Capital of Culture
Washington, DC has traditionally been an unbalanced city when it comes to the life of the mind. It has great national monuments, from the Smithsonian museums to the Library of Congress. But day-to-day cultural life can be thin. It attracts some of the country s best brains. But far too much of the city s intellectual life is devoted to the minutia of the political process. Dinner table conversation can all too easily turn to budget reconciliation or social security
This is changing. On October 1st the Shakespeare Theatre Company opened a 775-seat new theatre in the heart of downtown. Sidney Harman Hall not only provides a new stage for a theatre company that has hitherto had to make do with the 450-seat Lansburgh Theatre around the corner. It will also provide a platform for a large number of smaller arts companies such as the Washington Ballet, the Washington Bach Consort and the CityDance Ensemble.
The fact that so many of these outfits are queuing up to perform is testimony to Washington s cultural vitality. The recently-expanded Kennedy Centre is by some measures the busiest performing arts complex in America. But it still has a growing number of arts groups which are desperate for mid-sized space downtown. Michael Kahn, the theatre company s artistic director, jokes that, despite Washington s aversion to keeping secrets, it has made a pretty good job of keeping quiet about its artistic life. The Harman Centre should act as a whistleblower.
Washington still bows the knee to New York and Chicago when it comes to culture. But it has a good claim to be America s intellectual capital. It has the greatest collection of think-tanks on the planet, and it regularly sucks in a giant share of the country s best brains. Washington is second only to San Francisco for the proportion of residents 25 years and older with a bachelor s degree or higher.
Washington s intellectual life has been supercharged during the Bush years, despite the Decider s aversion to ideas. September 11th, 2001, put questions of global strategy at the centre of the national debate. Most of America s intellectual centres are firmly in the grip of the left-liberal establishment. For all their talk of diversity American universities are allergic to a diversity of ideas. Washington is one of the few cities where conservatives regularly do battle with liberals. It is also the centre of a fierce debate about the future direction of conservatism.
The danger for Washington is that this intellectual and cultural renaissance will leave the majority of the citizens untouched. The capital remains a city deeply divided between over-educated white itinerants and under-educated black locals. Still, the new Shakespeare theatre is part of job-generating downtown revival. Twenty years ago downtown was a desert of dilapidated buildings and bag people. Today it is bustling with life. If Washington is struggling to fix the world, at least it is making a reasonable job of fixing itself.