Left-wing and right-wing populists agree that the apparently unbroken list of American failures over the last few decades are the fault of a self-serving and corrupt elite class that needs to be overthrown. To them, Jeffrey Epstein is the very personification of this class. Hence the need to make the entire record public.
The Epstein emails apparently show lots of trivial and bipartisan efforts at networking, which is hardly surprising; building and maintaining connections has been a staple of cultural and political systems since the ancient Sumerians. It doesn’t account for the supposed elite failures. But is the record really that bad? Is America really the failure that the populists say it is? I will be addressing that issue in a series of posts over the next week.