Washington DC is Not a Popularity Contest

An Addendum to Paul Graham

Bri Buckley, Washington DC Skyline 2. Available for purchase here.

IN 2009 PAUL GRAHAM WROTE A THOUGHTFUL ESSAY titled “Cities and Ambition.” There he proposes that a great city is defined by the sort of ambitions it kindles—or perhaps more accurately, the sort of ambitious it gathers. As Graham puts it:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.¹

When I discussed this essay on Twitter many of my followers took issue with Graham’s premise. Millions of human beings call a city like New York, San Francisco, or London home.  The dreams of these millions cannot be shrunk down to one prestige occupation. Folks in Los Angeles were particularly resistant: the Angeleno who works in law or shipping resents when his city is reduced to its most vapid industry.

 These objections are obviously true yet somewhat irrelevant to Graham’s larger point: Every city has its own aspirational ideal, and this ideal influences who a city holds in high honor. Packed as they are with so many millions, large cities contain almost every kind of ambition—but not every city will esteem each ambition equally. “Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens,” Graham comments, “till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.”² Likewise, in Cambridge the financier and the founder will be held in high esteem—but less esteem than the scientist or the scholar.

Graham is on shakier ground when discussing the two great American cities he knows least well. Unlike New York, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley, Graham has never lived in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. He admits his characterization of these cities is impressionistic. Here is how he describes each:

The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There’s an A List of people who are most in demand right now, and what’s most admired is to be on it, or friends with those who are. Beneath that, the message is much like New York’s, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical attractiveness.

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.³

I do not think either of these characterizations is correct. Each is incomplete. My wife, who has lived in both Los Angeles and D.C., suggests that “who you know” matters more in the former city than the latter. In L.A. knowing people is the whole game.

This is not quite the same thing as fame. There is a difference between knowing people and being known. As my wife puts it: being a L.A. big-shot does not mean being Olivia Rodrigo. It means being the guy who can get a friend into Olivia Rodrigo’s private party. Access is the currency of the entertainment industry. Men and women who most of us have never heard of—the producer, the label executive, the agent, and so forth—have immense prestige in Los Angeles. They make and break careers; they can grant access to just about everyone. The message Los Angeles sings to its ambitious young is often “be more like them.”

Washington, D.C. is different. Yes, the city urges you to meet more people, to meet powerful people. But those are secondary themes. The main melody of the D.C. streets is simpler: have more influence.  

When powerful or ambitious outsiders travel to Washington they often mishear this message. There are several reasons for this. The first is that there are in fact three Washingtons. Those who come to D.C. on business easily conflate them.

The first Washington D.C. is the D.C. of the locals. You might think of these as the people who root for the Wizards or the Nationals. The locals are a diverse group: a vast chasm divides the lifestyle of the average Anacostia family and the average family in Falls Church. But whether they work at Five Guys or in tax accounting, this slice of Washington life is not centered on the city’s central industry. These people could be doing the same jobs just about anywhere. If Wall Street and Capitol Hill traded places tomorrow their livelihoods would change little.

This is not true for those who work in the federal sphere. The actual politicians in this sphere must be distinguished from the people who work around or below them, employed variously as reporters and journalists, bureaucrats in the executive agencies, analysts in think tanks, lobbyists on K street, activists in NGOs, lawyers in prestigious firms, or staffers on the Hill. Both politicians and this wider group of politicos are immensely ambitious, but their ambitions differ. The city does not sing the same message to each.

The politician seeks power and fame. He seeks these things through high office. However, the path to high office runs through donors, voters, and powerbrokers far removed from Washington.⁴ They always have a foot (and usually a home) outside of the Beltway.

This is also true of many senior appointees. Few Supreme Court justices first made their names on the D.C. Circuit. Most cabinet members are pulled from the ranks of elected officials or from the private sector—though this does differ administration to administration. Democratic administrations tend to fill their cabinets with more Beltway careerists than their Republican counterparts. The current cabinet, helmed by a politician who has worked in Washington for four decades, is uncommonly D.C.-centric.

When the outsider comes to Washington on business, she usually seeks access to this class of high office holders.  She values the fixer who can get her in a room with an important figure—or whoever that important figure has delegated their decision-making authority to. It is thus not surprising that Graham thinks of Washington status games in these terms. Washington insiders understand this perception. They are not above using it for their own ends. They know that access to powerful people is the most useful service they can provide to outsiders. They realize the most legible sign of success to folks back home are their connections with the A-list.  

