Sometimes Bad Guys Are Just Bad Guys

I got a nice note from my old buddy Bill last week - hi Bill! - and I think his influence was in the background as I read something Saturday morning.

Matt Stoller published a piece about how Larry Summers - among other things former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, and former President of Harvard - has been prominently caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

So Bill is a political scientist and is big into theory and has written a bunch of books and his big thing is applying Hegelian dialectics. And I know that for many readers you don’t know what to do with that sentence and so here’s where I get to butcher it all, because I myself was not super well read in the likes of Hegel or Kant, but I did read a lot of other stuff and so I synthesize it all a bit differently. In short though, let’s think of “dialectic” as referring to a “unified” set of “political” beliefs which is in opposition to a different “unified” set of “political” beliefs. This can be horrifically oversimplified into “right” versus “left”, but the thing is that the “poles” of political thought tend to change over time, and sometimes there’s an issue, event, or overall circumstance which leads to a dramatic realignment. The best example here might be slavery and how it took the U.S. Civil War to “resolve” the matter.

For a long time I have outright rejected the oversimplification of “liberal” and “conservative” in American political discourse and have insisted that generally speaking the Democratic and Republican Parties have tended to agree on more than they’ve tended to disagree on. Matt Stoller would agree with me here, in particular on the broad issue of monopoly / economic consolidation / corporatism / etc. Every administration from Carter forward has moved increasingly toward Robert Bork’s vision. Even people like Ralph Nader in the 1970s tended to favor big business over small business, albeit not all for the same reasons.

Larry Summers has been one of the most important thinkers along those lines. He was perhaps the main architect of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which had strictly separated commercial and investment banks. Along similar lines, during the Clinton years, consolidation accelerated, especially in the defense and media sectors. America increasingly moved away from being a nation that builds things to what people usually think of a “service economy” but which is frankly one driven primarily by financialization. The people who make the most money not only don’t make anything, they don’t even provide services, they just do things like buy out rural hospitals, sell the land to a holding company, and force the hospital to pay rent, and squeeze it for every cent they can. And nobody has been more important than Larry Summers at being the very smart and convincing person explaining why this makes for solid economics. And, let’s be honest, it’s worked remarkably well, from the perspective of the stock market, and especially the financial sector. But how well has it worked for most people?

I mentioned above that I’ve synthesized things a little differently. A very important, albeit difficult to read, recent book is Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap, which is largely about how the idea of “merit” has gone wildly out of control and is causing narrow thinking among policy elites. A very different but influential book for me is Anders Stephanson’s Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, which among other things argues that George Kennan, the man who articulated the policy of containment early in the Civil War, was largely guided by his experiences as a diplomat in the interwar Soviet Union, and his feelings that the Soviets were humorless killjoys. To put it a much, much cruder way, one way of understanding how policy comes together is that often it’s driven by men thinking with their dicks. Which, hey, leads us back to the Epstein scandal writ large.

Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and a lot of the political and corporate elite, may not all share the same opinions about everything, but they all seem to believe that by virtue of their standing that they deserve things, that systems should not block their access to things, that they have earned their standing, that they are entitled to what they want, even that it is virtuous that they want. Jeffrey Epstein, from my perspective, was a man of no scruples, who was very happy to feed the hubris of such men, and whoever got hurt along the way was of no real consequence to him… or to them. And all of this can be understood as central to a set of “political” beliefs which stand in opposition to beliefs which I’ll summarize as: every single person matters.

It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, because Trump and Clinton are not the same men, but on the balance, they’re overwhelmingly on the same side of things in terms of relevant policies. But because of the successful framing of Clinton as a crazy liberal - framing which actually served Clinton’s policy agenda quite well - the political discourse in America has been way off for decades. And what I give Matt Stoller a lot of credit for is that he’s been able to articulate anti-monopolization as being about more than just “economic policy”. And I’m taking some of that thought a step further and arguing that there is necessarily a close connection between the idea that the stock market must constantly go up and the deep misogyny of so many of these men… and, I am chagrined to report, a lot of women who have fought valiantly to be taken seriously by these misogynist systems, but who have nevertheless embraced all of those other corporatist, elitist strains of thought, and who, like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, still couldn’t fully break through anyway.

For me and a lot of people I know what I’m saying here is just a long-winded fine-tuning of what we’ve believed all along, that we’re in a highly corrupt late-stage capitalism and that the Democrats are broadly complicit even if they’re not outright fascists like the Republicans. I understand all of this, and yet I wrote this thing anyway, because I actually think it’s just a little bit more than a fine tuning.

I actually think that the rot of American elitist culture is what we all need to attack politically, and whether it’s the elitism of nepo babies like Donald Trump, or the elitism of pull-themselves-out-of-poverty-through-their-brilliance types like Bill Clinton or, uh, JD Vance (here you can pause for a moment and laugh)… if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, and all of these elitisms are just different forms of high quackery. Well, except, of course, that some of these ducks also hitched a ride on the Lolita Express.

These people, no matter how brilliant they might be, are intellectually bankupt at this point, and this is why they have been so afraid of Zohran Mamdani and why you can be damn sure they’ll do everything they can to try and keep him from succeeding, and they’ll be helped every step of the way by the execrable New York Times, which engages in its own very special kind of elitism (though how special really, when Larry Summers is one of their contributing writers? and don’t think for a second that them “not renewing his contract” makes any difference at all.)

See, I don’t simply want Larry Summers or anyone else to be taken down because of their association with Jeffrey Epstein. I want their politics to be taken down, because the thinking that underscores their policies is inextricably connecte with the thinking that underscores such an association. It’s not that Summers is somehow now exposed as being a bad guy; it’s that he was a bad guy along, whose worldview is one of outright exploitation and not merely excusing but in fact insisting that it is good that the rich get super rich. This indeed is how we should understand what the collective fallout of the Epstein scandal ought to be. It’s not just prominent people who should be taken down. We must collectively reject the efficacy of their worldview.

Or as my buddy Bill once put it, we need a new dialectic.