Opinion ‘Epstein class’ cuts deep on both sides of political divide in America
If there's one thing the redacted documents have revealed it is this: That when consequences are rare and reputations endlessly salvageable, abuse finds cover
The idea of an “Epstein class” ultimately matters not as a taxonomy of villains but as a demand for accountability across party lines. 
Wealthy, powerful men exploiting the powerless with impunity is not a new phenomenon. But the sordid photographs and correspondence released by the US Justice Department on Friday underline an uncomfortable truth for American politics and intellectual life: Exploitation of vulnerable women may not be confined to one party or ideology; it is a recurring feature of elite social networks that close ranks and make possible the rehabilitation of men such as Jeffrey Epstein, financier, power broker, underage sex trafficker. This is what happened after his 2008 plea deal, up until his eventual arrest, incarceration and suicide in 2019. The latest tranche of the disclosures has shifted the story towards what California Democrat Ro Khanna has termed the “Epstein class” — the ecosystem that protected his transgressions till it couldn’t.
For the so-called liberal-progressive elites, the “Epstein class” poses an especially uncomfortable question. The recurring appearance of figures such as former US president Bill Clinton, intellectual Noam Chomsky, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Harvard president and treasury secretary Larry Summers in the documents poses a challenge to claims of moral seriousness and weakens the reflex to treat these disclosures primarily as ammunition against political opponents. These are intellectual and political giants whose careers have been built, in part, on analysing power; who straddle government, business, academia and philanthropy and who pride themselves on liberal values. The “Epstein class” is corrosive precisely because of the diversity of its composition. The indictment is not partisan, and for progressives who claim the language of justice, it cuts deep. It exposes a blind spot: A tendency to critique systems in abstraction while granting individuals within one’s own milieu the benefit of endless contextualisation.
The idea of an “Epstein class” ultimately matters not as a taxonomy of villains but as a demand for accountability across party lines. If there’s one thing the redacted documents have revealed, it is this: When consequences are rare and reputations endlessly salvageable, abuse finds cover. This has consequences for victims, whose experience of exploitation ought to be at the centre of any moral accounting. Otherwise, it is performance, not justice.
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