On D.C. “Nerds” and Outsider-Wannabes

Members of the press always have plenty of chances to celebrate their accomplishments, or stand in solidarity with one another. In the last month the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Magazine Awards were given out. As for bringing attention to the more dangerous aspects of the job, the “#freeAJstaff” campaign has, over the course of several months, raised awareness of the Al-Jazeera journalists detained in Egypt since December. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, on the other hand, isn’t about celebrating journalism per se. It’s about affirming the sociological identity of most Washington, D.C. journalists.

Sure, the president will get up and give lip service to the work that the capital press corps does—their dogged reporting and commitment to accountability, transparency, and so on. But the Twitter hashtag that serves as shorthand for an entire weekend of debauchery, celebrity-gawking, and self-congratulation—#nerdprom—is much more about tribalism than truth-telling.

The “nerd” image is central to many Washingtonians’ conception of themselves and their city. D.C. is a town full of smart, detail-obsessed overachievers who made good and used their skills to land the ultimate Knowledge Economy jobs. Matt K. Lewis of The Daily Caller penned a gushing defense of “nerd culture” in The Week, explaining how the Correspondents’ Dinner was the ultimate sign that “the geeks have inherited the Earth.” He gushed, “Political journalism today is really the ultimate ‘revenge of the nerds.’”

There are a lot of nerds who embrace that moniker today. There’s Ezra Klein and his vaunted ability to take complicated policy topics and make them accessible to a mass audience. There’s the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who writes the blog “The Fix,” and whose breathless, earnest tone conveys that he has memorized every congressional candidate in the country and is incapable of thinking beyond the next election cycle.

And there’s my own anecdotal evidence, from my three years living in D.C., when I met hundreds of people who would talk about things like “nerding out over judicial hearings” and express their joy over living in a “city full of nerdy celebrities in suits.” The implication was clear: Despite our desire to be near powerful, well-connected people, we are really just a merry band of outsiders, motivated by public service and our love of knowledge.

I never really understood whom, exactly, these self-proclaimed nerds were setting themselves up against. Plenty of writers, including (of course) David Brooks, have tried to make the pop-psychology case that politics is just high-school tribalism, being acted out by adults. But if D.C. journalists adopt the “nerd prom” label for their biggest, most self-indulgent party of the year, the real question we ought to be asking is, if a group of well-spoken, well-connected, wealthier-than-average professionals are the nerds, then who are the popular kids?

The Correspondents’ Dinner is an evening when the press gets to pat itself on the back and celebrate its access to power, while the most powerful human on the planet is cracking jokes a hundred feet away. If these are nerds, it’s safe to conclude that we’ve defined “nerd” down to the point where the only thing it means is “a person with detailed knowledge of a particular subject,” as opposed to indicating any kind of outsider status.

This is not to re-litigate battles over high-school identity (“the theater kids were the real nerds!”), or have an argument about whether I know the lyrics to more Smiths songs than the average D.C. reporter. Rather, it’s to point out that adopting the “nerd prom” label, and the attendant rhetorical pose of “tee hee, I’m such a nerd I get so excited when I see the Treasury Secretary” allows D.C. residents, including members of the press, to adopt certain advantageous labels that they no longer deserve. Labels like: the outsider, the disinterested observer, the authoritative hobbyist. Or, the pragmatist who is aware that a lot of lying and self-promotion takes place in Washington, but who doesn’t think any of their trusted friends would be guilty of such things.

These poses predate the “nerd prom” parlance, of course, and the political class’s rhetoric about its Serious Commitment to Public Service is the oldest story in the capital. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, the pearl-clutching that took place among the Washington establishment was a delight to behold. David Broder, who made a career on the strength of his “centrist straight-talk” shtick, told the Washington Post at the time, “The judgment is harsher in Washington. We don’t like being lied to.” (Oh really?) The perfectly named Muffie Cabot, who was President Reagan’s social secretary, said at the time, “This is a demoralized little village. People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened.” The effect of all this is to imply that Washingtonians, unlike mercenary New Yorkers or superficial Angelenos, are alone interested in policy, truth, and public service.

But if that’s the case, how could a journalist like Cillizza make such a successful career out of using glib, anti-intellectual phrases like “If You’re Explaining, You’re Losing,” and pass that off as valuable analysis? More broadly, if the nerd takeover of Washington were as much of a cause for celebration as many Washingtonians claim, how could Matt K. Lewis, he of “the geeks have inherited the Earth,” have also written this “We live in two Americas” think piece? Lewis, comparing the reality television show Duck Dynasty and Affordable Care Act poster child “Pajama Boy,” portrayed the blue state/red state divide as a culture clash, respectively, between the “pretty regular guy . . . who hates phonies and tells it like it is” on the one hand and effete liberals on the other. In Lewis’s telling, to the extent that the geeks had inherited the earth, their prime achievement was making it impossible for a regular guy like Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson to “navigate the PC landmines that 21st century fame demands” (i.e., to compare homosexuality to adultery and bestiality without public backlash).

Around the same time, Lewis’ geek-bashing “Two Americas” piece in The Daily Caller was echoed in starker terms by Rich Lowry, who called Pajama Boy “an insufferable man-child” in Politico. This piece, which made fun of Pajama Boy’s plaid onesie, hipster glasses, and (Lowry assumed) effete taste in literature and food (Sylvia Plath! Tofurkey!), demonstrated for anyone who cared to notice that “Let’s beat up the nerd” is still one of the major pillars of modern conservative identity politics. All is right with the world.

For now, the nerdiest attendees of this year’s Prom didn’t have to worry about upsetting Lowry. Indeed, they could take comfort in the fact that the current president is actually himself kind of a nerd—bookish, introspective, and enamored with comic books. But when the pendulum swings back the other way and we have a reactionary jockstrap in the White House again—and it will happen—watch for the press corps to drop the “#nerdprom” label as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they won’t have to pose as hated outsiders any longer. They’ll have become the real thing.