Has the Epstein Class Always Been This Bad?

child labourers, Pennsylvania, 1910, photo by Lewis Hine in the National Archives A couple of people have asked me, after I’d written several times about what I call the “Patriciate” and what many call the “Epstein Class” or simply the “Elite” (among other conspiratorial-sounding names): Do you think this is a new phenomenon, or has this Class always existed and been this awful, vindictive, destructive, oblivious, unrestrained, unpunished, and paranoid? Or, thanks to the proclivities of the mass media, were we just never told this was going on? I guess I should start by defining what I mean by The Epstein Class (aka the Patriciate). Here’s a modified version of AI’s current consensus definition: A stratum of extremely wealthy, powerful, and well-connected people who substantially operate above the law, protected by their status, money, institutions, and networks, and whose insulation from those outside their stratum makes them incapable of relating to most people and hence corrupt and…