The Village

Certain progressive bloggers have taken to referring to Washington, DC as "The Village." It's a shorthand for the bipartisan, vain, venal, insular, corrupt, self-important elite cocktail party culture that dominates the city and by extension our national government. The "Villagers" are politicians, media figures, lobbyists, socialites, etc. of both parties who have a stranglehold on our politics and who plunder government as if it were their personal fiefdom, all the while making claims to be acting on behalf of some mythical "real" Americans.

Digby, one of the early employers of the term, reviews its meaning:

I have explained this before but I think it's worth repeating once in a while since the term is actually fairly common in the blogosphere. Greg is right that it stems from the notorious Sally Quinn article about the Clintons. But it's more than that. It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or their drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about what they all do, creating social rules for others which they ignore themselves.

The village is really "the village" an ersatz small town like something you'd see in Disneyland....The Village is a metaphor for the faux "middle class values" that the wealthy, insular, privileged, hypocritical political celebrities (and their hangers-on and wannabes) present to the nation.... DFHs [Dirty Fucking Hippies aka Progressives] are definitely not welcome ;)

Whatever their political leanings, the Villagers are characterized by a personal conservatism borne of their desire to maintain their influence and prerogatives, to continue to be power-players and hobnob with other Villagers of power and influence. Public policy be damned. Or perhaps I should say, they see public policy not as something to be crafted rationally to serve the common good but rather as something that can best be worked out when the elites who meet and socialize together sit down at the table and reach some consensus. Their own personal relationships matter; practical solutions for hundreds of millions of Americans are secondary. In an act of breathtaking vanity and delusion, they rationalize the former as the best way to achieve the latter.

These people are why our national government – notwithstanding the recent most welcome change in power – is so deeply out of touch with and irrelevant to the complex, urban, diverse, technology driven, increasingly progressive, rapidly changing nation America has become. Before real change can come to our government, the permanent bipartisan Village class must be swept away.