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I think and talk and write a lot about culture, understood as the complex of ideas, symbols, customs, creations, activities, beliefs, and structures that characterize a particular community or heritage. Here in the U.S., people tend to be somewhat familiar with the idea of a culture, even if they define it differently or over-generalize. We hear “Black culture,” “Latino culture,” “Jewish culture” and so on. What we don’t hear all that much about is class, and what we do hear, especially in mainstream contexts, tends to obscure the truth rather than illuminate it.
Politicians often talk about how they’ll make things better for the middle class as if it were the only one worth mentioning. More than half of people in this country define themselves as middle-class, including some who can’t afford to buy a home or pay their bills and others who would be seen as upper-class in any other country’s income distribution chart. Although there is still a sense on the left of working-class solidarity, it’s part of a particular worldview, not a general trend. People know what it means when reference is made to “the 1%” or “the 99%”—and perhaps also know that according to the (pre-Trump) Federal Reserve, the top 1% of households own 30.5% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% possess 2.5%.
You’d think that statistic alone would have generated a lot more conversation about class, but evidently it look Jeffrey Epstein to jump-start it.
Recently, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) began using the term “Epstein class” to describe the vast networks of the rich and connected found in documents from the Epstein files grudgingly released by the Department of Justice. The rubric instantly caught on, because it so elegantly encapsulates the phenomenon: where else do both Noam Chomsky’s and Howard Lutnick’s names coincide other than in the written record of the life of a depraved pedophile with no ethics or morality and a prodigious talent for connecting people to money and warped sex?
Journalist Anand Giridharadas, the observant and astute guest on Ezra Klein’s 13 February podcast episode, offered a penetrating analysis of what it all means. One passage in particular sticks with me. Instead of cherry-picking the files for Trump’s name or Bill Clinton’s, singling out famous people for their engagement with Epstein, Giridharadas turns our attention to the big picture:
That cherry-picking, he says, “is such a facile way of looking at what we ended up getting, which is, as you say, a coast to coast, industry to industry, right to left, as far left as you can go, as far right as you can go, different professions, different ways of moving through the world, some famous, some obscure. And as I wrote in the New York Times piece that I wrote in November, this diversity masked a deeper solidarity. Because even if these people were on cable, you’re sitting at home, you’re watching cable at the end of the day, and you’re seeing these two talking heads fight.
“But that’s for you, that’s the spectacle for you at home to keep you entertained. What they’re actually doing is revealed in these files, which is hanging out, breaking bread, colluding, sharing information, giving each other tips on deals, giving each other PR advice, making introductions to each other….”
Giridharadas points to a conversation Steve Bannon had with Epstein, who contacted him to ask a favor. “[Bannon] uses a racist term for white people, the specific kind of demo of white people that Steve Bannon used to get Donald Trump elected. And so in this moment, Steve Bannon, who deplores the quote unquote globalists and people of high finance and this and that, is talking to financier Jeffrey Epstein, referring to white people in Georgia as crackers. None of these people in these networks mean what they say when you hear them in public.
“They mean what they say when you’re not looking. And these emails, in sum, are an extraordinary and rare chance to see what they really think about you, how they really move through the world, what their actual ends and projects are. Maya Angelou is right, when people show you who they are, believe them.”
Let’s decode the Epstein class as if it were a culture. Its values are self-interest, solidarity around the accumulation of money and power that transcends all other differences, secrecy, maintaining public personae having little to do with their private truth, the embrace of appetite without restraint, worship of the power that attaches to wealth and influence, and the absolute absence of shame. Some of the members are crude, vulgar, and ostentatious in their tastes, such as the current President; others prefer the neat, discreet, expensively understated fashions associated with old money. They are overwhelmingly white and male. They believe in their own superiority as an entitlement to treat others as disposable if inconvenient. They are committed enough to their own lies enough to convincingly represent them over and over again.
As pointed out on Klein’s podcast, many people who had some of the attributes of power, wealth, and influence common to the Epstein class were introduced to his world and fled in disgust. Many others saw it as a gateway to a kind of belonging to which they could otherwise never aspire. Klein and Giridharadas talk about Kathy Ruemmler—President Obama’s former White House Chief Counsel, and at the time of the podcast recording, Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer—who solicited and received many luxurious gifts from Epstein. The episode must have been recorded on Wednesday, because on Thursday, she resigned. Unsurprisingly, “Goldman’s chief executive, David Solomon, said on Friday that he was surprised and disappointed in Ms. Ruemmler’s decision to resign.” Why let a little thing like a long-term friendship with a degenerate criminal interfere with the career of a Wall Street lawyer?
The far right in this country has been feeding for a long time off stories such as the one that caused “Pizzagate,” that a powerful pedophile ring was running this country, or that it was the “deep state,” generally understood as a secret, untouchable network behind government that wields the real power. In their stories, Democracts and liberals are the masterminds. But it turns out that while the Epstein class doesn’t care about its members’ politics, the preponderance of Republicans correlates easily with the preponderance of wealth.
My hope is that what Giridharadas has said so clearly will open the eyes of people who believed the MAGA propaganda that a vote for Trump was a vote for working people:
“They mean what they say when you’re not looking. And these emails, in sum, are an extraordinary and rare chance to see what they really think about you, how they really move through the world, what their actual ends and projects are. Maya Angelou is right, and people show you who they are, believe them.”
Charenee Wade singing Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Vulture.”