Commentary: In an Age of Trump, what's the point of Washington?

Rebellions tend to disappoint, and on that score it’s perhaps appropriate that the great populist revolt of 2016 appears to ending with a massive transfer of power from Washington to…New York City.

Here’s what I mean. First, and most importantly, Donald Trump has given every signal that he intends to spend much of his time in his hometown. Over the next few years, Manhattan, it seems, will be the stage of much of the political action we currently associate with D.C. If the president is there, then that’s where the influencers will naturally congregate even more than they do already. 

Secondly, there is the sense in Washington among the young that the little city’s brief, Obama-inspired golden age is coming to an end. “A Newly Vibrant Washington Fears That Trump Will Drain Its Culture,” is how a much-mocked New York Times headline put it earlier this month.

It’s undoubtedly true that, on a block-for-block basis, no American city has benefited more from the Obama presidency than Washington. Long story short: The hip young senator’s election brought with it an influx of hip, young and often well-off professionals, who in turn propped up new local businesses.

Suddenly, and with the added assistance of stimulus cash, dreary old Washington came to feel like a real big city, which led to a new swell of civic pride among the recent transplants. Washington was cool, and by the end of Obama’s first term it was adding more millennials to its population than any other city in the country.

Yes, Washington might not have everything that Austin or Brooklyn had to offer, but we also had a lot to make up for that: the seriousness of our work, newfound cultural attractions, the thrill of living in a place in a period of reinvention.

The enduring questions are whether that reinvention was ever a good thing, and more broadly what kind of city we want our capital to be. Should it be a place where a vast, powerful, and permanent political class reside, or should it be more of a normal mid-sized American city, albeit one with an unusually large number of people who live here temporarily, rarely putting down roots?

It’s safe to say that the Founders wanted it to be more like the latter, which is part of the reason D.C. doesn’t enjoy the same federal representation of other metropolises. But occasionally it takes on the imperial trappings of the former, as it did for a time before President Kennedy’s assassination, and as it is right now.

Over the next few years, I suspect, Washington will be even more on the outs with the American public than it usually is. Trump will be doing much of his president-ing from Trump Tower, leaving Washington stuck with the drama of Congress, which no longer sets the national agenda, along with our bloated and much-loathed federal bureaucracy.

Trump’s supporters will continue to rail against “the swamp,” while his opponents live in fear of what the new president intends to do to them. Conservatives who tend to want more power transferred to the state and local level will welcome a diminishing of Washington’s influence. Liberals who usually extol the virtues of a strong federal government may have second thoughts with Trump at its helm.

And this arrangement could well lead to a greater discussion about whether we should have ever had so much power in one city in the first place. Perhaps a country as vast, multiethnic, and ideologically diverse as the United States has no reason to be run by a tiny elite living together in a smallish, peculiar East Coast town.

The solution to this problem is obviously not to concentrate more power in New York, which is likely to happen under Trump, at least in the short term. In fact, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently suggested in an interview with Vox, the answer to much of what ails America might be to devolve power away from any one place as much as possible.

“We have to recognize that we’re in a crisis, and that the left-right divide is probably unbridgeable,” Haidt says. “And if it is, we’ll have to give up on doing big things in Washington, and do as little as we possibly can at the national level. We’re going to have to return as much as we can to states and localities, and hope that innovative solutions spring from technology or private industry.”

If that’s true, than what’s the point to Washington, at least in its current form? Why do we need to put all so many of our political elites in one little place? 

Thanks to modern communications technology, there are ways around the present arrangement. Legislators can travel in and out; their staffers can telecommute. The same goes for bureaucrats and cabinet secretaries. Political journalists might be better off writing, reporting, editing and most importantly living in the hinterlands. Overall, there’s a real argument to be made that whole country be better served if people in Washington spent less time around each other.

In a formal sense, a capital city is of course a necessity; every country has one. But what we may need to figure out is whether we want so many members of our governing and media classes living in ours full time. 

In:
• Donald Trump
• New York City

Will Rahn

Will Rahn is a political correspondent and managing director, politics, for CBS News Digital.