DC’s policy world is a complex ecosystem, centered in Washington but with relevant outposts all across the country, including media, activist, political operator and appointee, scholarly, and advocacy communities, but is not reducible to any of them. Think-tanks, policy magazines, and young professionals’ organizations are its chief nodes socially and professionally, and coalitions in this space are typically organized ideologically– the sum total of smart and ambitious folks working across professional domains for some definable political and ideological cause. Policy world’s terms are the cross-sectoral organization of ideological ambition and conflict and its role in interpreting events and creating public meaning in the American public discourse. There is a civic statecraft inherent to influence in that world. There is some respect, camaraderie, and solidarity on professional and expertise lines and across ideological lines, but this is increasingly an exception rather than a rule.
These ideological communities in policy world do not run Washington or America, they do not exert true power over legislation or elections, and they do not necessarily serve as farm-teams for the communities that do. They do something that is far more relevant: they organize conflict in the public discourse, broadly defined, and interpret the meanings of current events and conflicts in short-term, medium-term, and ultimately long-term modes, in ways that filter out to every other community and domain in American life, and ultimately define the parameters of the meanings of current events and trends which everybody else in America consumes. They exert power, in essence, over meaning; and their work is crucial for shaping the ways vast sectors of American institutions think, and in time, how events in our time are interpreted by the mythos of history.
These ideological communities suffer from neuroses exactly as pressing as those facing any constituency. Ideological, factional, and personal pettiness abound; people who have much to learn from each other avoid each other whether for pride or for fear; whole communities enforce myopic taboos which suppress honest dissent and enforce groupthink and sheepishness. They are as isolated as any elites are from their fellow citizens of diverse walks of life, and as subject to unknowing hypocrisy. While their social function is the interpretation and creation of public meaning, they are as much slaves to fashion as anybody else. The creative energies of the best institutions and communities in this space shine brightly, and some of the best hold themselves to incredibly high standards of decency. These are people who wind up as ministers and mandarins and counselors and cabineteers to the institutional leaders who do hold actual power in this country.
Swanky policy forums and panels, and social-intellectual events for closed professional communities, are the price of doing business in policy world. Many of them are decadent, partisan, and low-quality. These events be wholesome, fair-minded, and serious, at the very least. In actuality, they must be far more. There is presently no central arena in which every major ideological community in policy world feels invited and compelled to present its case, and engage productively with all other major ideological communities in policy world, in a serious and wholesome style which balances the conflicts and represents the meanings of the events of our time, redeems the public discourse to its highest standards, and establishes the formats and spirits of a political culture for policy world aligned with the highest standards. Whatever project filled that role would need to have a reputation for keeping a disciplined and compelling standard of political culture, intellectual integrity, and institutional creativity known for fairness across ideological lines, creativity in political imagination, and seriousness in intellectual and policy questions, a community and place where this sort of service and culture is expected.
Policy world is thus, in essence, a shadow of the American system of government itself, and of the American political constellation. Its organization of conflict in the public discourse is however far more informal and manipulable than the processes of government and politics; but is no less consequential for maintaining the balance of the public discourse and thus of American public meaning, and especially in cultivating higher norms of political culture.
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