A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position himself into the role of Macher in politics and (unusually) in science, including non-trivial associations with (inter alia) MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard University’s evolutionary dynamics programs, and the Santa-Fe institute.*
The latter is especially notable because while as a kid Epstein skipped two grades, he was de facto an academic drop-out. Yet, back in 2002 already, an incredibly instructive New York Magazine profile by Landon Thomas Jr. reports:
Investing in people doesn’t mean providing them with an education. Rather, Epstein brought people together from business, science, and politics which allowed them access to funds, prestige, political decision-makers, Hollywood stars, media moguls, and young girls. While Epstein donated money, his real gift to others was that he facilitated other people’s plans by brokering one of the most scarce commodities in science and politics, attention. His perceived success at this kind of brokerage is my main interest below. (Here I use ‘brokerage’ and its cognates in order to refer to his role as enabler.)
But it would be remiss of me to fail to mention that in return for facilitating attention and funds Epstein got investment opportunities — including investment in scientific projects he cared about not the least ones associated with eugenics and transhumanism — and sexual access to children. He was, in fact, convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. And there is very little doubt that the plea bargain only covered a small number of his life of sex crimes before and after the conviction.
Of course, part of the interest in documentation pertaining to Epstein’s life is to what degree and to whom he also brokered or trafficked in sexual access to children to people in his circle, and whether that allowed for opportunities for further financial gain (through payoffs or blackmail, etc.) I assume my readers are familiar with these sordid facts. They matter a great deal for the continued public interest in the handling of the case, but I will only emphasize them intermittently below.
That, even after his Florida state conviction, there was non-trivial demand among the very rich and educated for Epstein’s services should not surprise. For, one of the key lessons of the Madoff scandal — my college friend, Erin Arvedlund, first broke the story — is that “that [on average] the victims were wealthy and educated.” (David M. Levy & Sandra Peart (2013) “Learning from Scandal about what we Know and What we Think we Know,” p. 302) And what’s very striking about the attitude of sophisticated investors revealed in that scandal is that many were not without suspicion that the returns Madoff achieved were fishy. But most of them assumed that he was their crook. This indicated that these wealthy investors assumed they were operating in a crony capitalist environment which they shaped and were shaped by.**
This mindset was also revealed in the so-called college admissions/Varsity Blues scandal in which bribing and cheating were deployed to ensure college admission in elite universities. Of course, and to avoid confusion, the donations of the mega-rich to fund buildings and schools at universities do not count as ‘bribes,’ but they partake (recall) in the same transactional ethos, alas (as Jeffrey Epstein discerned and exploited). Our purportedly meritocratic, prestige-oriented educational culture is suffused with short-cuts for the connected.
So, Epstein’s criminality and his legal brokerage activities reflect and contributed to what (inspired by Machiavelli) I have been calling ‘corruption.’ Corruption is not just about illegal and legal bribery, and insider trading, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. This kind of corruption is characteristic of crony capitalism. (Recall this post for more elaborate defense of this stance.)
Now, I am enough of a Mandevillian — private vice, public virtue — to think that some such corruption is inevitable in a great, flourishing society. From the point of view of the political theorist and even qua citizen, I doubt one ought to be obsessed with rooting out such corruption in all contexts. But Machiavellian corruption and crony capitalism can slide into a culture of legalized bribery and favoritism when lack of accountability of ruling cliques becomes normalized, and the rule of law is a mechanism by which the well-connected can play by totally different rules than the rest. Even the systemic, bailouts during the great financial crisis seem to have favored the well-connected (at the expense of everyone else) [for a nice early, public choice paper that documented this see here].
When Bill Clinton gained prominence ahead of his first presidential run, the Whitewater scandal exploited the expectation that it was entirely plausible that state politicians were in cahoots with local property developer and regional banks. In fact, the Clintons lost money on the original deal, but various people they associated with were convicted of criminal activity (including the governor that replaced Bill Clinton).
I start my potted narrative with Whitewater for two reasons. First, Clinton was one of the architects (or enablers) of the 1999 repeal of Glass–Steagall act that turbocharged the pervasiveness of our culture of corruption. Second, the Whitewater investigation exposed Bill Clinton’s persistent pattern of philandering and (to use euphemism) inappropriate work-place relations. Hillary Clinton’s decision to stand by her man saved his presidency; but because Hillary Clinton was and remained the very public face of liberal feminism it has contributed to the political misfortunes and ineffectiveness of political feminism Stateside for almost a generation. I wouldn’t mention this weren’t it for the fact that this was cleverly exploited by the first Trump campaign when Hillary Clinton ran against Trump to neutralize the potential damage of Trump’s own non-trivial pattern of significant sexual harassment (and worse).+
Let me return to the ‘Epstein files.’ While Epstein was in close contact with many celebrities, he seems himself not to have been especially interested in public attention nor has contributed to public life in any significant fashion.* And so his name should have faded from public memory relatively quickly after his death.
