Safe and Beautiful

Not that it matters, but my “lived experience”—and I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s ever had any other kind—remains obstinately uneventful. It’s 8 a.m. in Washington, D.C., the crime-ridden cesspool where the Trump-administration staffer known as “Big Balls” was recently beaten by a group of teenagers, and it’s shaping up to be a brightly burnished day. At the coffee shop, people are chatting with the barista. Outside, the worst of the mugginess has passed, leaving only the rich generosity of late summer: sunflowers standing at attention, roses unfurling for a second bloom. At the farmers’ market on Sundays, we comb through mottled heirloom tomatoes and peaches big as fists. A woman pauses to let her corgi sniff a patch of grass, and a man pushing a stroller stops to tell its occupant, “DOGGIE!” “Doggie!” the child squeals back. Joggers bound by in packs. Elsewhere, I’m told, the National Guard has been called in to restore the peace, as part of Trump’s “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” Meanwhile, here I am, looking at the pink froth of the crepe myrtles and wondering if the peace ever lets up.

I hated D.C. when I was growing up here, not because of the violence, but because of the opposite. It was a place that was practically drowning in polite professionalism. Every event, no matter how wild in conception, had a way of dwindling down into a business lunch or an office happy hour. Each summer, the Metro filled up with interns wearing ill-fitting suits; even on weekends, the bars closed by 11 p.m. D.C. was a good place to come of age insofar as it supplied, in spades, the sort of stiffness that teenagers love to rail against, and that I confess I still find myself reflexively resisting. Even now I look out the window at my quiet street, with its neat row of townhouses, and wish that something would happen.

It’s funny I should feel this way, because, in fact, something is happening. Not two miles away, a president intent on suppressing dissent with military force has deployed the National Guard to police a crime problem that has been blown far out of proportion. What is the right way to feel when your native city is ground zero for an authoritarian takeover? Why does my sense of horror lag so far behind my instinctive joy at the profusion of flowers? Why am I unable to understand D.C. as anything other than cracked sidewalks and a little bridge over the stream where I used to drop sticks in the water? It’s funny, too, that I should perceive my neighborhood as safe to the point of sterility, when in truth it’s in one of the highest-crime wards in D.C. Nothing I feel quite latches onto the world.

At this point, I am beginning to worry that feelings are not a reliable guide to reality. Or, as I might put it if I were a very different sort of person, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Some of the facts that do not care about anyone’s feelings include the fact that violent crime in D.C. has been declining for two years after a spike in 2023, and the fact that crime is more rampant in many red-state cities Trump has shown little interest in reforming. But facts do care about your feelings when you are the Harvard Law professor and avowed Franco enthusiast Adrian Vermeule, who recently tweeted:

The whole crime discourse is annoying because some people are talking about crime in the strict legal sense, and some are talking about pervasive social disorder which does not necessarily result in any “crime” in the strict legal sense … The first group then recites statistics about crime in the strict sense, overlooking that the second group is talking about ambient social disorder.

The convenient thing about “ambient social disorder” is that it is not falsifiable. Unlike crime in the “strict legal sense”—that is, actual crime—“ambient social disorder” is a kind of miasma. Vermeule apparently smells it all the way from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in D.C. on and off for twenty years and I’ve yet to catch a whiff of it. How are we to resolve these conflicting experiences? Whose should take precedence?

We’ve confronted these epistemic quandaries before, of course, back when appeals to “lived experience” were in vogue on the other side of the aisle. Then as now, they were used as a kind of argumentative cudgel. I didn’t like “lived experience” when liberals were having it, and I like it even less now. What I like least of all is a new and specifically reactionary twist on standpoint epistemology, which involves framing an allergy to empiricism as proof of spiritual profundity. This tendency—this negligent disavowal of evidence, this strident insistence that careful attempts to grasp the complexity of a social situation are the preserve of soulless technocrats—is so prevalent I feel compelled to name it. I often think of the phrase “whiny heroism,” which the historian Fritz Stern used to describe the sensibility of proto-Nazi intellectuals in Germany. Perhaps we might call the reactionary variant of standpoint epistemology whiny irrationalism. It has the same soggy quality, the same effete sentimentality, the same vicious and proud myopia.

For what is social science if not a systematic attempt to do what the philosopher Iris Murdoch says we do in love, that is, come to “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real?” And what is Vermeule’s approach but an inverse effort to deny the reality of anything but the self and its paranoia? Here we have yet another iteration of the oldest of moral scandals, a refusal to acknowledge the reality of anything but the self.

This scandal runs alongside a smaller one. In the novel Life and Fate, by the Russian journalist Vasily Grossman, a character in a Ukrainian ghetto about to die at the hands of the Nazis remarks that she is unable to muster any sense of commensurate dread. Her neighbors know that they are going to be murdered, she tells her son in a letter, yet they go on learning French and getting married anyway. They cannot keep themselves from living, even on the cusp of atrocity. In the novel Abel and Cain by the Austrian aristocrat Gregor von Rezzori, the narrator enjoys the “deep, spotless, ice-cold blue” sky and “Sunday glow” on the day that the Nazis march into Vienna: “Hitler weather,” he calls it.

For my part, I am faintly scandalized by how beautiful I still find the rose gold of the late summer, even today, when somewhere in the distance the troops are approaching.

Photo credit: Air Force Master Sgt. Amber Monio, National Guard