Here we are spending a season on Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts and the question inevitably arises as we see old friends: "how's Alan Dershowitz holding up?" This is a small place, especially in winter, and our decidedly not-oligarchic-class friends regularly encounter the famous TV-lawyer and defender of the likes of OJ Simpson and his more recent buddy, Jeffrey Epstein.
Dershowitz is infamous around here for being angry that his chummy attachments to such criminals make him an Undesirable himself. He rages at social exclusion. He's been known to get into a loud public beef at the summer farmer's market, for example.
Anand Giridharadas' oped, How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails [gift link] seems to me both insightful and incisive about why elites and their hangers-on like Dershowitz feel injured when called to account. On this island, the rest of us get a close up glimpse on occasion, especially of the ones who are Democrats. A lot of people know what they are seeing; this place is full of smart New Englanders. (And yes, still feel they have to look to Democrats for something better.)
... People are right to sense that, as the [so far released Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.... The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.
The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.
... If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen. ...
Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.
Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through J.F.K., L.H.R., N.R.T. and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. ...
Giridharadas is brutal, revealing the moral emptiness of the Epstein class.
...the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins. ... These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again when they turn. ...
Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.
American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.
This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us. ...
Jeffrey Epstein's immediate victims are not alone in being treated like disposable trash by this set. We all are.
Posting may (or may not) be sporadic over Thanksgiving week as family assembles. I expect further outrages in this time when many look away.
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