I suspect the main reason why political operatives in MAGA land (including Trump himself) got so interested in the — admittedly rather hazy — details of Epstein’s purported suicide in jail and to what degree there was a cover-up of the networks he operated in — is that they accurately discerned that his network included at least one of the biggest Democratic fish [Bill Clinton]; and that he would be a good symbol for a wider sense of outrage about liberal/Democrats hypocrisy and inside dealing. (Democrats unfolding’ cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline didn’t help them.) It is a curious fact that in our public culture hypocrisy is treated as a worse sin than many actual crimes. Why this is so, I leave aside here.
For, the publicly available facts of Epstein’s life allowed MAGA to connect fear, even growing panic over sexual predation of the young to a general, culture of perceived lack of accountability among wealthy and well-connected insiders. If the US government had pursued Epstein with the same intensity and diligence it pursues (say) the poor who miss bail bond payments, harms to the innocent would have been prevented. Sadly, campaign donations or gifts in kind to attorney generals (and judges) at all levels inevitably have drawn the justice system into the transactional ethos that ends up favoring the rich and connected. I doubt anyone among MAGA operators was in doubt about Trump’s own closeness to Epstein (this was well documented after all); but not unlike Madoff, he was their crook who would help clean the stables (drain the swamp and so on).
Of course, American politicians, including very powerful ones, and the wealthy do go to jail sometimes. But it’s also fair to say that the American justice system is far more effective at criminalizing the poor than in fighting the corruption at the top (including among elite judges); and I haven’t even mentioned the persistent lack of accountability over war-crimes and the targeted drone killings of purported enemies. Even before the rather worrisome recent expansion of ICE, the distance between the spirit of the rule of law and the reality of very weak legal and political mechanism of accountability was growing very large. As I have noted before only the most ardent institutionalists can have failed to realize this.
As an aside, I suspect Trump himself thought that by returning to the presidency he would be invulnerable to any fall-out. Now that he has delivered the repeal of Roe Vs Wade and his tax-cuts, he is belatedly realizing that he will become politically dispensable soon.
Be that as it may, Machiavelli strongly suggests that the decline of loyalty to the ancestral religion correlates with the decay of norms and the kind of corruption I have been exploring here. (I doubt such religiosity prevents great harms to others, but it may indeed prevent such corruption.) I suspect that both the vitality of Evangelism on the political right and the intense embrace of Woke among progressive students are themselves tracking the perception of corruption. There are also more than a few hints of religiosity and the embrace of ascetic ideals in the environmental movements. The fourth great awakening, if it happened, is now more than a half century behind us; and US culture is building toward a fifth one as the sordidness and cruelty as well as countervailing moralizing intensifies.
My own view is that the American system of government inherited from Madison-Lincoln-FDR facilitates crony capitalism and corruption. And while I discern few sources for renewal in the current political situation (not the least because there are so few sources of unquestionable authority and integrity), I do expect — alongside rising Chinese power — fresh thinking (perhaps most acutely on distant shores) and more sober reckoning about the limitations of American political culture and institutions. Somewhat frustratingly, the present shift toward ‘Radical Constitutionalism’ and the ‘Unitary Executive’ being engineered by the Supreme Court and undivided rule by the Republicans, while it clearly makes the executive branch less constrained and potentially more responsive to voters (here I modestly disagree with Liz Anderson’s recent, excellent piece), it will also make it even easier to entrench corruption and be less rights respecting.
I lack the providential faith needed to hope that the Epstein files are themselves the trigger for the wider political and social renewal that is needed. I see no evidence that we on the cusp of a political culture and legal practice of accountability of the rich and powerful. But the enduring anger over the Epstein files in MAGA land expresses a wider unease, even recognition that Trump’s second electoral victory itself does not represent the culmination of renewal but manifests its wholly unfinished status.
To be continued.
- A modestly rewritten version of this post originally appeared at DigressionsnImpressions (here).
*Because of that I am just one or two steps removed from several people whose attention Epstein cultivated. But I doubt I was aware of his existence before he got arrested in 2019, and a number of articles appeared which strongly suggest Epstein recruited academics through the literary agent, John Brockman.
**As I learned from my co-author Aris Trantidis (one of the few experts on clientalism), Crony capitalism comes in degrees, and in degrees of visibility. Finland is not Greece, and neither is Russia (and so on).
+The failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign opened the door, I think, to the political potency of #MeToo.
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