After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: neither the ‘never again’ values, nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities, nor trust.
After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: Neither the post war ‘never again’ values – reflecting sentiment at the end of bloody wars – and the widespread yearning for a ‘fairer’ society; nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities in wealth; nor trust – after the exposed venality, rotted institutions and perversions that the Epstein files have shown to be endemic amongst certain of the western élites......
Loss of respect however, does not go to the core of the impasse. No conventional political party has an answer to the failure of ‘kitchen-table’ economics – the lack of reasonably well-paid jobs, access to medical services, costly education and housing.
No mainstream party can provide a credible answer to these existential issues because, for decades, the economy has exactly been ‘rigged’ — structurally re-oriented towards a debt-based financialised economy, at the expense of the real economy.
It would require the present Anglo liberal market structure to be wholly up-rooted and replaced by another. That would require a decade of reforms – and the oligarchs would fight that outright.
Ideally, new political parties might emerge. In Europe, however, the ‘bridges’ that potentially could take us out from our deep structural contradictions have been deliberately destroyed in the name of the cordon sanitaire designed to prevent any non ‘centrist’ policy thinking from emerging.
If protest has no effect in changing the status quo, and elections remain between the Tweedle Dee and Dum parties of the existing order, the young will conclude that ‘no one will come to save us’ – and they may conclude in their despair that the future can only be decided on the streets.
