Barbarians at the Gate

Partying hard in Trump's DC.

Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of stale beer, bright young men outnumbering bright young women whose attention they desire. Starry-eyed, badly-dressed, trying way too hard — the essence of DC.

(Incidentally, Democrats are no better — every bit the caricature as their opposite. But these CPAC afterparties usually nail the Washington striver stereotype in singular fashion.)

This party was very different, however. It wasn’t even a CPAC party. It was billed as a “DOGE appreciation party.” And while that may sound plenty dorky, it surfaced something else that’s novel in Trump’s DC. It surfaced a kind of gleeful barbarism that I’ve just not seen before.

Everything about the party was over the top. After you RSVP’d, you needed to get vetted. (For whatever reason, I was approved fairly quickly.) An email went out the day of the party saying that the whole thing was “strictly off the record” — presumably because journalists had breached the defenses. The note was intentionally edgy. “Security will be tight, so arrive prepared.” There were guard goons at the door. Word had spread on social media that the party was hard-right, so a handful of cops were called in to protect attendees from a dozen or so people out front chanting “Fuck off, fascists!” in that familiar protester cadence. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this resistance was being paid by the organizers to be there, for ambience. It all felt curated.

The space was rented, I was told; Meta had apparently held a party there earlier in the week. Walking up to the third floor, you were confronted by a massive stuffed bison by the entrance. The whole place was shabby chic — a penthouse loft, with a massive split-level living room that no one would ever live in, with dusty bookshelves and odd furniture scattered about. There was an industrial-sized kitchen that looked unused. A bar in the living room and a second one at the exit to the rooftop were further tip-offs that this is an event space and not a home. (That said, I did wander into a bedroom decorated Buddhist-style, so who knows?)

Respecting the “off the record” injunction, I’ll stick with the mood, as in truth it was more instructive than any conversation I had.

The mood was jubilant. But it wasn’t just that sense of liberating triumph that Trump’s victory has injected into many conservatives. It was a kind of agitated truculence. The DOGE theme had everyone drunk on destruction. There certainly was a lot of camaraderie, you could feel it in all the conversations. But there was no sense of restraint, and no sense of positive mission. The mission itself was to tear down, to punish.

The evening was not free of cliché: At one point, I overheard a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire. My mind turned to the sack of Rome, a point of no return. Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when the Visigoths entered the city in 410AD, retold the instructions of Alaric, their Christian king:

He encouraged his troops boldly to seize the rewards of valour, and to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people; but he exhorted them at the same time to spare the lives of the unresisting citizens, and to respect the churches of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, as holy and inviolable sanctuaries.

Today, the barbarians have also entered the gates. But King Trump has no Christian virtues to speak of, and he has counseled no restraint. His taunting address last night to a joint session of Congress brooked no pity for the vanquished. There will certainly be much plunder and self-enrichment as the wealthy and effeminate stand by helplessly and watch. But unlike back then, it feels like no denizen, and no institution, will be spared.

I don’t want to pretend that I somehow stand above and apart from all of this. The giddy glee feels in part driven by the prospect of smashing decadence. And I feel it too. Moreover, I suspect that the feeling is shared much more broadly across the country — and that it’s what keeps Trump’s revolutionary radicalism still above-water in the polls. Only a slim majority voted for Trump, but the rejection of the progressive identity agenda — call it “wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever you want — feels broader. Maybe it’s that this agenda was quietly resented by many Democrats too, and was understood to be weak and decadent even as it quietly became their ideological standard. And without a standard to rally around, it’s impossible to organize a resistance.

I kept thinking about another very imperfect historical parallel. In 1919, the Spartacist revolt, an uprising led by famous German Bolsheviks Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, was violently put down by the weak infant Weimar Republic. Luxembourg and Liebknecht were lynched by members of the so-called Freikorps militias sent in to suppress the communists — by freshly demobilized soldiers already nurturing myths of how Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by its elites in the Great War. The Spartacist revolt almost certainly needed to be put down for the Weimar Republic to survive, and the government couldn’t muster more professional forces to do it. But in making use of the Freikorps, they had let loose something into the young republic’s bloodstream — something savage, something primal, something that could never be contained or controlled once it had tasted blood.

I saw a familiar face at the party at one point later in the evening. I drunkenly tried to communicate the above to him. “These people are having fun right now, but they don’t know what’s coming. This is not an organized army, these are bandits and vandals, and no one has full control. They’ll turn on each other eventually. Everyone is backslapping tonight, but they’ll all be swimming in each others’ blood in a year’s time!” Yes, drunkenly. But I still can’t shake the feeling.

The party kept going even as I was running out of steam. Before leaving, I went up to the roof to catch a breath of air. And there, for a second, I caught a brief glimpse of a former CPAC party. A gangly guy in a shitty suit was talking to a pretty young woman. “I’m from Massachusetts. Where are you from?” “I’m from Wisconsin. I moved here for a job at Commerce.”

I’ve never been so happy to see so familiar a sight. Maybe, just maybe, among all the loud barbarians, there are still armies of awkward young strivers who come to this town not to ransack it but to make their lives in it.

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