It was odd, for many reasons, to be a journalist in 2016 and 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump. Part of the oddness was that seemingly every story had to include him. If a reporter travelled somewhere to gather material on something apparently unrelated—a natural disaster, a sporting event, a scientific discovery—it felt important to explore whether the people who lived there had voted for Trump, and why. Writing about individuals, one found it crucial to note whether they liked Trump. His rise was connected to so many aspects of modern American life, from reality television and information technology to gender politics and deindustrialization, that weaving it in seemed not just natural but inevitable. We were in Trump’s America, and so to understand Trumpism was to understand the country, and vice versa. That’s an intellectual way of putting it. From another perspective, Trumpism was a mood that infected everything; it still is.
One of the central contentions of Trump’s movement was that the world was run by a corrupt, deviant, and rootless élite, a cabal of cosmopolitan globalists who held themselves out as enlightened but were actually callous, self-interested, and predatory. (Trump positioned himself as an alternative to this group: if the rich weren’t like you and me, he was the exception.) Another Trumpist tenet was that our society had become lawless, its justice system far too lenient. (He promisedrough justice: “Lock her up!”) Yet another was that the technocratic experts were part of a deep state, and weren’t telling the truth. (He knew better.) And then there was a claim about power, which was to be enjoyed and employed nakedly, in place of the nuanced manipulations of norms and bureaucracies.
This wasn’t exactly an unprecedented mix of ideas, and yet, just a year or two earlier, it hadn’t been anywhere close to taking over America. How had it ascended so quickly? I started seeing Trumpism’s arrival through the metaphor of a kaleidoscope. In the ones my kids own, translucent plastic pieces tumble into new designs as the barrel rotates, creating patterns that, after periods of hesitation, click into place. Politics, I came to think, were a kind of dark kaleidoscope. Familiar fears and anxieties shifted until they assumed novel, captivating configurations. Trumpism was such a pattern. It was a grim vision of society that didn’t make sense logically but, for some, held together for reasons of emotion or identity. If there really was a class of unaccountable, libertine global élites plundering the world, then wasn’t Trump obviously a member? You weren’t bothered by such questions if you liked what you saw through the kaleidoscope. For you, Trump was the one spinning the barrel—an observer of the pattern, rather than a part of it.
A kaleidoscope is always shifting, with new patterns coming into focus. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been fascinating and horrifying onlookers for more than a decade; in addition to being an actual set of appalling events that involved real perpetrators and real victims, it’s been a political wild card and a conspiratorial lure. Butit’s only recently—with the release of millions of documents, which anyone can read for themselves—that its pieces have really snapped into place. Trump, for many,is now inside its pattern, along with a lot of other people, organizations, and institutions. A different dark vision of society has emerged. Suddenly, we seem to be living in the age of Epstein. We tell ourselves that by understanding his rise to power we might understand the world.
The Epstein scandal further rearranges many of the kaleidoscopic elements that Trump already rearranged. An evil global cabal, an ineffectual justice system, the exercise of unchecked power by untrustworthy experts—these are familiar themes. But the Epstein story also brings together other elements, many of which have been in the mix for decades.
We might start with the institutional sex scandals of the two-thousands and twenty-tens. It was in 2002 that the BostonGlobe, with its Spotlight investigations,showed thatwidespread sexual abuse had been covered up by the Catholic Church. In 2017, reporting intheTimesandthis magazinehelped break open the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which reflected not only one man’s abuses but a larger predatory power structure within the entertainment industry. In between, we learned about coaches, includingJerry SanduskyandLarry Nassar, who preyed upon their athletes; about admirable figures, such asBill CosbyandJimmy Savile, who abused victims and were protected by de-facto conspiracies of enablers; and about sexual abuse in the militaryof prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and also among service members. For many people, these scandals finally proved the assertions of those feminists, journalists, and researchers who had long argued that sexual abuse, including abuse of young children and teen-agers, was more widespread than was commonly acknowledged. It was especially disturbing to see how the abuses had been carried out within big, respected, and highly visible organizations. It became natural to look at any organization or institution and wonder if it was protecting an abuser—some well-loved man who had it all, and used his power for predation.
Broadly speaking, these scandals were contained within org charts. But, over the same period, there was an increasing awareness of how networks of knowledge and power could cross institutional and even national lines. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement argued that a global overclass was taking advantage of the rest of us: members of the one per cent may have worked for competing governments or financial firms, but at the end of the day they enriched one another, like pro athletes playing in the same league. It wasn’t only progressives who worried that capital and control were flowing into globalized spaces, accessible mainly to the private-jet set. In 2004, the conservative political theorist Samuel Huntingtonexplored the ideaof “Davos men”—“transnationalists” who “view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operation.” Huntington warned that the “growing differences between the leaders of major institutions and the public” weren’t just economic but cultural—he suggested, for example, that members of the global élite tended to be indifferent or even hostile to traditional values, including religion.
These new understandings—both of the powerful and of the diffuse hierarchies within which they operate—are two elements of the Epstein kaleidoscope. Another is a new conception of the public. In the days before social media, public opinion might have been characterized through surveys or “man on the street” reporting, or ventriloquized by leaders who claimed to know what people thought. But the same decades that saw a rethinking of the élite also saw a reinvention of the public as a networked, online entity—a sort ofhive mind. Huntington’s analysis, at the turn of the millennium, had contrasted the élite class with a traditional public that cared about God and country. But the new public was stranger than that. Its hive mind could think out loud, surfacing, organizing, and analyzing vast quantities of information in real time, as in theSteubenville rape casein 2012, or the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in 2014. And yet its thinking was hardly objective. Shaped by for-profit viral and ad-targeting algorithms, it was drawn to ideas that were lurid, divisive, and provocative. It was often—in a word—crazy.
The new public was hyperglossic, with its human subunits constantly typing and posting. Its thoughts explored every possibility: anything that could be said would be said, no matter how horrible or outlandish. And these tendencies collided with an unprecedented growth in accessible data. Increasingly, the hive mind could find pretty much anything it wanted to see in the Earth-size Rorschach blot available for its analysis. End-to-end encryption had been invented, but not widely adopted, and so the powerful often used Gmail and Outlook like the rest of us. Their secret societies weren’t actually that secret. There were endless documents to be WikiLeaked.
As the hive mind sifted through the data, norms began to change, and these shifts raised difficult questions. What should we think about people who had acted badly in the past, but who said they were acting within the norms of that time? What about those who had enabled bad behavior, maybe just by looking the other way? Cancellation was, among other things, a response to the new understanding of power: it recognized that powerful people, despite their differences, found common cause through shared tacit values, and that the maintenance of predatory or unjust values was therefore a malign and damaging exercise of power. And, actually, it wasn’t always so complicated: lots of people had done things that were plainly against the norms of both their time and ours. Before #MeToo, young women who wanted to work in the culture industries were frequently assaulted or harassed, and, if they talked about it, they were dehumanized. Defenders of this behavior suggested that it might have been normal to harass women back then. But maybe it wasn’t—maybe everyone knew it was wrong—in which case the norm that was actually in effect centered on bowing and scraping to powerful people. This was the central norm that needed to be overturned. Commonsense morality had to be reasserted.
Source: Drudge Report
