Noam Scheiber reprinted an excerpt from an old article by Jonathan Chait the other day. It’s been percolating in my head for a while. First, the excerpt:

I received a phone message the other day from someone who wanted my help in getting an article he’d written published in TNR. We had not spoken since we worked together on the college newspaper and had taken opposite sides in a political dispute. The dispute centered on whether I was a racist, sexist, right-wing bigot unfit for journalism; his side claimed I was, while I maintained, unpersuasively, that I was not. Suffice it to say I had not spent the intervening years trying to think up ways I could help this fellow, and his phone message reflected some acknowledgment of this. “We haven’t spoken in a while,” he observed, his flinty voice sounding uncharacteristically timid. “I know you’re not my biggest fan.” With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, he immediately launched into his article pitch. It seems he has picked up one of the mores of Washington: The distinction between your friends and your enemies is less important than the distinction between people you know and people you don’t. By this reasoning, the two of us have a connection. That the connection consists of his having viciously denounced me years ago no doubt struck him as beside the point.

Me: I have had several similar experiences since I’ve been in Washington and my first reaction to this was to nod my head in approval. But then I thought about it and now I’m not so sure. I don’t dispute at all that this sort of thing happens a lot in Washington, I’m just not so sure it doesn’t happen every place else too. I’ve known lots of people in business and sales, and for a brief time I was more interested in business than journalism myself. It seems to me that every time I watch business and sales people talk on planes, at airports, in hotel lobbies (my people watching often veers precipitously into obsessive eavesdropping) or when I listen to friends in “real” jobs talk about work, “making contacts” is a huge part of their life. Whole industries depend on this elemental fact of life, from convention planners to private clubs. When you think about it, having a connection with someone seems pretty crucial in all sorts of professional spheres. Certainly in academics and entertainment, but even in medicine, architecture and the armed forces (from what I gather). Back-scratching, favor-banking and rolodex padding is hardly a phenomenon unique to the nation’s capital.

I think that people in Washington, like Chait and myself, are often shocked by “how this town works” and therefore think this town works much differently than “normal places.” But perhaps the reality is that is what’s so shocking is how un-special this place really is. Our expectation is that it should be different, and so when our baseline assumption is contradicted we react by thinking how abnormal D.C. is when the reality is closer to the opposite.

On the other hand, perhaps what makes it seem so different is that we don’t monetize our transactions the way normal people do. When a college rival calls you at your office at Sprockets and Widgets Inc. and suggests that their past animosity should be forgotten in the name of doing a mutually beneficial deal, the win-win logic of the thing speaks for itself. But in Washington, when some jackass from school calls you up with an article pitch, it’s hard to see what the upside for you is. The implied bargain is that the enemy-turned-supplicant will reward you with his loyalty down the road (and perhaps a good article). But this is so intangible it seems otherworldly. So maybe this town is different, but not as different as it seems.

I’ll keep noodling.