The Dinosaurs’ Lament

The American Spectator is having a bit of fun with another mournful essay by Sally Quinn about the assault on Washington establishment sensibilities by the MAGA hordes in power in DC. She writes:

The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place. This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?

It is actually a tonal improvement on her abject terror expressed the year before.

Sally Quinn is a dinosaur. The rise of badly educated brats into positions of power, and especially the poisonous power of social media unmediated by adult editors, has created a nasty edge to the Democratic Party and solidified the GOP as the resistance to federal expansion (at least in appearance). Gingrich ousted the genuinely nice guy Bob Michel, and after the reign of the ugly hardball of George Mitchell and the far worse Harry Reed — it's been some time since both parties shed moderates and adopted a very different style.

The delusion that longtime Washingtonians have been trying to sustain a (fictitious) unconditional polite bipartisanship is a hoot.

The establishment was instantly at war with Nixon even though he did nothing to alter the structures and spending (other than to increase it). The Reagan Administration was assumed to be a foreign occupation much like the first Goth rulers of Rome, but again spending and establishment social life were not seriously threatened. The Gingrich Revolution and the surprise takeover of the House was perhaps the bigger shock. Key staff jobs were lost, and seemingly permanent influence centers dissipated. I was a lobbyist for much of my work at that time and delighted at reading about the shock and despair of environmental groups when they learned that Congress had actually held hearings and moved legislation without consulting them, much less awaiting their permission. The Washington Post ran lots of articles that all could have been captioned "The Post has no sources in the new House leadership--old sources alarmed."

The reaction to Trump and MAGA is qualitatively different from the reaction to Nixon or Reagan. Even if the dinosaurs can't see the change in politics, especially on the left, they must know that they despise the new regime not just because of déclassé tastes but because the grievances that brought them to power are substantive and have been building for half a century, all while the establishment bathed in the material and moral self-satisfaction of achievements and social contribution long since past. Substantive grievances can lead to substantive changes.

It gets harder to say how dare you? when what you stand for is incompetence, corruption and ongoing social, fiscal and moral rot. Pointing that out is a faux pas.

Changing administrations means a change in favored restaurants, minor changes in favored upscale real estate locations (Georgetown, McLean, Capitol Hill, Potomac…) but a lot does not change. I was a paperboy on my old Georgetown neighborhood 60 years ago and the route included people who came to DC with Eisenhower, Kennedy or earlier and stayed. That trend has continued well into recent years. The big Washington law firms always had former leaders from both parties as partners although that feature seems to be changing. Bipartisan law firms seem to be a thing of the past as newly minted lawyers (especially the female and female-adjacent ones) can't conceive of a world where they have to tolerate political incorrectness in their midst.

The establishment was born in the continuum from FDR to LBJ and beyond when programs, funding and institutions seemed entrenched and created lots of high-paying positions in government, NGOs, consulting, lobbying and legal work. Neither the permanence nor moral entitlement was ever supposed to be questioned.

There is a tacit understanding that one should not notice that the genuine moral achievements of the civil rights movement have long since degenerated into horrifically warped communities wrought by welfare dependence, grifter sinecures and the social distortion and malignant absurdities of DEI. One is not supposed to notice that the sexual liberation of women has morphed into a 57-gender freak show with males winning women’s sports trophies. The noble stated intentions of the Great Society and the interest groups it spawned are not supposed to be blamed for the metastatic growth of federal spending. And only the right can be blamed for the culture wars, even if the left is always on the offensive with every aspect, every facet of the conflict.

Gutting the sheer corruption of USAID and other grift sources could become permanent and transformative if the GOP controls all three branches after 2028. And Trump's appointees and their likely GOP successors have no fear of reducing their turf and killing federal jobs. The fear in the establishment and beyond is palpable.

I think the dinosaurs kinda know that it’s over. The ascendancy of both MAGA rubes and militant Marxist baristas looks like the new dominant partisan species, and neither will throw the kinds of dinner parties or wallow in the forms of happy denial that the dinosaurs have fondly enjoyed. I don’t know if the new ecology will be an improvement, but we should agree that the Darwinian broom cannot sweep out the status quo fast enough.