Curb Your Dog!

What the rest of us want from Washington

Virginia Postrel from the May 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Indeed, it's a barometer of official Washington's attitudes that you can count on your thumbs the articles on the drug war published in The New Republic over the past half-dozen years--though if Vanity Fair is to be believed, the magazine's literary editor had an early '90s coke habit that would have gotten a less privileged man a lengthy prison term. Worrying about how non-insiders fare in the legal system is, however, much too crass for Georgetown partygoers. It suggests that non-insiders matter.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a man more quoted than read in Washington, provides some insight on the gulf that has developed between official Washington and the America it rules. He suggested that when citizens see one another as civic equals, they identify with each other. As a result, they develop sympathies that prevent the sorts of tortures aristocrats used to inflict on uppity peasants.

But suSch sympathies are missing in a capital insulated from its own depredations. Who in official Washington fears EPA enforcers or INS raids? Who in official Washington struggles with OSHA requirements or trembles at the threat of a liability lawsuit? Who in official Washington need ever fear a decades-long prison sentence for drug conspiracy? Who in official Washington has any chance of getting lost in a system beyond his comprehension, a system populated by strangers with strange ways?

And why, given that no one in official Washington faces such threats, do we expect them to call off the dogs?