Scandal has exposed inner workings of Washington

For generations, US people have been made to believe that their politics, though raucous, rests on two reassuring pillars: checks and balances, and fair elections. However, what continues to be exposed by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is not merely a disturbingly sordid network of elite misconduct, but the way partisan politics in the United States metabolizes scandal — not as a spur to accountability, but as an opportunity for taking tactical advantage.

The steady drip of Epstein-related disclosures, reported by mainstream US media outlets, was supposed to exemplify "political transparency". Instead, it has illustrated transparency's modern deformation: selective release and strategic outrage, and partisan triangulation. Files are demanded, then weaponized; redactions are condemned, then quietly tolerated when inconvenient. Each party accuses the other of concealment, while insisting that its own demands are motivated purely by principle.

The result is a familiar Washington ritual. Scandal as spectacle.

The contrast with Europe has been telling. As The Associated Press and Reuters have reported, Epstein's associations have produced resignations and formal investigations in some European countries with a swiftness absent in the US. That disparity suggests a political culture in the US in which elite insulation is reinforced by institutional impotence, legal complicity and partisan stalemate.

Both parties insist they favor full disclosure. Yet their behavior suggests a narrower objective: disclosure that damages opponents without endangering important supporters. The Epstein scandal has thus illuminated a deeper truth: politics in the US has increasingly become a competition among elite networks, each committed less to the public good than to the preservation of its own circle.

That realization has consequences. Polls cited by the Washington Post show a public that assumes information is being withheld. This skepticism is not pathological. It is learned behavior. Citizens have watched investigations stall, reports arrive incomplete and moral indignation evaporate once partisan utility is exhausted. They have concluded — not without cause — that the rhetoric of accountability is a substitute for its practice.

What, then, would be needed to restore the system's vitality? Not another vow of transparency, but structural changes: Disclosures tied to major public scandals governed by clear, automatic rules rather than discretionary release. When transparency depends on political will, it will always bend toward political convenience. What is required is supervisory institutions that function as they were meant to. Oversight loses credibility when it is episodic and asymmetrical. Genuine checks and balances require that exposure sometimes implicates allies, donors or former colleagues. The public is not excused from this. Demanding accountability with prejudice — demanding it of some while exempting others — means receiving it from none.

The Epstein scandal has not only stripped away comforting illusions about how power operates in the country but also exposed the rot that runs throughout the body politic of "US democracy". That will not be eliminated by moralistic rhetoric about democracy's virtues. Only by visible, repetitive proof that rules apply upward as well as downward. And by institutions behaving as they were designed to do. Even when doing so means confronting an inconvenient truth.

Unless that happens, checks and balances will become nothing more than a footnote in US history, and it will simply be the largest checks that say what is right and what is wrong.