Elite impunity deserves America's contempt

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails yesterday that were obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein. These emails are damning. I’ll get to their content another time. Meanwhile, Republicans on the same committee responded by releasing the rest of the collection of Epstein correspondence, about 23,000 emails in all.

While the Democrats hoped to focus attention on the corruption of one individual, namely Donald Trump, the Republicans, in their bid to muddy the waters, ended up focusing attention on the corruption of the elite culture from which Trump arose before becoming president.

David Kurtz said he was “astonished not so much by the chumminess [Jeffrey Epstein] enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor, but by the messages’ flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence.”

Kurtz then quoted a political scientist we both follow. “The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit send,” Ed Burmila wrote.

Impunity is the word befitting these revelations, Kurtz said.

I would suggest a couple more. First, class solidarity.

Kurtz said “it’s one of the oddities of this whole spectacle that the question is whether Trump — already an admitted pussy grabber, held liable as a sexual assaulter, and prone to traipsing through his pageant dressing rooms to gawk at young flesh — was also engaged in another kind of sexual misconduct, as if stacking revelations high enough will finally overcome the elite impunity that’s cosseted Trump for more than 40 years.”

That’s the thing. It won’t.

Yes, it’s important to never give into cynicism. It’s important to set standards of conduct and the consequences for violating them.

But no one here is a fool.

For there to be justice – in this case, the faint hope of impeaching and removing a president credibly implicated in child-sex trafficking – elites must betray elites. Powerful men (and they are men, let’s be real here) must find in themselves an incentive to be traitors to their class.

But we all know, or at least suspect, that there’s no amount of evidence or persuasion that can move elites against elites if they can collectively avoid accountability by looking the other way, now and forever. The most obscene crimes can be overlooked in the name of class solidarity. You can stack revelations all the way to heaven and it won’t “overcome the elite impunity that’s cosseted Trump for more than 40 years.”

If there’s to be change, it will come after many years, perhaps many decades, of effort to bring elites back in line, through democratic means, with the laws and norms according to which the rest of us live.

Maybe that effort will begin with the release of “the Epstein files,” which are still in the possession of the US Department of Justice. (Yesterday’s cache of emails was not part of that.) The House appears ready to vote on their discharge next week, with a surprising number of Republicans, perhaps as many as 100, voting in favor of their release.

Even then, however, it must get through the Senate, the most elite institution of elite institutions. Then it must get Trump’s signature. Does anyone here expect him to add to the stack of revelations?

That brings me to my second word, contempt.

Those of us who are still subject to the rule of law, ie, normal people, may not have the power to force elites to do the right thing, but we do not owe them. They are not entitled to our respect and admiration.

We give those freely, of course, as their status triggers in many of us a natural inclination toward judging people on an individual level. We associate “success” with character. The richer and more powerful you are, the deeper the strength of your character appears to be. On the basis of that, American society tends to hold elites in high esteem.

If nothing else, perhaps this trove of correspondence between rich and powerful men and the country’s most famous pedophile will correct that error. Altogether, they don’t paint a picture of commendable inner fortitude. They paint a picture of criminal minds: bribery, extortion, exploitation and other evil acts discussed without a care in the world.

Here’s Sky Marchini: “One of the craziest things that has become apparent to me as I’ve gotten older is people just putting ‘hello, yes, would you like to do crimes? Here is my plan to do crimes. Let us join together to do the crimes at this specific time and place’ in an email.”

There’s so much crime, it may look like a conspiracy. But that suggests something out of the ordinary. What we’re seeing is the consequence, after decades of effort, of putting the rich and powerful in a separate category of morality and law from the rest of us. What they do is no longer subject to social judgment. It’s just how they spend their time.

Here’s Andy Craig: “I still don't think this was some overarching convoluted blackmail scheme … These people are all just rich and powerful perverts, and also idiots, and so gravitated to [Epstein] who was happy to cater to them. … They did it so carelessly because the idea they were at any risk genuinely never occurred to them.”

Craig went on to say: “You see this in how they all talked about it. Ha ha ha, parties and girls and drugs, backslapping about it like a bachelor's party in Vegas. That some were obviously underage, and all were obviously being pimped, was just a bit of naughtiness. Accountability wasn't even on their radar as a concern.”

But it’s not the crime that makes them contemptible. Many criminals are deserving of punishment but not necessarily our contempt.

It’s their character. It’s who they are.

These are men for whom ethical behavior is an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. They use people, then throw them away, like garbage, especially if they are vulnerable. Sexually exploited kids always are. They are hollow, brittle and breathtakingly insecure, though they always find safety in the herd (ie, class solidarity). If not for their status, they would be easily recognized as pathetic shits. But they encase themselves in gold, making their corruption seem commendable.

That deserves contempt.

I think it’s important that impunity be the takeaway from these emails. Epstein, Trump and the rest act with indifference to morality and the law, because they do not believe they will ever face consequences. They are right to believe that. Decades of elite effort have assured them of it.

An assessment of the problem, however, is not the same thing as the motivation to solve it. In addition to impunity, we must feel contempt. Not hatred. Not fear. Contempt – not only who they are, but who they want us to believe they are, even as they "do crimes" out in the open.

Bringing elites back into accordance with morality and law is going to be a long journey. But the first step is contempt. Let it burn within you.