![]() ![]() I suspect the truth of the matter has less to do with politics than with money and exhaustion. The Obamans and the Clintonites, of course, claimed the real issue was just that they didn’t want to hang out with Quinn’s crowd. DC worthies have been lamenting the social profiles of presidential hangers-on even longer, from the Carter crowd (Georgia rubes) to the Clintonites (institution-disrespecting boomers) to the Obamans (Quinn says they took their antisocial cues from the cold-fish president). ![]() Quinn’s original piece asserting that feminism killed the Washington hostess ran in 1987. By this point, the bipartisan Beltway social scene seems a bit like Saturday Night Live: It’s always been not as good as it used to be. Of course, there’s ample reason to assume predictions of doom are overstated. And if we’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that we want to cherish every minute.” And, rather than being a clueless lament for the elitist glory days, it ends in a covid-era epiphany of sorts, as she realizes that what she really missed while riding out the lockdown at her Maryland farm was intimacy with friends: “The big cocktail parties - especially the official ones, where you grab a drink, do a quick tour of the room and make small talk - have lost their cachet. The much-lamented era of bipartisan social comity often came at the cost of ignoring social inequality, engaging in disastrous foreign-policy groupthink, and excluding people who lacked the right credentials-not to mention excusing truly atrocious personal behavior by members of the elite.Ĭomplicating matters for critics, Quinn’s essay cops to a bunch of this, noting the overwhelmingly white population of party-goers and the antifeminist politics of hostess-ing, among other things. ![]() And it’s true that there’s a lot for critics to disfavor about the old insider class. Quinn is a longtime fixture and convener of that scene, and her piece will likely be met with derision by people who disdain the idea of an A-list and who love to pick on the media figure most associated with it. The culprits, in her telling, are many: A succession of presidents who wanted little to do with permanent Washington’s social class a polarized political environment where fewer people want to make friends with the other side a cultural and economic change wherein power-class DC types typically marry power-class spouses, leaving them too overworked to regularly attend fancy dinners, much less host them. In a lengthy Washington Post magazine story posted today, Sally Quinn pronounces Washington’s elite social scene dead. ![]()
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