...McLean, [Virginia]... has become the psychic center of the Washington Republican establishment... [Here you find the] rewards awaiting ambitious conservatives in modern Washington, where unprecedented wealth is being made from the business of politics...

...Beyond their cultural preference for the suburbs, Washington's cadre of movement conservatives had no interest in joining the Georgetown set -- they had come to Washington to defeat it. Certainly, these post-Reagan conservatives -- many from the South and the Sunbelt -- hailed from a different class. Edwina Rogers, for instance, grew up in the rural Alabama town of Wetumpka. ("Dirt road, no telephone.") Ed is from Birmingham. (They met when she was a University of Alabama law student and he was working for the 1984 Reagan campaign.) As Edwina explained it, "Georgetown is more for the social elite, the intellectual elite. The people in McLean are more from humble backgrounds, state universities, not coming in from Yale or Harvard. It's middle-American nouveau riche."

Indeed, the migration of power from Georgetown to McLean represents the shift in American politics in microcosm. The Northeastern liberal elite drawn to the urbane sophistication of Georgetown has receded. In its place has risen a new conservative striver class -- more likely to have grown up in Texas (or, as with the Rogerses, Alabama) -- that has set itself up as landed gentry across the Potomac River in McLean.

...Conventional wisdom has been slow to assimilate this new reality. In the parlance of Beltway-bashing populists, "Georgetown" is the sneering shorthand used to describe Washington's clueless, cosseted elites. That shorthand, however, reveals how little these critics really understand contemporary Washington. Georgetown -- and the establishment that resided there -- faded from importance long ago. Over the last decade of growing Republican dominance in the capital, a new establishment has risen up to replace it. In a sense, McLean is the new Georgetown...

...Most galling to this former Harvard professor [the writer is talking about longtime Mclean resident Zbigniew Brzezinski] are what he sees as touches of fake class. Those despised McMansions are "totally phony, in that they imitate European aristocratic mansions, chateaus, and castles," he grouses. "The height of absurdity being reached by some that were clearly designed for northern Europe, with spires and roofs to deal with the snowfalls, but these are now located on postage-stamp lots in semi-tropical Northern Virginia." [Brzezinski's disdain for what the place has become, by the way, is not about his having been a professor, but his having been born a somewhat high-ranking Pole.]