A Republic if you can keep it

For perspective's sake, authors Mark Penn and Andrew Stein are relics from NYC's endless tribal wars. Stein is an adjudicated tax evader and Penn helped run Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign into the ground. Caveat emptor.

Matt Ford's essay " The American People Voted for Jeffrey Epstein: The emerging mosaic of elite scandal tells an unflattering story of how far we've allowed our republic to stray from its founding ideals" (newrepublic.com) has some serious thinking fueling it, especially with respect to the "elites" with whom Epstein associated and MAGA.

It would be tempting to dismiss the Epstein scandals as a purely elite phenomenon. But this is the society for which the American people have voted. The 2016 election could once be dismissed as a constitutional fluke since most Americans voted for Trump's opponent. The 2024 election is more definitional. This country had nearly a decade of experience with Trump in power"the corruption, the lies, the bigotry and misogyny and abuse and violence"and welcomed more of it.

At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority. It defies checks and balances, rejecting the notion that power can be abused or corrupted because it justifies itself. Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall"it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

This is why the second Trump administration is populated with such ghoulish figures.

This carries over for Ford into the idea undergirding the creation of the American experiment with a republican form of government.

In Trump's America, all of us are not created equal. There is a hierarchy atop which the Lutnicks and Kennedys and Thiels and Musks of the world can prosper, free from government regulation or union negotiations or press scrutiny or law enforcement investigations. Everyone else is part of a underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity"at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain"and where amorality is required to participate.

The Founders were not without their own sins, of course, but at least they had higher aspirations for their new nation. "Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net," Adams once wrote to another friend. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral ... people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." So far, Americans are failing that test"and the republic itself.

"By simultaneously waging war on American higher education and the federal government's research-funding infrastructure, Trump and his allies apparently hope to de-educate millions of Americans and force them into menial, low-wage industrial jobs," writes Matt Ford.

"The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones"that kind of thing is going to come to America," Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick bragged to CNBC in April. Americans, he argued, are now destined for a form of industrial serfdom. "This is the new model, where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here," he later rejoiced in an interview in May ... .

Trump's America, all of us are not created equal. There is a hierarchy atop which the Lutnicks and Kennedys and Thiels and Musks of the world can prosper, free from government regulation or union negotiations or press scrutiny or law enforcement investigations. Everyone else is part of a underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity"at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain"and where amorality is required to participate.
newrepublic.com