… is the provocative title of a New Republic essay which goes there. It goes to the place where you say that the fault lies with us. Not just them – the Trump voters. Us – the other side.
“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” [John] Adams once wrote to [a] 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... 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.
This is, if you like, the importance of Larry Summers. That Harvard University, of all places, appointed a corrupt greedy licentious reprobate president is a chapter in a story. It is a story about millions and millions of Americans, including our corrupt elites, including even presidents of our greatest universities, failing the test and failing the republic. Don’t forget Stanford’s disgraced corrupt billionaire ex-president! Coast to coast, at our greatest schools, reprehensible self-serving cynics and liars are appointed president, just as Trump is elected and re-elected the country’s president.
As late as 2014, Harvard ignored this letter from an anti-trafficking organization: “[It is] unusual and disheartening . . . to read almost daily press releases distributed by a pedophile [who] feels entitled to identify himself as a ‘Harvard philanthropist.” Who was allowed to identify himself as a Harvard philanthropist.
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At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… 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.
Summers abused those he considered his inferiors – women – and he got his thrill by proxy. We assume.
Everyone [outside the contemporary American elite is] part of an 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.
November 24th, 2025 at 6:43PM
High Modern Authoritarianism has failed.
It’s amusing to see how that reality plays out in the opinion journals. There are people who find abstractions and ideologies useful in Making Sense of the Yuman Condition, and they show off their erudition by deploying pretentious expressions like “permission structure” and filling the pages of The Atlantic and The New Republic, often to the great amusement of Kurt Schlichter’s Militant Normals.
There are others, sometimes with Pajamas Media affiliations or perhaps their substacks, for whom a little bit of lived experience goes a long way toward interpreting that human condition. What are my neighbors fretting about? Should we do without the whipped cream and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving? Can we safely take the kids to the Christmas tree lighting?
That changes what that “abuse and immiserate at their own discretion,” doesn’t it? An establishment can get away with its fixers, to procure stimulants and maybe young girls for ranking members of the club, as well as to get their legacy but dull spawn into the right colleges. Bundle that, though, with a “permission structure” that permits mentally disturbed boys to go out for the girls’ sports, or that permits mentally disturbed repeat offenders to mug or murder passengers on the rapid transit, and that puts Mr Ford’s claims in a different light.
Combine that with the past quarter century of urban expressways that don’t express, with a patient protection and affordable care act that is neither, with futile nation building wars, with corona shutdowns, with money-printing, with schools sending universities matriculants who can’t handle first grade arithmetic, season that with Rachel Maddow going to Dick Cheney’s funeral, and the Return of Trump, all his flaws and failings notwithstanding, is still voters asking for a course correction.