Whether or not these arguments are persuasive (and I personally find them less than dispositive), the fact that a supposedly “norm”-obsessed Washington would shrug its shoulders at blowing up the institution of the Senate might also reveal something about the evolving character of the American political establishment. As recent years have shown, politics is often as much about group affinity and generalized worldviews as it is about abstract arguments, and social conditions can influence how certain ideas will be received. Washington has largely been insulated from the negative consequences of the disruption of the past 20 years. For many parts of the country, recent decades have been a time of economic stagnation and social frustration. Not so in the glittering Beltway, where luxury condos and six-figure jobs have proliferated. In a kind of reverse reckoning, many of the debacles suffered by the country as a whole have ended up enriching D.C. and its environs. For instance, No Child Left Behind poured a cascade of testing-centric mandates upon local school districts — and millions of dollars into the pockets of consultants and testing companies. The Great Recession was a great time for the lobbying and influencer classes. D.C. is disproportionately populated by the scions of trust funds and meritocratic winners, who have benefited from the financialization and bureaucratization of the American economy. For this demographic slice, “move fast and break things” has paid off handsomely, so why not apply it to American government? Exacerbating this tendency is the Beltway’s penchant for short-termism, with the news cycle as the farthest horizon. “Winning the day” is very different from long-term statesmanship.