Disdain for Washington is a common trait among Americans and the entire English-speaking world. In Anthony Trollope’s travelogue, “North America,” Washington was described as a transient, small city with neither robust commerce nor gracious society. The city was born of a compromise between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and was meant to belong to no other region, a geographic leftover to which the unlovely work of government could be relegated.
New Yorkers, the city that had the capital when it was traded away in 1790, have a more robust contempt for Washington than any other class. New Yorkers have a whole journalistic subgenre of New Yorkers dumping on Washington, with the Washington Post reporting on it in 2009. Donald Trump has declared a kind of summer-weight martial law for Washington, citing a statute that allows the president to nationalize the city’s police when “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
The Democrats have the opposite problem: they hate to love Washington. Democrats have spent nearly 40 years committed to the cause of statehood for the District, a constitutional no-no that is still irresistible to them for the promise of three Electoral College votes, two new senators, and another seat in the House that would all be blue in perpetuity. The party line is that Washingtonians are some kind of American Gazans, denied self-governance by colonizers.
