Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Except for the last two weeks, when he was on vacation.

Amid the cascade of (welcome) local news stories chronicling the growing momentum for District voting rights, one tangential piece in the Post, a Saturday essay from staff writer Philip Kennicott, stuck out to me. My attention was assured, specifically, when I read the following passage concerning a symposium which took place this week and addressed the future of Washington planning:

And again and again, people kept coming to two paradoxical conclusions: That we are a great city, almost a model city, and yet we remain strangely inert, supine in the face of federal intervention, layers of bureaucracy and intellectual inertia.

How interesting, I thought. More than just a source of frustration and indignity, perhaps our electoral impotence is causing a chronic urban neurosis–an inability to think grandly and proudly without the tic of a fear of federal rebuke. Then Kennicott blew up his thesis with a profound example of intellectual inertia:

Now it needs to start thinking like a city, showing the 25 million annual tourists the cutting edge of architecture, sustainable design and development, and the bustle and bumptious energy of a real metropolis. A good start would be a few restaurants that serve until 4 a.m.

How perfect! Concluding a call to show the world what we’ve got by suggesting that we may not, in fact, have it.

But we do, of course. Maybe we don’t have enough 24-hour restaurants to satisfy the unpredictable urges of the Washington press corps, but as the essay linked above admits, in most respects we rank with the country’s finest cities. Kennicott is wrong; the problem isn’t that we’re scared stiff of the feds or trapped in a web of red tape. It isn’t that we’re intellectually dull or that the tourists don’t know enough to wander beyond the Mall into the places real people live. It’s that the voices speaking for Washington aren’t our own. They’re Kennicott’s and Louis Gohmert’s and James Inhofe’s and the President’s, but they aren’t ours, the voting residents of the District.

The Post essay has Dan Tangherlini lamenting that we’re not taken seriously: “‘The enterprise is illegitimate,’ he said, at least in the eyes of the federal officials who call so many of the shots.” And of course, to them, it is. We can’t go to the mat over so many issues of local importance for the very simple reason that we lack the basic political options available to so many other cities and towns. Our representative has no vote to bargain with on our behalf; our delegation can’t line up support with the promise to return the favor. We have to win all of our arguments by persuasion, which is just about the weakest currency around.

What is most unfortunate is that we are likely to be the best stewards of our national capital. No one would prefer a livelier Mall more than Washingtonians. No one would rather choose moderation in the construction of new buildings as opposed to bunker brutalism than the people who live here. No one, I imagine, is more eager to move forward on issues of transportation, housing, sustainable design, and general urban progress than the good people of Washington, but our ability to work positively on such issues is constrained anywhere and always by our political limitations. Voting Rights detractors are sure to reach for Washington’s mixed history of self-government as evidence to the contrary, but they shouldn’t present our failures without acknowledging their roots in the District’s powerlessness.

We don’t lack the self-government gene; I imagine we could ably instruct many a Congressperson on the finer points of democracy. One doesn’t need to live here long to know that Washingtonians don’t lack for self-confidence or intellectual vigor or imagination or any other such thing that Philip Kennicott might imagine. What we lack is a goddamn vote. Give us our basic political rights and watch us demonstrate all the confidence any diagnostician of the peculiar condition of Washington haplessness could want. But then, that’s what the voting rights bill’s opponents are afraid of.

Photo by andertho.