Edward Said v. Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how Larry Summers—the Democratic Party’s Henry Kissinger of economic policy—embodied everything that was wrong with Washington. He represented one way of performing the role of the public intellectual—an elite, harm-proliferating, self-dealing way—and it was in every meaningful sense the opposite of what Edward Said had counseled.

That little essay has renewed salience in light of Larry Summers’s ridiculous e-mail exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein, newly exposed as part of emails released by Democrats sitting on the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee. Coming only days after DropSite News’s reporting about leaked Epstein emails implicating many Democratic national security officials (which I wrote about here), the new Summers-Epstein email is part of a release that deeply incriminates Trump himself.

At this point, one of two things is going to happen as a result of these Epstein leaks. Either bipartisan elites will collectively exonerate each other from all of this because they’re all complicit in horrific levels of corruption and/or sex crimes…or MAGA and the media will turn on Trump and Trump will bring down with him many of your favorite national security Democrats (who are also implicated).

Elite impunity is the likelier outcome if we’re to judge by history, but I’m not immediately concerned about that. I’m concerned with the scumbag character that Larry Summers displays because Washington is filled with Larry Summers types. Read this:

A hall-of-fame piece of shit. Now read my post from last year about why I repudiate the Larry Summers way of being an intellectual:

---

Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. For less than $2 per week, you can keep its critical analysis going.

---

Public Versus Elite Intellectualism

The ways I think about how power and the world works have changed over the past decade. A key text in seeing differently was Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual. It’s a trim little volume—originally a series of lectures for the BBC.

My discovery of Said, and specifically Representations, came at a pivotal period.

When I first started building a public profile on foreign policy, it was as a “defense intellectual,” speaking from a perch among the elites of the national security state. I was reliably cautious in my opinions—an anti-hawk, mostly—but my credibility as a public voice came primarily from my government service in the Obama administration and my association with a high-profile think tank. It didn’t hurt that I was a military veteran.

Because of what surrounded me in Washington, my understanding of what a public intellectual should be had an inside and an outside role. Inside, you were supposed to want to be a government consultant operating behind closed doors. It pays, in all the ways. Outside, you were expected to be an explainer that tried to bring the public along on government policies.

The idea was that you should do the best analysis possible—but without any real self-consciousness about having a worldview…which means not the best analysis possible—while triangulating among your career opportunities, your social networks, and what would most help policymakers do their jobs. We used our credibility to legitimate the policies of the national security state—the going concern. Did we see it that way? No, we couldn’t see that clearly because we tended to be similar in breeding (and thought).

The art of succeeding in Washington is quite literally about associating yourself with the ideas held by the well-connected and influential. And while that art may look like a grift to some, you sleep well at night if you earnestly hold the ideas you peddle.

Of course, the fact that you sleep well at night while operating this way is a major reason for so much tragedy in the world. And there’s no better avatar for what I’m describing than Larry Summers.

Summers was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, and subsequently president of Harvard. He uses every ounce of clout he has to serve ruling-class interests at the expense of others. I’m sure there are people like him in every industry, but only in government and politics does such a person self-aggrandize by trading against the common good.

In 1991, Summers wrote a memo arguing that “underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted” and should therefore be the site of more dumping of toxic waste. You think I’m kidding!

This is the real life version of Terry Silver’s rant from Karate Kid III.

Larry Summers was also part of Jeffrey Epstein’s in-crowd, traveling with and soliciting money from the convicted pedophile and human trafficker:

And in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, Obama’s recovery package for the economy was a fraction of what it needed to be ($780 billion vice $1.7 trillion) not because of mysterious “politics,” but because Summers specifically intervened to advise Democrats to keep the fiscal intervention much smaller than what internal estimates suggested:

That decision, of course, led to an anemic economic recovery. I personally knew people who lost their homes in the crisis and were never helped. I personally knew people who lost their jobs, at least one of whom never recovered. Doing less than circumstances demanded heightened the dissatisfaction in the American heartland bubbling during the Obama years…and that cannot be separated from Trump coming to power in 2016.

There’s more I could say, both about Summers and people like him. But if you didn’t have an image of what a ruling-class intellectual looks like, well now you do. He exists to enrich himself at our expense, but he feels good about it (presumably) because he’s internalized what otherwise just looks incredibly cynical. He represents a milieu that sees aligning their preferences with the Galactic Empire as not just totally normal but as the only path to success.

Contra Larry Summers, the way I think about all this now is that power ought to be criticized, challenged to be more accountable, even if that means standing on your own sometimes. As Edward Said counseled, critically minded public intellectuals:

are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.

Living up to that standard means not just accepting the role of an outsider, but being an insider with the people at whose expense rulers rule.

Power is, of course, a professional aphrodisiac. Larry Summers knows this all too well. In one fascinating anecdote from Yanis Varoufakis’s door-stop of a memoir, he recounted Summers trying to school him up on the ways of Washington:

“There are two kinds of politicians.” he said: “insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.” With that Summers arrived at his question. “So, Yanis,” he said, “which of the two are you?”

It’s hard to convey in prose what it feels like to know the sacrosanct rule of which Summers spoke—to be on the inside and play by insiders’ rules—yet go the other way. Yanis did. I did too, and have tried to write about it a couple times. But succumbing to the allure of power corrodes democracy and the tradeoff between insider and outsider is not as he presents it. Nothing is quite as Summers presents it.

Many people in Washington would kill to have Larry Summers’s career. Fuck them God bless. But what about those of us who insist on another way? How do we know if we’re on the Summers track?

Simple: If you’re not pissing off people with power, then you might be working for them. You have to be willing to draw the ire of gatekeepers of various sorts. In a way, it’s a metric of success.

If they’re attracted to what you’re selling, check in with yourself about why. I mean, maybe the White House was looking to change some things and thought you were the smart one who said what needed to be done in just the right way. But that’s not how this stuff usually works.

Incidentally, I was recently going through a stack of free books at my university and found a classic pamphlet-book by Audrey Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. I’m ashamed to say that, while I’ve always known its titular phrase, and have found myself contemplating its applicability to my own work from time to time, I had never read the actual essay itself. In hindsight that’s ridiculous, because it’s very short and accessible, and somewhat profound.

In her essay, Lorde says:

survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

That’s it. That’s what we—“we” being anyone who raises their voice in the public sphere—should be doing. Defining and seeking a world in which we can all flourish. And finding people who share in that purpose.

---

Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. For less than $2 per week, you can keep its critical analysis going.

---