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One of hundreds of photos of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein |
If I despise one product of contemporary journalism most, it’s the “think piece” written by editorialists trying to keep neutral. In order to make meaning from ongoing events, like the Jeffrey Epstein “files” controversy, they want to appear cool, dispassionate, above the fray. Six years after Epstein’s spurious death in custody, the Trump administration refuses to release the files which Trump’s voters absolutely know exists. The first factional rifts have opened in Trump’s electoral base.
Too many “think pieces” have promised to explain to us outside Trump’s base why the Epstein files have proved capable of dividing the faithful. But I’m reminded of Duncan J. Watts, who observed that explanations must first explain things. Especially when dealing with unique or unexpected conditions, commentators fail to explain, and simply describe. I keep seeing journalists describing the controversy, the participants, the unanswered questions, but failing to explain anything, lest they appear partisan.
Explaining these events means first understanding the participants, especially the base. I grew up in a deep-red household, and internalized longstanding conservative beliefs. Let’s start with the core conservative economic principle: that hard work, honesty, and dedication lead to financial reward. Whether that means working hard as an entrepreneur to cultivate your business, or working hard as an employee to advance your boss’s goals, self-sacrificing labor is the only key to economic freedom and self-reliance.
Of course, if hard work were enough, then farmers would be America’s richest laborers. In Aristotelean terms, hard work is necessary—if you sit on your hands, you certainly won’t flourish—but it isn’t sufficient. Generations of conservative Americans got their first jobs and realized they saw no reward, no matter how hard they worked. When this happened, I changed my prior beliefs. Other conservatives refused to change, insisting that the world must be wrong.
Growing up Republican, so much political discourse I observed reduced to one underlying question: who’s stopping me from getting rich? If core beliefs can’t be wrong, then their failure to bear fruit must come from someone causing that failure. Immigrants undercut wage values, queer people change the social fabric, welfare recipients separate survival from work, Jewish bankers distort the value of money, or whatever. My poverty proves someone else’s culpability, failure is always externally caused.
Sexual perversion provides a useful metaphor to understand this external blame. From the medieval blood libel, to the Satanic Panic, to QAnon, “they” identify the people destroying our society by their sexual abuse of children. Jeffrey Epstein gives us something these prior blame points didn’t, because Epstein’s sexual abuse of children happened. We have named victims, sworn testimony from reliable adults, and a lawful chain of evidence, something almost no prior child sex scandal had.
But something else is also happening with Epstein. Conservative scaremongers have settled on a list that includes people whom progressives regularly hold responsible for society’s ills. Epstein’s list, if it exists, includes billionaires, financiers, hedge fund operators, landlords, and others who make their living off other people’s work. Conservatives seeking someone to blame usually land on small, powerless outgroups. This time, they’ve turned their ire on a cadre of powerful people who actually cause harm.
No wonder Trump’s administration submarined the investigation, despite having campaigned on it. The groups previously blamed for conservatives’ failure to flourish, including immigrants, Jews, and “welfare mothers,” were too poor and marginal to fight back, and it served powerful people’s interests to let the out-groups fight. For the first time in meaningful numbers, conservatives are tuning their attention to a list that includes lawmakers, landlords, and others. The powerful find themselves forced to close ranks.
I doubt whether the “Epstein files” really exist. When conservatives decided that somebody must be culpable for their poverty, they assumed that documents and paper trails must exist. Conspiracy nuts like Dan Bongino and Alex Jones reassured audiences that evidence surely, definitely existed, and would surface any minute now. Pam Bondi’s famous “It’s on my desk” claim was probably a utilitarian lie, like “the check is in the mail,” to defer consequences onto the future.
Trump’s True Believers ginned themselves to believe this list existed, and would provide the vindication they’ve spent their adult lives seeking. Then the administration committed a rug-pull. Whether officials were lying then, or are lying now, hardly matters. What matters is that, for the first time within my lifetime, conservatives have more than circumstantial evidence and innuendo of who, exactly, is keeping them poor. And for the first time, their outrage may hasten some consequences.