Guardian | The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign
are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of
people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are
the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks
from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John
Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with
scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal:
they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the
dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are
by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips
to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks
like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such
stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over
TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always
pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern
Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the
architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high
officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to
fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision
droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the
enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never
explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting
through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a
Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable
digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after
all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been
exposed, since WikiLeaks
doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the
issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for
sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from
John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to
confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real,
there is a small possibility they aren’t.
With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases
furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the
American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
