Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. functions in the book less as a neutral geographical setting than as a concentrated image of political power. It is associated with the White House, presidential authority, taxation, the Ownership Class, and the alleged “swamp” that populist rhetoric promises to drain. The city therefore becomes a symbolic battleground: the place where ordinary people hope government might serve the common good, but where the text argues that wealth and inherited privilege repeatedly shape who can enter power and whose interests government protects.

Political Capital and Elite Power

Washington, D.C. is linked to the book’s central opposition between the 99% and the 1%, or Ownership Class. The world is described as ruled by a rich elite whose greatest achievement is persuading the majority to carry out its wishes. In this framework, the capital represents not merely public administration but the institutional surface of a deeper class relationship, expressed through the book’s use of the master–slave dialectic: those who control power act as masters, while those who submit in order to preserve their lives become politically subordinate.

The city’s importance is sharpened by the presence of Donald Trump in the White House. The book argues that a multibillionaire and leading member of the Ownership Class cannot plausibly be treated as an enemy of that class. His occupation of the presidency turns Washington, D.C. into evidence for the author’s claim that the elite have gained direct access to political rule rather than needing to operate only through intermediaries. The capital is consequently portrayed as a place where popular anger can be redirected into support for the very wealth that the anger claims to oppose.

The “Swamp” and Its Reversal

The book repeatedly invokes the Washington, D.C. swamp as a target of populist hostility. It imagines a genuinely working-class political figure, earning roughly $50,000 a year, draining the Washington, D.C. swamp, the Wall Street swamp, and the Trump swamp. Yet the same passage insists that such a person could never reach the White House because the elite would not permit an opponent of their system to enter its central institution.

This produces the text’s defining reversal of the slogan “Drain the swamp.” According to its argument, Trump supporters sent into Washington, D.C. not an outsider but “one of the swamp creatures themselves”: a billionaire whose wealth came through inheritance and whose career is presented as inseparable from the structures the slogan condemns. The city thus embodies political misrecognition. A movement that imagines itself as revolutionary places an established member of the Ownership Class at the heart of national government, allowing the swamp to become, in the book’s image, deeper and darker rather than emptied.

Taxation, Secrecy, and Presidential Authority

Washington, D.C. is also connected to the unequal tax system described throughout the work. The book contrasts one system for corporations and the super-rich with another imposed on ordinary people, who face a complex and intimidating bureaucracy without the lawyers and accountants available to powerful institutions. The capital stands behind this arrangement as the location from which public rules are made and enforced, while the wealthy are said to receive special treatment that remains largely hidden from public view.

Trump’s tax affairs become a particular test of Washington, D.C.’s democratic legitimacy. The book asks what scandals might be present in his tax returns and argues that the American public should not accept a president who withholds his financial affairs from the people over whom he exercises authority. In this sense, the city’s political meaning depends on transparency: presidential power is treated as incompatible with concealed taxation and private financial opacity.

Historical Conflict and the State

The book places Washington, D.C. within a larger historical argument about the American state and the conflict between government and unrestrained capitalism. It compares the Trump insurgency with a renewed Confederacy, describing both as forms of far-right conservative rule grounded, in the author’s account, in racism, white supremacy, and plutocracy. The analogy is not offered as a narrow geographical comparison; it casts the capital as the seat from which a modern version of an old political order might be restored.

Abraham Lincoln’s struggle against the Confederacy supplies the counter-image. Lincoln is presented as having used a positive-liberty state to end the Confederacy as a physical entity, while the book calls for a new Lincoln to end the Confederacy as a mental and ideological entity. Washington, D.C. therefore represents both the governmental power capable of restraining predatory capitalism and the political center that can be captured by it. The city’s significance lies in this unresolved duality: the state may protect common life, but it may also become an instrument of inherited wealth.

Symbolic Future of the Capital

The book’s wider political mythology gives Washington, D.C. a place in a drama of decline and renewal. The arrival of the “Dawn of the Jacobin Age” is linked to the claim that the right wing made its greatest mistake by placing a senior member of the 1% in the White House. The capital becomes the stage on which elite victory is expected to turn into elite exposure: once the Ownership Class governs openly, the consequences of its rule can no longer be blamed on hidden intermediaries.

At the same time, Washington, D.C. is invoked through the language of American constitutional division and reconciliation. The book cites the image that a house divided against itself cannot stand and argues that the conflict between slavery and freedom must finally resolve in one direction or the other. It also appeals to Thomas Jefferson’s call to end the hereditary principle and invokes the tree of liberty, while acknowledging that conservatives and liberals disagree over who counts as a patriot and who counts as a tyrant. The capital thus stands at the intersection of inherited power, revolutionary memory, and the hope that political institutions might be remade for the common good.