
R: 4 / I: 0
I have to imagine you've all noticed this. Everyone has noticed it! There is a Washington look. There is a certain texture to the face, a certain deadness behind the eyes, a certain way of moving the mouth when speaking that is unique to the D.C. creature. You see someone on TV and you know, instantly, without being told, that they live within the Beltway. They have the phenotype.
Here is what's strange and what isn't immediately explainable: this convergence does not follow from electoral incentives. If anything, electoral incentives should produce the opposite! One ought to expect that politicians would look like their constituents, talk like them, move like them. They should phenotypically converge on the median voter of their district. A senator from Texas should look Texan, a representative from Wisconsin should look Wisconsinite. This is what you would predict if you thought elections were the primary selection mechanism at play.
But they do not look like their constitents. They all look like THAT. Regardless of origin, regardless of party, regardless of ideology. You can watch it happen in real-time if you pay attention. Someone gets elected, often young, energetic, phenotypically aligned with wherever they came from. Give them two years. Four years. Six years. Watch the face change. Watch the affect flatten. Watch them begin to look like the others, if by some miracle of exception they don't already when first elected. This phenomenon is not aging, though they will tell you it's aging. Aging produces character. This is something else, it is more akin to erosion. This is the wearing away of distinguishing features until what remains is a kind of generic substrate, optimized for an environment we don't live in.
The reason behind this, I suspect, is that elections may be what get you in, but they are not what keeps you alive.
Once you are in Washington, the selection pressures shift. The people who thrive are not the people who remain phenotypically aligned with their constituents back home. The people who thrive are the people who can adapt to the actual environment they now inhabit, which is not Texas or Wisconsin, but a closed ecological system with its own atmospheric composition and its own pressures and, importantly, its own predators.
What one ought realize is that Washington is a city built entirely out of representation. No one there makes anything! No one there grows anything! The entire economy, the entire social structure, the entire purpose of the place is the fabrication and manipulation of representations. Symbols, narratives, frameworks. One may declare they make legislation, and perhaps they do, but only legislation as a kind of symbolic manipulation of future representations. They are not governing, they are producing governance shaped objects that other people will then later interact with. They are surrounded, every day, by people whose job is to manipulate other's manipulation of symbols. Lobbyists, staffers, journalists, consultants, every single person the Washingtonian interacts with is playing a game several layers of abstraction above ground.
And so, if you want to survive there, you must adapt. You have no choice but to! The people who don't adapt get destroyed, and not by voters, who are little more than an itch you scratch once every two or six years, and you scratch by sending the right symbolic representations back home. The real threat to any Washingtonian is the daily environment. The colleagues who can knife them in committee, or the untrustworthy and unloyal staffers, or the party apparatus constantly demanding tribute, or the litanmy of journalists salivating at the maw to cannibalize any Washingtonian they notice is wounded. All of these pressures are immediate, constant, and they all reward the same trait: fluency in abstraction! Comfort with mediation! The ability to exist entirely in a world of representations without experiencing vertigo!