WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The news that I am leaving Washington and moving back to California has been greeted with varying degrees of incredulity bordering on shock from my friends and colleagues inside the Beltway. The
reaction has been akin to someone leaving Hollywood: "What? And leave show business?"

Like the classic TV show, "The Prisoner," almost no one ever escapes the Beltway once comfortably installed
here. M. Stanton Evans used to remark that too many conservatives come to Washington intending to clean out
the swamp, only to discover that Washington is a hot tub. The case for being in Washington rests on the
obvious fact that the northeast "BosWash" corridor is the axis of intellectual and political life in America.
But, of course, this also constitutes the case for leaving Washington.

Despite its many charms, Washington has always seemed an alien place. The dress code rivals Starfleet; blue
jeans are as scarce as in the former Soviet Union, and cowboys can only be found stuffed and mounted in the
Smithsonian. Here the most fearsome six words in the English language are: "I know a good Mexican
restaurant."

But aside from these stylistic aversions, there is the problem of The Establishment. I have long made the
partially tongue-in-cheek argument that there should be term limits for conservative policy wonks and
activists--that we should all be required to spend every fifth year living and working in Duluth or Spokane, rubbing shoulders with the 55 percent of Americans who don’t vote and don’t care about politics. If term limits are useful in disrupting the culture of Capitol Hill through reviving frequent rotation in office, wouldn’t rotation in think-tank offices also be helpful to the health of the republic?

There is perhaps no better example of Washington’s enervating effect than the fact that the Republicans in
Congress no longer speak with bravado about "revolution." I used to argue with Grover Norquist that using the language of revolution in non-revolutionary America was imprudent (especially since the actual agenda was far from revolutionary), but he rejoined that it was necessary to use such language to remind us that we represent an insurgency against the Washington Establishment, rather than a new Establishment ourselves. He is probably right about this.

Some people have unusually robust political and cultural immune systems, like the Cato Institute. Perhaps they de-floridate the D.C. tap water over there at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, but for whatever reason Cato manages to maintain its surly countenance toward the Washington Establishment. Cato has managed an
impossible feat: they caused Milton Friedman to say that he had been wrong about something. Friedman had
said Cato would go bad when they moved to Washington 20 years ago. He publicly retracted this prediction a
couple of years ago.

I’ll still write this column from Washington from time to time, as I’ll come back to town frequently. But
otherwise I’ll write it from the Sierra foothills or the beach out west. But I’ll know my escape attempt has
failed if a giant white ball chases me down the beach the first time I head for the waves with my surfboard.
Au revoir, D.C. . . .

--By Steven Hayward