Institute, Heritage, the Centre for American Progress… there are dozens of think tanks, some of them honest intellectual outfits. Others, all of them on the right, are little more than “astroturfers”, outfits that construct whole right-wing populist movements from a town council stoush here, a school protest there.
The elections did have some effect: in the two days I was around last week, there were only around 12 talks, panels, presentations you could go to. In the high season, there’d be 30 or so. It is the meshing of power and ideas on a scale that exists nowhere else. If you think it’s all for show, well, it’s understandable — you’re more accustomed to the IPA. But progressives obviously want good ideas because, well, ideas are all we’ve got.
And right-wing mega-donors like the Koch brothers and others? They’re not buying influence for their specific interests. They don’t need to. They’re true believers in the evangelical libertarianism that has blossomed among US mega-corporations in recent decades. It’s delusional, of course. Business leaders have become zealots of competition just as platform monopolies have all but extinguished it.
In the discussion land of DC, you see the same people over and over again, TV talking heads who will snarl for 30 seconds on MSNBC or Fox, and then talk like a Harvard seminar. Attending, as an outsider, is in part participant observation among this tribe with its many different raiments. If you’re a Republican, well, for men, a blue suit, red tie and white shirt. And let’s be clear: a red tie — Pantone process red, not cerise, not scarlet, not, God help us, maroon. (What are you, a commie?) For the women, a dress — bluish, greenish, single colour, heavy fabric, waist-cinched if you can do it. And pearls. Young women the same, or figure-hugging, above the knee. And pearls.
Democrats and progressives? Well, the male, wonkish Democrat faces a choice early on, as momentous a one for progressives as was, say, the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact: do you go the bow? Yes. The bowtie is the ultimate sign that you are committed to this life, the full Arthur M Schlesinger. Tweed jacket? Go on, kid. Everywhere else, people will think you’re one-fourth of a barbershop quartet, but in the lobbies of the tanks they will recognise you as someone who can appreciate a quip about what Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have said to Tip O’Neill about Strom Thurmond.
It’s scarification, tribal style.
They know you have suffered for this, probably at high school, and your fidelity is honoured. The women who work for NGOs dress like women everywhere who work for NGOs — all the money in the hair, eyewear and teeth, which shine so much you feel like you got glass in your eye.
At age 33, they pick one of the bowties to breed with, like a Chinese restaurant diner pointing to an abalone in a tank, and the species persists. Before that, there’s been the master’s in public policy, the internships, moving in and out of a judicial clerkship, then a junior assistant fellow position.
You make a decision: the political undergrowth or the ideas circuit. Politics, you grub around as an adviser to serial congresspeople, try to forget you ever read anything except polls and, at some point, return to the dogshit town you somehow got out of, where you will never wear a bowtie or pearls again. Miller shirts, mom jeans, and food you wouldn’t have thrown up over, until you make it back to the City of the Sun, and burn everything you wore to get elected.
If you stay on the ideas circuit, you just… age in place. At age 65 you still look like a perpetual undergraduate, shuffling in late with your New York Times and New Republic under your arm, carrying a jumbo latte. You look younger than the sharp-dressed young people. There are some special rules. Black wonks can — indeed, must — peacock a little, either ethnic pattern dress cloth for the women or uber-formal, opera-ready; men, the current fashion for short, dread-spiky hair, funky specs, coloured shirt (mauvish, canaryish) and ethnic patterned dress cloth.
Gay wonks have the dispensation of wild socks, paisley or little Tweety Birds underneath the dark-blue cuffs. Women academics dress like your mum after an op shop splurge (“Mum, it’s a cinema usher’s jacket!” “It’s fine!”).
Every such foyer looks like an animal gathering at the watering hole, and serves the same purpose as plumage — to tell herd from predator, mate from prey (false dichotomy). But they all have one thing in common at the moment: they have no idea what is going on out there, and no great confidence that anything they say makes a blind bit of difference to what does.
This came out clearest at a Brookings Institute session that doubled as a launch of the PRRI annual American values survey. It’s a full-service presentation. Slick too. This is no shambling through a few slides; it’s the full McKinsey. With a coffee in your hand, the delicate omelette melting in your stomach, you feel you could do this forever, if there was any chance it told you anything about anything.
