Brutal but true:

Hannah Arendt wrote that if the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life after 1918 was death, then after 1945 it was evil. Today, the fundamental problem is complicity: reckoning with our acquiescence to a political system that suddenly appears criminal. These shocks all expose something rotten beneath the surface of liberal respectability: how elites participate in atrocity while maintaining prestige; how institutions supposed to safeguard justice in fact protect the powerful and exploit the vulnerable; how mass consent is secured through careful distribution of access and silence. The names in those Epstein files – political leaders, corporate titans, academics and cultural impresarios – are disturbing because their continued authority and uninterrupted careers make undeniable what we have known but perhaps refused to fully concede: that the moral vocabulary of the US-led liberal international order became a cover for domination and kleptocracy.

The Epstein outrage and Trump’s demolition of American prestige have alike led the collapse of enforced silence. Mark Carney’s admission at Davos that the US-led order had passed was applauded by the very Atlanticist elites who championed it for decades. Trump’s obscenity has made the system impossible to defend with the usual pieties. That these same commentators were unmoved by Biden’s sponsorship of genocide shows what actually troubles them: not the order’s concealed violence, but the loss of its dignified facade. It is now a scramble to salvage reputations amid general collapse.