"How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!"

John Mason Brown fuses urban design with political temperament, turning a cartographic detail into social satire. Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for the capital prized grand diagonals, radiating avenues, and a constellation of circles, Dupont, Logan, Scott, and others, meant to create vistas, distribute traffic, and stage national ceremony. Brown hears in those elegant roundabouts an accidental commentary on the republic’s habits: a governing culture fond of motion without arrival, argument looping back on itself, processes that cycle through hearings, committees, and commissions only to return to the starting point.

The joke deepens with the city’s geography. Washington is literally encircled by the Beltway, a ring road that spawned the phrase “inside the Beltway,” shorthand for insular, self-referential politics. The street plan’s nodes of convergence mirror how coalitions form around issues, then dissolve and reform elsewhere, producing churn more than linear progress. Parliamentary maneuvers, procedural holds, filibusters, and continuing resolutions can feel like traffic in a busy roundabout: everyone yielding, no one advancing, horns of rhetoric making more noise than movement.

Yet the metaphor isn’t only cynical. Circles also symbolize continuity, balance, and return, qualities embedded in constitutional design. Checks and balances ask the branches to orbit one another, restraining rash swings and forcing reconsideration. Repetition in oversight, revision, and appellate review can be a safeguard, not merely a stall. L’Enfant’s circles act as civic rooms where avenues meet; similarly, politics at its best is a choreography of repeated encounters that sharpen consensus.

Brown’s quip endures because it captures both the exasperation and the logic of the capital: a beautiful plan that disperses power and slows momentum; a city engineered for vistas that also invites detours; a democracy whose forward motion often looks like circling until alignment appears. The prophecy, then, is architectural and behavioral at once, a geometry of governance.