Gah, I find this person annoying:
Anyone who doesn’t believe the gates have by now been well and truly crashed needs to check out the October issue of Washington Life magazine, one of the local glossy society pubs, and turn to page 46, where they can find a nice shot of Open Left’s Matt Stoller, martini glass in hand, laughing with friends in the picture spread on “Cocktails at Arianna’s” in Georgetown. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the prep-school and Ivy League educated bloggers gave in to the expectations of their social class and began living, in their later 20s, the lives they would have mocked four years ago, while earnestly rebellious and penurious recent college graduates. Still, it’s amusing to see the onetime “outsiders” out and about on the Dupont Circle-Georgetown circuit, or hear about their retreats at the Arca Foundation-affiliated private estate, Musgrove, on St. Simon’s Island off the coast of Georgia.
This is actually one of the reasons I love D.C. All a person has to do to become the establishment in this very small and transient town is stay here — which is an oddly and wonderfully democratic way to construct a nation’s political elite, geography and length of residency being far less restrictive criteria for entry than those used by most institutions of higher education or by historical elites, let alone your average Manhattan nursery school.
Way to call out Stoller while praising him. "Welcome to the Club, dear, so glad you finally decided to join Us." But don't the first and second paragraphs somewhat contradict each other? If "the prep-school and Ivy League educated bloggers gave in to the expectations of their social class and began living, in their later 20s, the lives they would have mocked four years ago", swanning about Georgetown, then, it seems to me, Franke-Ruta is claiming one who does not have that pedigree is not expected, not welcomed easily, into that world. But then she goes on say that "[a]ll a person has to do to become the establishment in this very small and transient town is stay here", regardless of class. Do these not conflict?
Ah, I think I have the secret decoder ring. By democratic Franke-Ruta means meritocratic, so that anyone with the proper chops can join the establishment, but naturally those of a certain quality have bucketloads of talent, dahling.
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