Yet access is not how D.C. insiders judge their own worth, nor the worth of their peers. The Washington ambitious are less interested in access than they are in influence. Access matters to them—but only so far as access translates to some tangible form of influence. Knowing the A-listers is rarely the end goal. The main thing is shaping how those A-listers think.

Influence is what unites the sly operator and the nerdy wonk. I described the wonk in my recent essay on Washington, D.C. reading habits. To repeat that description:

Washington intellectuals are masters of small mountains. Some of their peaks are more difficult to summit than others. Many smaller slopes are nonetheless jagged and foreboding; climbing these is a mark of true intellectual achievement. But whether the way is smoothly paved or roughly made, the destinations are the same: small heights, little occupied. Those who reach these heights can rest secure. Out of humanity’s many billions there are only a handful of individuals who know their chosen domain as well as they do. They have mastered their mountain: they know its every crag, they have walked its every gully. But it is a small mountain. At its summit their field of view is limited to the narrow range of their own expertise.

In Washington that is no insult: both legislators and regulators call on the man of deep but narrow learning. Yet I trust you now see why a city full of such men has so little love for books. One must read many books, laws, and reports to fully master one’s small mountain, but these are books, laws, and reports that the men of other mountains do not care about. One is strongly encouraged to write books (or reports, which are simply books made less sexy by having an “executive summary” tacked up front) but again, the books one writes will be read only by the elect few climbing your mountain.

The social function of such a book is entirely unrelated to its erudition, elegance, or analytical clarity. It is only partially related to the actual ideas or policy recommendations inside it. In this world of small mountains, books and reports are a sort of proof, a sign of achievement that can be seen by climbers of other peaks. An author has mastered her mountain. The wonk thirsts for authority: once she has written a book, other wonks will give it to her.⁵

What does minor mountain climbing have to do with Graham’s A-listers? Nothing much—If you think about this question in terms of insiders and outsiders. But if your metric is not access, but intellectual influence, the story starts to change. If what matters to you is how decision-makers frame the issues they face, the appeal of becoming a world-class expert on a narrow technical problem is more apparent.

The ambitions of Silicon Valley are fueled by quasi-mythical accounts of founder champions. The wonks and bureaucrats of Washington have similar lode stars. Among the foreign policy hands few shine brighter than George F. Kennan. Here is a man who shaped the foreign policy priorities of the American government for half a century—and did it with one memo and one essay!  Here is a man who changed the shape of world history, altering the destinies of billions—and he did so by placing pen to paper. Who are Larry and Sergey next to that?

Like most aspirational myths, the image of George Kennan seems to matter more than the real true figure, whose historical influence and career arc are not quite as we remember.⁶ But the image stands nonetheless. Kennan provides a model that ambitious across Washington aspire to. Thus the dozens of attempts to write a Long Telegram for the 21^st Century. “The George Kennan of x” is a title worth chasing.⁷

Not every wonk aspires to Kennan’s heights, but the vast majority of Washington’s wonks, as well as most of its less wonky bureaucrats, are playing Kennan’s game. The staffer who crafts a memo, the speechwriter who drafts an address, the analyst who slaves away at some obscure report, the clerk who comments on a case, and the journalist in the briefing room are all engaged in different versions of the same task. Through their labors each one hopes to shape the way an important audience frames an issue of concern. They are attempting to mold the priorities and perceptions of the powerful. Those who successfully do this have influence. Such influence is the object of Washington’s ambitious.

In the entertainment industry, no one cares where the phrasing used in yesterday’s interview came from. In D.C. this is a matter of high prestige. You are succeeding when a politician uses language you wrote or draws on concepts you developed.

Unlike the Cambridge academic, who is satisfied to see his ideas colonize an academic field, the ambitious of D.C. want to influence the larger world. The successful wonk or the bureaucrat knows that such-and-such regulation was downstream her strivings, or that such-and-such deployment only happened because of her timely intervention. She made the difference. That too is influence.

Occasionally the ambitious of Washington will hope to follow the path of a Jake Sullivan or Anthony Blinken and ascend to a position of substantive decision-making power. But even in these cases, they still play an advisory role. They are not the king but his counselors. This is not the sort of power idealized in Silicon Valley. ⁸

The drive for influence in D.C. has two main drawbacks. The first is that influence is ill-defined. In contrast to wealth and fame, it is hard to measure. “Influence” means influence over an audience—but which audience matters most? Is it the great mass of voters? The political class as a whole? The president and his cabinet? Three random bureaucrats hidden away in offices that only a few dozen people have heard of?

