In 2020, the Washington Redskins’ management decided that the team’s name was “offensive.” It’s instructive that the NFL team decided to change its name to the Washington Commanders.
Those familiar with the history of sports teams in Washington, D.C., know the city’s professional baseball team for much of the 20th century was known colloquially as the “Senators.” But the transition from the most famous franchise in D.C. sports being “The Senators” to it being “The Commanders” reveals something about the political culture of the nation’s capital.
Although our hundred actual U.S. senators are important, they are not what they used to be. Scholars like to say that America has a “presidential” system of government, which they contrast with a “parliamentary” system. There is some truth in that. But it is also true that for much of our history, it would not have been unreasonable to argue we had a “senatorial” system.
Due partly to the selection of senators by state legislatures, senators were the hinge of our political system. They connected the democratic-republican political process to the state legislatures. It’s not surprising that the Senate functioned much like a de facto “farm system” for higher office. With the exception of Gen. Zachary Taylor and House Speaker James Polk, every person elected president between James Monroe and Abraham Lincoln had been a senator (and Lincoln became president because of his stunning, though ultimately unsuccessful, campaign for Senate in Illinois in 1858).
The Senate in that era of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Lincoln represented the wisdom and dignity of the democratic republic. Ideally, American senators, like their counterpart Roman senators of old, brought wisdom and prudence to bear on governance. Unlike in Rome, however, U.S. senators were part of the democratic process. We, via our elected state representatives, selected them and rewarded them with reelection or higher office if we approved of their work or returned them to private life if we disapproved.
The senators, of course, didn’t always see it that way. And in time, the system, which never truly matched the idealized model, featured a strong leavening of corruption. Americans then decided it was necessary to reform things. Thus, senators are now elected by the people, not the state legislatures. As a result, we no longer have a direct connection between state and national democracy. Additionally, civil service reform has limited the amount of patronage available for senators and, as a result, limited the grease in that part of the political system. But when the Washington Senators became the “Senators,” the old Senate was still very much in view. Hence “Senators” as the representatives of the city made a great deal of sense.
What of “Commanders”? The franchise’s president, Jason Wright, claims the name is “something that broadly resonated with our fans.” Note the transition from “Senators” — political leaders who are part of both a political dynamic that involves compromise and negotiation, all in the context of electoral politics — to “Commanders,” who have the task of, well, commanding. They embody service and leadership not as a fundamental part of democratic government but as the preferred mode of governance of tenured civil servants. That is to say, servants who often resent the reality that they must, from time to time, pay some deference to the democratic political process.
In other words, in the translation from “Senators” to “Commanders,” we see, I fear, the turn from a democratic spirit in the nation’s capital to something entirely different and far worse.
Richard Samuelson is an associate professor of government in Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C.
