The Epstein Files and Elite Moral Collapse
When America's ruling class operates without shame, the consequences extend far beyond individual crimes.
It is perhaps not an accident that an island figures prominently in the horrifically appalling Epstein scandal. The scandal, which now implicates a wide swathe of America’s elite, brings together one fantasy of modernity and one of its most atrocious moral horrors.
Islands have often been the places where modernity has staged its worst delusions. In the 18th century imagination, islands were, symbolically speaking, spaces where one could safely escape all moral norms and sexual prohibitions; they promised unlimited indulgence, but one that did not imperil mainstream society, precisely because they were exceptional and offshore. The image of the exceptional relaxation of norms—i.e. “offshoring”—applies to financial crimes, too. It is a form of evasion that does not imperil the system as a whole. To offshore crime, sexual violence, indulgence and financial perfidy is threatening but also reassuring. After all, it is offshore.
This was, of course, always a delusion. Financial offshoring is not a peripheral matter; it magnifies the crimes of the financial center. Similarly, elite actors apparently thought they could carry out their worst desires without contaminating the center. What those who came into Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit were enacting was not a fantasy of freedom, a revolt against prohibitions or norms. What they were enacting was an aspect of the horrific logic of modernity: An extraordinary pornification of the imagination, sexual exploitation and commodification of bodies, and total abjection in the pursuit of power. And it is an elite that seems to combine violent impunity with emotional immaturity.
There are so many angles to the Epstein files. Have all the files been released? Will the victims’ rights be protected? Given that both Democrats and Republicans are implicated, who stands to benefit? The files provide a sobering x-ray of some of America’s elites: immature, full of impunity, corrupt, venal, venial, and venereal all at once. They also provide a sobering view of global politics: There are no grand purposes, not even a political economy. Instead, what we get is a world run by huckstering middlemen, vulnerable personalities, fragile egos. They’re the perfect embodiment of Oswald Spengler’s figures of moral decline: clever, skeptical, but licentious and morally exhausted.
What decisions are such immature and fragile men capable of? The puzzle is how Epstein managed to put himself at the center of so much geopolitics; the fact that so many global powers felt they had to go through him is remarkable. He comes across as both a figure of great evil and an agony aunt for the powerful, including powerful countries.
The consequences will play out over time. Who knows what skeletons will tumble out? But, as always, the response is revealing. There was initial reluctance to confront the matter in both political parties, and it has taken years—and legislation introduced by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna—to get the release of the files moving. Yet there is still, arguably, a shroud of silence. Yes, there is gossip and chatter, but it is almost a way of not confronting the central question: How could a society produce an elite of this kind? Imagine if this kind of story had broken about the ruling class of any other country. Every colonial trope of debauchery or orientalism would have shaped the coverage.
But the response is revealing in three deeper ways. First, though there is partisan bickering, there is still a kind of attempt to exceptionalize the behavior of this ruling class. Like earlier colonial and island imaginaries, it functions as a bounded zone in which elite actors can suspend norms without contaminating the moral order of the center.
Second, there is a pathology of modern political life, where power is not legitimized or justified through virtue, but through opacity, brazenness, legalese, propaganda, and procedural shenanigans. So much energy will go into legalese when the horrors are in plain sight.
Third, there is a shadow that haunts modernity—the way in which we make sense of vice in public space. The only great historians who let us grasp this moment are the Romans: Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy. They located sexual decadence and violence at the very center of power, treating excess as a sign, and, in some cases, a cause of political decline. We moderns, of course, are supposedly more sophisticated. We distinguish between public and private. For us, corruption is not about virtue; it is a matter of institutional containment. In The Machiavellian Moment, the historian and theorist of the politics of virtue, J.G.A. Pocock, noted a paradox at the heart of modernity. Unlike the Romans, we do not think decadence, especially sexual decadence, tells us much about the decay of societies. Usually, the causes are structural—economic or political. Yet, Pocock argued, the republican category of virtue survives. It may not have explanatory force, but we cannot entirely abandon the language of virtue, or the sneaking suspicion that, even if sexual decadence is not causal of other issues, it is revealing.
There are, of course, outstanding issues in the Epstein files that need to be addressed—people who committed crimes in legal terms, people who engaged in morally reprehensible behavior, and people who themselves are not individually guilty but who condoned what was happening. The Epstein files are not about individual guilt or innocence; they are about the nature of collective power. And when, within that collectivity, elites abused sexual, financial, legal, political, and even intellectual power without shame and with impunity, one has to wonder whether the Roman historians were onto something: They envisioned empires collapsing when elites could no longer restrain themselves in any aspect of their lives. An elite so needy, greedy, and now so vulnerable can hardly be trusted to exercise good judgment.
The dilemma, as the Romans knew, is this: An elite of this kind has no authority left. Even in power, it is fearful; who knows what violence it enacts to cover its own tracks? On the other hand, if the elite gets away with it, the road is open to moral nihilism, a point we are dangerously close to reaching.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and a Visiting Professor at Princeton University.
A version of this article was originally published at Indian Express.
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America's ruling class has gone full woke which adopts all sorts of sexual deviancy including demanding young children be sexualized. So, the Epstein files are not really any crucible of new moral decay. The ruling class have already committed to acceptance.