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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
The Epstein stuff was salacious because the people involved were well-known and because the plebs love seeing the high and mighty brought low, love gossiping about the rich and famous. The reality is that while what Epstein was doing (paying teenage girls from poor families for sex; pimping put some of those girls to his friends and business associates) was obviously wicked, and while his early-2000s sentence should have been much longer than it was (and served under less generous terms), far worse happens in working class communities across the West every single day without consequence or penalty.
It’s like the ‘Bullingdon Club’, which captured the British public’s imagination in the 2010s. In truth, its members behaved no worse than countless other drinking clubs, sports teams, fraternities, other social groups of regularly drunk young men. But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.
It was uniquely awful, in the sense that we used to have an order in which those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality than a drunk peasant and would be obligated to use their station to set a positive example.
I'm not even an actual reactionary (far from it) but I think this one element tracks with the sense of good and has an excellent pedigree back to the ancients.
What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?
Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.
Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.
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"Held to a higher standard of morality" is spin. What you describe is enabling the well-connected to get their enemies selectively prosecuted for "crimes" that everyone does, and should not be crimes at all.
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