The Epstein files tell stories incredible und unbelievable. All of this, taken together, seems to make up a paranoid conspiracy story. But in reality, this story is true. As a result, an entire system is being called into question.
“‘Sex scandal’? What are you telling us now? This is a war against children,” writes Alexandra Zykunov (“Ein »Sex-Skandal«? Das ist Krieg gegen Kinder”, Der Spiegel, 12.2.2026). This in itself is like poison in the veins of the political and legal system, the democratic one, built with a lot of effort, blood, sweat and tears, with two and a half centuries of struggle, to limit the unfettered power of the big and powerful over the small and weak. As children are par excellence.
The poison is particularly toxic for democracy, because many kinds of “ingredients”, supposedly foreign to each other, have contributed to its composition. Its lethality is due to the very nature and multifacetedness of this network of powerful men with the central node in the USA. The network is densely interwoven: A strong warp of the so-called elites is tightly embraced by the harshest and most flamboyant weft of hard nationalist-populists.
“‘Sex scandal’? What are you telling us now? This is a war against children,” writes Alexandra Zykunov (“Ein »Sex-Skandal«? Das ist Krieg gegen Kinder”, Der Spiegel, 12.2.2026). This in itself is like poison in the veins of the political and legal system, the democratic one, built with a lot of effort, blood, sweat and tears, with two and a half centuries of struggle, to limit the unfettered power of the big and powerful over the small and weak. As children are par excellence.
The poison is particularly toxic for democracy, because many kinds of “ingredients”, supposedly foreign to each other, have contributed to its composition. Its lethality is due to the very nature and multifacetedness of this network of powerful men with the central node in the USA. The network is densely interwoven: A strong warp of the so-called elites is tightly embraced by the harshest and most flamboyant weft of hard nationalist-populists.
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| Manhattan, 2011, at Epstein's mansion: From left: James E. Staley, then a senior executive at JPMorgan, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Mr. Epstein, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft nd Boris Nikolic, who was a science advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - © New York Times, "Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past," 10/18/2021 |
What should democratic politics now say to the people, in order to regain its lost honor and credibility? If it is still legitimate to use the terms civic virtues and virtuous citizen, what does virtuous democratic politics mean in the first quarter of the 21st Century?
The liberal democratic state is not entitled to impose on its citizens, by political or administrative means, social values, ways of life and mental, communicative or moral capacities of a specific quality, for example, to be intelligent, fair, responsible, compassionate. If it does so, it runs the immediate risk of ceasing to be democratic. The paradox (or dictum) of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, slightly paraphrased, that “the liberal democratic state feeds and lives on conditions that it itself cannot guarantee” has a strong warning value. It says that the deepest foundations and the strongest strongholds of democracy with guaranteed freedoms and rights, when they exist, exist in what a living society and public sphere can create; the “administrative and “procedural” democracy of the directly political level borrows democratic political power and makes use of it. It is not this itself that produces it.
However, this does not mean that this state is legitimized, through its own actions and omissions, to allow values and abilities of a destructive quality to be imposed with extra-institutional tools (e.g. economic or technological power) and to dominate unhindered and unilaterally on the social scene. Because then, what is capable of nourishing democracy by ensuring its life, can turn into poison. Even worse, if, at the same time, this same state allows itself to be and to negate itself as a state of law, when the crime does not attract a fair punishment because the perpetrators are famous and powerful, the victims are unknown and weak, the money is too much, the party confrontation is too little in terms of content.
Here we are now. Indeed, in “times of disruption”, at a turning point towards a “change of era”. To understand anti-systemism in US and European societies, references to “economic hardship and existential insecurity”, to the degradation of the middle class, to “democratic fatigue”, etc. are not enough. Our peculiarly Greek self-examination of “right”, “left”, “centrist”, “center-left” (!) etc. versions of anti-systemism, but with almost radio silence in domestic publicity about the hot spot of anti-systemism, the US, confirms what we knew: In Greece, we are used to distilling the same gnat over and over again and we are capable of swallowing an entire caravan of camels whole.
Along with many others that have been developing for several years, the Epstein network also shows, to the extent that it is relevant, what the real, influential anti-systemism of our time is and wants: It is an attack from above on the hard-won democratic and social barriers that limit the power of the big and powerful over the small and weak.
It is an open challenge to the democratic political and legal system. It is not “conservative” but disruptive, as the would-be disruptors themselves say. The slogan that suits it is reminiscent of another subversive slogan, a hundred or so years old: “All power in the hands of the powerful.”
Real democrats and living democratic institutions, mainly in the US, but also in several European countries, and perhaps in other democratic countries of the world, must untie a Gordian knot more difficult than the original one, the Phrygian. In times without King Alexander.
The liberal democratic state is not entitled to impose on its citizens, by political or administrative means, social values, ways of life and mental, communicative or moral capacities of a specific quality, for example, to be intelligent, fair, responsible, compassionate. If it does so, it runs the immediate risk of ceasing to be democratic. The paradox (or dictum) of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, slightly paraphrased, that “the liberal democratic state feeds and lives on conditions that it itself cannot guarantee” has a strong warning value. It says that the deepest foundations and the strongest strongholds of democracy with guaranteed freedoms and rights, when they exist, exist in what a living society and public sphere can create; the “administrative and “procedural” democracy of the directly political level borrows democratic political power and makes use of it. It is not this itself that produces it.
However, this does not mean that this state is legitimized, through its own actions and omissions, to allow values and abilities of a destructive quality to be imposed with extra-institutional tools (e.g. economic or technological power) and to dominate unhindered and unilaterally on the social scene. Because then, what is capable of nourishing democracy by ensuring its life, can turn into poison. Even worse, if, at the same time, this same state allows itself to be and to negate itself as a state of law, when the crime does not attract a fair punishment because the perpetrators are famous and powerful, the victims are unknown and weak, the money is too much, the party confrontation is too little in terms of content.
Here we are now. Indeed, in “times of disruption”, at a turning point towards a “change of era”. To understand anti-systemism in US and European societies, references to “economic hardship and existential insecurity”, to the degradation of the middle class, to “democratic fatigue”, etc. are not enough. Our peculiarly Greek self-examination of “right”, “left”, “centrist”, “center-left” (!) etc. versions of anti-systemism, but with almost radio silence in domestic publicity about the hot spot of anti-systemism, the US, confirms what we knew: In Greece, we are used to distilling the same gnat over and over again and we are capable of swallowing an entire caravan of camels whole.
Along with many others that have been developing for several years, the Epstein network also shows, to the extent that it is relevant, what the real, influential anti-systemism of our time is and wants: It is an attack from above on the hard-won democratic and social barriers that limit the power of the big and powerful over the small and weak.
It is an open challenge to the democratic political and legal system. It is not “conservative” but disruptive, as the would-be disruptors themselves say. The slogan that suits it is reminiscent of another subversive slogan, a hundred or so years old: “All power in the hands of the powerful.”
Real democrats and living democratic institutions, mainly in the US, but also in several European countries, and perhaps in other democratic countries of the world, must untie a Gordian knot more difficult than the original one, the Phrygian. In times without King Alexander.
Heinrich Böll Foundation (affiliated with the German political party Alliance 90/The Greens): Festschrift for awarding of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought 2004 to Böckenförde
Tobias Rapp: Epstein und die Folgen - Gründlicher kann das Vertrauen in die Demokratie nicht untergraben werden, editorial in Der Spiegel magazine, 12.2.2026, also archived here
Alexandra Zykunov: Ein »Sex-Skandal«? Das ist Krieg gegen Kinder, Der Spiegel, 12.2.2026, also archived here
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