Washington, DC is a strange place, unlike other American cities in many ways. It is, for one thing, comparatively flat: because of a 1910 edict prohibiting the construction of anything exceeding 130ft, the Capitol building and the Washington Monument tower over everything else in the city’s core. With its wide avenues and its grandly imposing government buildings, it explicitly recalls its imperial predecessors – Rome, London, Vienna, Paris – but is really nothing like those places. Unlike these old European abodes of power, Washington radiates the live aura of hegemony: a power which is everywhere evoked and yet insistently obscure.
At the level of the built environment, and of plain old vibes, Washington feels to me as though somewhere like London had been stripped of everything but the mere aesthetics of imperial grandeur. And neither is it anything like its close-ish neighbour New York, which for all its vulgarity and materialism still possesses a torrential energy and an enduring (if highly commoditised) sense of romance. Most cities evolve and adapt to their purposes – trading ports, garrison settlements, fishing villages – metastasising over centuries into new forms. Washington, by contrast, was conceived and built as a federal capital, and it feels to this day like a city whose entire purpose is that of power.
Although it’s not, at the best of times, among the cities I keep close to my heart, I found myself there last week, at the grimmest of interludes. I was mostly doing archival research deep in the Library of Congress, but I did have to leave from time to time – to get lunch, to go for coffee, or because the people who run the place wanted to close up and go home for the evening. The library is directly across the street from the Capitol Building, and therefore right at the centre of the city’s core of imperial pomp.
And in Washington last week, of course, a lot was happening. At the White House, US president Donald Trump was entertaining Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the first (very pointedly) invited guest of his second presidential term. He was also outlining a plan for the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, blurring the line, in the Trumpian style, between real estate scheme and war crime. Elsewhere in the city, Elon Musk’s fiscal death squads were advancing on multiple government departments, systematically ripping the innards out of the federal infrastructure, in service of an extreme libertarian project of state demolition disguised as technocratic streamlining.
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A lot was happening, but on the streets, none of it was remotely apparent. It’s an eerily quiet place, Washington; there is an abiding sense that things are going on, that vast historical forces are at work, but all of it is hidden behind the walls of all those blank and imposing buildings. Black Cadillac Escalades sweep through the avenues, trailing a malevolent aura of raw power, but nothing and no one is visible through their darkened windows. And for a city that is so central to the US and its place in the world, there are surprisingly few people. Downtown, the streets are strangely empty.
I know there were protests – because I looked it up – but they were small, and barely broke the surface of the news. The only evidence I saw of any kind of activism were two young men sitting close to each other on the metro, holding cardboard signs with generic slogans of resistance scrawled on them in black marker. They looked dejected, and they sat in total silence, and, strangely, neither seemed to acknowledge the presence of the other.
I don’t know what I expected last week, really, or if I expected anything at all. But it was strange to look at my phone and read countless articles about how an unelected billionaire’s seizure of the machinery of state power constituted something like a coup, and to see so little in the way of protest; to read, on the faces I encountered, no real sense of urgency or rage. Americans, who have for many decades accommodated themselves to – or, more often, ignored – their government’s practice of overturning and meddling with the governments of other states, are now discovering the US constitution is a mere piece of paper. The question for so long implicit in US foreign policy – in Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Indonesia, El Salvador and countless other places – was “who’s going to stop us?” A version of that question, perhaps even more explicit, is now a live one in the country’s domestic affairs.
[ Unelected Musk holds court in Trump’s Oval Office as he defends efficiency driveOpens in new window ]
Somehow, being in Washington brings to mind the topic of ruins. Its imperial grandeur, its insistent iconography of power, seems to gesture unconsciously toward its own future desolation.
There is a German word, ruinenwert, which translates as “ruin value”, and which refers to a notion that buildings should be constructed with their eventual ruin in mind. The Nazi architect Albert Speer was among its foremost proponents; ruinenwert was an animating principle of his vision of Berlin as the centre of the Thousand-Year Reich. Speer believed – and Hitler agreed – that the city’s fascist architecture should be constructed without the use of iron girders and reinforced cement, because such modern materials would eventually come to spoil the aesthetic effect of the city’s ruins. The Nazis themselves were inspired by the architectural remnants of the classical world, and Hitler wanted the eventual ruins of his Reich to inspire future generations. (Even when most focused on the future, fascist aesthetics remained in kitschy entanglement with the past. See also the obsession of the online ultra-right with corny visual evocations of the values of “the West” – classical statuary, busts of Greek philosophers and so on.)
Though Speer claimed to have originated the concept of ruinenwert, he was drawing on a long European history of the aestheticising of ruins. Outlining what he referred to as a “poetics of ruins”, the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot wrote about the contemplation of ruins as a melancholy encounter with the impermanence of all things, with the eventual fate of even the grandest of human designs. “In our imagination,” he wrote, “we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground.”
Walking around Washington last week, I found myself imagining it in the far future, 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 years from now. Washington will, some day, make a fascinating complex of ruins; the city itself seems to aspire, in some half-conscious way, to that future condition. I hope that there will still be people around to see it.