“Well, I guess the most interesting fact,” the MC said, somewhat apologetically, “is this”, flicking up a slide that told us that 80% of Republicans and Democrats — about 60% of the nation — believe that the success of the other side will be the ruin of the United States.
“That’s, uh, pretty decisive…” he said to nervous laughter.
The day before at the AEI, an overview session on the election, a lot of shuffling through particular races and stances, had been end-stopped by an almost plaintive cry from one participant: “I mean, I just don’t know what will bring this country together!”
Ah, the appeal to unity. Shared understanding. The fanfare of American politics. To put that in context, this was the day that Kanye West was finally cut loose by Adidas and other companies for his explicit Jew-hatred, raving about how he was now a “digital prisoner” whose genius was being exploited by “Jewish business people”.
The four-day rave has been deeply unsettling, not least because it coincided with the realisation that Elon Musk would in fact be buying Twitter and looked on such outpourings as acceptable free speech. In this context, revelations that West (half the media dropped his preferred self-designation of “Ye”) had wanted to call his new album Hitler were almost grimly funny. This was followed by the most extraordinary moment of all, when hackers managed to take over several digital display boards in Jacksonville, Florida — including one above a Florida v Georgia football game, to which the whole of both states attended — and broadcast “Kanye was right about the Jews”.
This was the moment, when I really thought Well, where are we? Where is this place? The subsequent attack on Paul Pelosi would suggest that one had ended up in an am-dram production of Cabaret. The “Kanye Jews digital display takeover” suggested a Batman movie. This was the sort of gotcha the left had once fantasised about, especially in the early cyber era. Now the left all worked for progressive think tanks and the deranged right were the not-so-merry pranksters.
How does one even make sense of that in a think tank discussion, modelled as it is in its very physicality — the horseshoe tables, the turn-taking, the consideration? In Arizona, full-kit armed militia types had started staking out early voting drop boxes, filming voters, saying they were looking for “mules” — people putting in multiple ballots. A pervasive, engineered fiction of the right. An Arizona judge then dismissed a lawsuit restraining them. In the US it is illegal to give people standing in a voting queue water, but…
The truth is, the proud beasts of the think tank oases are ill-equipped to understand the disjunctive shift between the elegant res publica of DC, and the society it once ruled, because their entire education is organised around a politics/culture division that no longer exists.
This was one reason why Steve Bannon — a haunter of esoteric bookshops, a one-time blood and soil hippie (albeit in the navy) — could run rings around Hillary’s staffers. He understood what they didn’t and don’t, and what is happening now, and that was expressed succinctly by the veteran broadcaster Tom Brokaw in 2016. Trump, he said, was the moment when the popular culture of America overcame the official culture, the whole bowtie and pearls thing, and began to determine its form. In other words, the implicit public ethic of argument for many people now resembled the Jerry Springer show, not the Harvard Debating Society.
What’s noticeable indeed is how shallow many of the contributors are. When off their narrow patch — data, or governorships, or four midwestern states, or the damn Federalist Papers — a lot of them seem to lack mental agility. This seems to explain their general bewilderment, which spreads through the subculture. They are beginning to believe that the madness will never be over, and that its wacky new side has now been weaponised with some of the old stuff, Jew hatred in particular.
The best effort was Norman Ornstein, an AEI veteran, a thinker of some subtlety, a former exponent of the blue suit and now in retirement dressing like Woody Allen. Trump hadn’t started any of this, he noted, getting a couple of small gasps. He couldn’t, didn’t, have the solo capacity to. It was the Republican establishment, in its war against Obama in his second term, that had prepared the ground that made Trump possible. What looked like a mass effect was really a confirmation of, well, the power of power (I’m paraphrasing). This was sinuous and elegant, and I’ve only conveyed about half of it, and it is either true — that America is just a shadow of the power over it, the movements of vast money and military — or it is the ultimate expression of an establishment circular logic. But in Washington think-tank world, the circles you move in are the circles that shape the world, and it may be hard to see anything outside of that.
We streamed out, a couple of the blue suits and pearls crew gathering up coffee cups (that’s internship for you). “So what happens now, do you think?” I said to a tweedy young man as we waited for the door crush to clear. “Oh, I’m going to lunch at the Cato.” Apparently they really put on a spread.
