What The Epstein Boomerang Tells Us About The Democratic Party Right Now

Blood is on their minds

Bill and Hillary Clinton refused to respond to a US House committee subpoena this week, prompting nine Democrats to join their Republican colleagues and hold the power couple in contempt of Congress. It took less than a week for the Jeffrey Epstein ‘files’ to boomerang on the enemies of Donald Trump last November, and now the boomerang has struck the Clintons.

Thanks to the precedent set by the imprisonment of Steve Bannon, a friend of Epstein who has fanned the flames of conspiracy theory, it is even possible that the former president and first lady will face actual consequences for their refusal to appear.

Regardless of what one thinks about these two individuals, it is entirely predictable that Democrats would begin a witch hunt for evidence to use against Donald Trump, but end up sacrificing two of their own party leaders in the process. Revolutions eat their own, and both Clintons have aged into embarrassments for the party, while it was always clear that Trump had cut off Epstein by 2005.

Still, the many years of built-up public anxiety about Epstein and his jet and his island were bound to destroy someone, eventually. Purgation, a public sacrifice of someone powerful to balance the perceived cosmic scales of justice, has always loomed in the minds of everyone who takes an interest in the Epstein scandal.

Bill Gates and Prince Andrew have paid a price, but not in prison. Only Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend and inheritor of her father’s international espionage ring, has done any time behind bars. The public hunger for punishment, what we might term the Epstein sanction, remains unsatisfied. Scapegoats are the all too human tendency in these situations.

But a less obvious factor in the bipartisanship of the contempt vote is the current state of the Democratic Party. Hillary represents the original point of failure that made Trump president the first time, while Bill represents the past failures of moderate centrism that the new Democratic Party wants to repudiate.

Young voters do not think much of the Clintons, or about them, or think very much of their kind of Democratic Party. Older Democratic voters — the ones who watch MSNOW and turn out for protests — are entirely oppositional to Trump, and willing to set everything on fire to destroy him, including the Clintons. Their memories of the 1990s are not sweet enough to treasure, it seems.

More to the point, right now Democrats desperately want a precedent for putting former presidents in prison. They are the party of Jay Jones, the Virginia Democrat who fantasized about killing a Republican legislator and his children. Punishing Trump is their dream. They talk openly of punishing everyone who works for his administration. They mean what they say. They are showing us the level of their dedication to this cause.