Based on his interning experiences, University of California – Berkeley student Jacob Grant says that our nation’s capital is where idealism goes to die.

He makes a great analogy to the popular HBO series, Game of Thrones.

For anyone who has read George R.R. Martin’s excellent series “A Song of Ice and Fire” (I hear there’s also a show), D.C. bears an eerie similarity to the fictional city of King’s Landing. This should come as little surprise; Martin’s novels are a well-crafted amalgamation of history, and King’s Landing has all the trappings of a bloated, decadent capital city: the magnificent temples and monuments, the growing bureaucracy, the rich and powerful sustained through their connections and the large segments of the city made up of poor and forgotten neighborhoods. These are not just the markings of historical Babylon, Rome or London, but of Washington as well — although there is less murder, and the incest is metaphorical.

Washington D.C. isn’t sexy. There is a reason lawmaking is compared to sausage-making: Like any exercise of power, it is brutal and ugly. The weather is almost as miserable as the people (“They said I was daft to build a castle on the swamp, but I built it all the same!”). The political gridlock is almost as bad as the traffic, but at least the former is by design. The campaigns never really end, and the game between the two sides only pauses for happy hour. This is “House of Cards,” but only at its most petulant and self-serving; there is little of the bold pragmatism of Underwood or Urquhart that is not soon swallowed whole by partisan bickering, itself to be set aside when there are favors to be distributed and money to be raised.

Such are the problems inherent in a permanent political class. Regardless of how noble their intentions may be, people go to D.C. because that is where the power is. D.C. culture is infectious, without regard to political ideology, and can turn even the biggest anti-government crusader or populist defender into just another cog in the machine, concerned only with the power, money and cocktail parties inside the Beltway. Short of a drastic reduction in the size and power of the federal government or moving the entire federal bureaucracy to the near-vacant city of Detroit (it would save a bundle on housing costs), the only option is to change the culture.

…Anywhere that political power is concentrated, there exists the possibility of abuse. In D.C., this possibility is exacerbated by the culture of a permanent political class that is often more interested in its own scheming and networking than the unimportant schmucks outside the Beltway. …