Unlike most capitals, Washington D.C. exists solely because it is the seat of power for a country, and its sole business for all intents and purposes is serving, influencing, or conducting government business.

Paris or London, for instance, are capitals. But they are capitals precisely because they are economic centers for so much more than government.

So when we look at how Washington fares as a place to be, we are getting a glimpse into the what government actually produces when it isn’t just influential but controls nearly everything.

It doesn’t look good. D.C. is becoming an intolerable place to live unless you are at the top of the pyramid of power, money, and influence. Which is, come to think of it, exactly what you would expect given where America is today.

Such a deeply reported @paulschwartzman piece on all the ways that pervasive fear over rising violence is leading DC residents to change behavior: avoiding certain Metro stops, getting in car to drive only five blocks, kids not joining football teams, etc: https://t.co/tp2EqefWqQ

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) September 12, 2023

D.C. was granted “home rule” in 1973, meaning that the city now elects officials who run many of the functions of local government. But Congress still has enormous powers, as was seen by the Congressional rebellion against criminal justice reforms that would have loosened some criminal laws and penalties.

D.C. isn’t just a creation of the federal government. It is also a Democrat city to the core–unsurprisingly, as Democrats are the power of government, especially national government. It hasn’t given a Republican more than 9% of the presidential vote since 1988 when it hit the grand total of 15%.

It is, in other words, a company town and the company is the Democrat Party.

Stephanie Heishman, a Northwest Washington event planner, knows she may sound almost absurdly cautious as she describes how, after a regular Sunday dinner at a friend’s house five blocks away, she travels by car instead of walking home.

She has her reasons. A year ago, she was awakened by gunfire outside her Adams Morgan apartment building and from her seventh-floor window saw a car speeding away. In August, after a night out with friends, her Uber driver couldn’t reach her building because police had blocked off a street where bullets had just killed two men and fatally wounded a third.

“It’s so ridiculous,” Heishman, 44, said of the precautions she takes to feel safer. “On the other hand, I don’t want to randomly get shot.”

Violent crime has long been a part of Washington life, the worst of it during the early 1990s when drug trafficking propelled the annual homicide toll to nearly 500 and D.C. earned an inglorious reputation as America’s “Murder Capital.”

The volume of carnage these days is not nearly as high, and most D.C. residents are unlikely to ever be a victim of violence. Yet a sharp rise in crime over the past year — punctuated by reports of homicides, brazen shootings and carjackings by armed teenagers — is rattling a city already struggling to recover from a pandemic that upended its rhythms and ravaged its once-thriving downtown.

D.C. is hardly the most violent city in America–but then again, it is among the wealthiest and certainly the most powerful in the world. To say that the money to keep it livable is copious is such an understatement that comparing the Tsar Bomba to a grenade doesn’t begin to cover the divide.

If the Democrats decided D.C. was going to be safe and clean, they could make it safe and clean. The problem is that the will to do so doesn’t exist and the ideological barriers to doing what is necessary are insurmountable.

“It’s worse in some ways, like a wicked spirit is out there,” said Ronald Moten, 53, who was arrested for selling crack in the 1990s before working with youngsters to keep them from committing or becoming victims of crime. “You used to not have to worry about crime unless you were associated with the streets, with drug dealing. Now you could just be going down the street, going to the car and you can be killed.”

The randomness is reflected in statistics showing sharp increases in crime in areas where it is less expected, as well as the jarring details of individual incidents: a military interpreter from Afghanistan killed while driving a Lyft on Capitol Hill; a construction worker slain as he arrived for work at 6 a.m. at Howard University; a spectator shot to death as he watched an Adams Morgan soccer match.

Earlier this summer, Moten said he was entering a Connecticut Avenue nightclub when three men “in hoodies” tried to rob someone who was leaving. “A gun went off, and I had to dive to the ground,” he said. “People don’t care. They rob them in Georgetown and Connecticut Avenue. They’re going to the Wharf. Now, it could be anywhere.”

When former crack dealers are decrying the level and randomness of the crime you should wake up and smell the coffee, and by their own lights, the leaders of D.C. have. They have declared a crime emergency, which is on brand for Democrats. Up the rhetoric and surely things will change.

D.C. has always had a dual personality–like a third-world country, the wealthy and the poor live mashed together far closer together than you would expect. And, ironically, in a city dominated by people who cannot stop talking about inequality, the poor live especially badly. For decades you could look to Washington as a place where Democrat rhetoric revealed its hollowness. The wealthy and powerful lived large while the poor who were unfit to rule the world languished.

But the ideological shift from very liberal to truly leftist has eviscerated Washington’s ability to even protect the rich and powerful, and that is something new.

The spike in felonies — homicides and robberies are up 29 and 67 percent from the same time period last year, police statistics show — is not the only data that is causing alarm. The number of juveniles arrested for carjacking has increased slightly since last year, with 41 of the 64 charged between the ages of 12 and 15. As of Aug. 31, a total of 81 minors had been shot in the city this year, compared with 66 over the same span last year and 37 in 2021.

While a preponderance of violence occurs where it often has — in poor neighborhoods on D.C.’s eastern edge — statistics show that the geography of crime has become more diffuse, with prosperous areas less immune than before.

This shift is, I believe, caused by the increasing reliance of the Elite on the activist Left to maintain their power. While the Democrats and the Left developed a marriage of convenience in the ’60s and ’70s, the exit of the working class from the Democrat coalition meant that the money and power people needed the support of the socialists and revolutionaries to stay at the top of the pyramid.

And the activists want things to collapse. They do everything they can to force that collapse. They hate the forces of order.

The decline of D.C. is an inevitable result. The rich and powerful made a fool’s bargain with the revolutionaries–they fund their nonprofits, mouth their pieties, and even sell out their fellow Americans to maintain their grip on power. And in the process, they have handed over our cities to crazy people.

Can it continue? Or will the coalition break?

In the old days, the nonprofits that provided the ground troops for Democrats could be bought off, and Democrats would continue pouring money into them in the hope that the money will buy loyalty. But I am pretty sure that won’t work. Clearly the decline of our cities will bring a reckoning.

What I don’t know is whether that reckoning will come in the form of reforms and a shift in political power, or whether the more likely outcome–a bunker mentality and increasing authoritarianism in the Elite–will be the result of that reckoning.

Trump may have been the last spasm of the working class’ power to alter the trajectory. Or his presidency may have been a preview of things to come.

I suspect the former and hope for the latter.