Just as difficult is discerning whether your chosen audience has in fact been influenced by your labors. Even if a government body in question ends up doing exactly as you desire, there is no guarantee that it was your report, your petition, or your dinner conversation that made the difference.

This is a perennial problem for think tanks and non-profits in Washington. It is common for these organizations to compile data sets that record every media mention of their work. They compile this data because it can be compiled: media mentions are one of the few metrics of influence that can be quantified with ease. Whether this metric successfully measures policy impact is a question they try not to dwell on.

But there is a second drawback to the Washington obsession with influence. Influence is intangible. It is found in realm of ideas, narratives, perceptions, and thoughts. The D.C. elite exerts great effort shaping how people think about things. Far less effort is devoted to shaping how people act on things.

The ambitious of Washington, D.C. are not academics. They are not interested in ideas for their own sake. They want these ideas to transform the world outside the Beltway. Their problem is that narrative management is not the same thing as actual management. Skill in one domain does not mean skill in the other. One does not change the world simply by changing how people think about it.  

This problem haunts even those Washington bureaucrats who shy away from the airy world of ideas. These men decry intellectualism. They understand how bureaucracies work. They know how the paper flows. They see that influence accrues to the man who decides when meetings are held, how long they last, and who speaks inside them. These men can frustrate the schemes they fear and hasten the schemes they favor. They are immensely effective at bending vast bureaucracies to their will.

But often that is not enough.

Individuals and bureaucracies are similar. Both are systems (one biological, the other sociological) that operate in an environment too complex for comprehension. To survive in this environment both the human being and the human organization must simplify vast streams of information that course around them, transforming this data into something small and comprehensible.⁹

That is all that “framing” really is. The opinion-shapers of D.C. provide tools—concepts, ideas, priorities—that simplify a complex reality.  To have influence is to shape the way an audience reacts to the data flow.  The bureaucratic wranglers do something very similar. They manipulate the internal structure of a bureaucracy to shape the way it processes information. 

At some point, however, the system must move from processing and perception to action. It is not enough for a system to understand its environment; to survive, that system must act on it.

Here the ambitious of Silicon Valley, like the ambitious of the American armed forces, have a leg up on the Beltway elite. These two cultures are strongly biased towards action. Both Silicon Valley and the military provide opportunities for the ambitious to interact with the “real world” while they are still young and green. The same is not true in Washington. There responsibility for both project management and people management are generally reserved for those already old.

In terms of another essay of mine, Washington, D.C. does not have a “culture that builds.”¹⁰ There was once a time when you must build was the message of Washington D.C. That day is now decades past. Today the ambitious of D.C. strive for influence. They are satisfied when they gain it.

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                  Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on American political culture up your alley. Check out “The Silicon Valley Canon,” “Culture Wars are Long Wars,” “The Problem of the New Right,” “Conservatism’s Generational Civil War,” and “American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future.”

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1. Paul Graham, “Cities and Ambition,” Essays, May 2008.

2. ibid.

3. ibid.

4. Moreover, power (and influence!) among high officials is most often not a matter of connections but seniority. Most congressmen would sacrifice a few inside connections if it let them leap ahead in seniority.

For an amusing account of Washington political culture that emphasizes the high-school nature of Washington seniority games, see Meg Greenfield, Washington (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 25-30. See also Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, vols I-III, passim., for a description of the structural reasons for seniority power in Washington.

5. Tanner Greer, “The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite,” The Scholar’s Stage (21 August 2024).

6. See Tanner Greer, “Against the Kennan Sweepstakes,” The Scholar’s Stage ( 6 March 2021); Lynn Rees, “The Tragedy of the Geopolitical Nerd,” Committee of Public Safety (6 June 2009).

7. I link to a dozen in Tanner Greer, “Oh God, Not Another Long Telegram,” Foreign Policy (4 March 2021).

8. I suspect this role is easier for many in D.C. to play because so many D.C. superstars are what Meg Greenfield calls “the grown-up good child” and the “quasi-permanent protege.” These are “people who come to town with reputations as awesome homework doers, dependable types who… [do] not mind at all accepting a protracted period of, as it might be described in the workings of the capital, protege-hood.” See her Washington, 41.

9. The best exposition of this insight remains Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1922). If you have not read the first chapter of this classic, you ought to!

10. Tanner Greer, “On Cultures That Build,” The Scholar’s Stage (18 June 2020).