Representation is Theft! is a regular column by Samuel Rosenberg critiquing electoral democracy and advocating for lottery-based sortition as a viable alternative
The extremely little information that has been released in the past few months about the many crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates is already enough to make one wince in utter revulsion. To even begin to report on the alleged and proven crimes that occurred at his private island and elsewhere would be a task above the station of this student magazine. Nevertheless, it is our responsibility as human beings to at least draw attention to such appalling transgressions when they are uncovered so that we may limit the likelihood of them ever being committed again. This is especially true in a society that actively encourages such transgressions, a society built upon the suppression of, not just the common person, but the common woman in particular.
To depict the atrocities committed by Epstein and his associates as anything less than mass femicidal rape would be inaccurate. Their barbarity was organized and executed at a level so unbelievable in scale, meticulousness, and industrialization that it simply cannot be shrugged off as stemming from the perversions of a select few. Such an undertaking must have required extensive compliance from several parties, from Epstein’s own employees to the possibly millions of employees of his associates and those associates’ corporations and governments. United Nations experts have already stated that the horrors committed through Epstein’s network may very well constitute crimes against humanity under international law. The intended target of these crimes against humanity is clear: women.
We cannot be surprised that the notorious hidden coalition, having grown strictly in the confines of patriarchy, would tolerate and even aid in such a monstrous endeavor. A key aspect of electoral “democracy” is that it was originally designed to exclude women. The founding fathers made themselves clear about their stance on women participating in politics; John Adams once wrote that women were unfit for “the arduous care of state” and better suited “to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning from political debate.” In fact, most of humanity’s modern electoral “democracies” operated with very limited female involvement until relatively recently. Although this involvement has grown greatly in the past century, the election’s patriarchal roots simply cannot be ignored. From their inception, the “democratic,” political elite were always meant to be rich, white men, and little more.
The patriarchal nature of elections certainly begets the patriarchal nature of the hidden coalition. Recall that the purpose of the hidden coalition is to limit who benefits from controlling state apparatuses and their monopoly on violence so that the fruits of power remain in the hands of a select few; if those select few are primarily straight white men molded by patriarchy and working to mold it in return, then would that not influence how those fruits of power materialize? Not only would the atrocities committed by Epstein and his associates simply not be logistically possible without the monopoly on state power held by the political elite, but it would also be unthinkable. Who else but a highly limited circle of wealthy, straight white men raised on the belief that they were destined to control the world would even consider organizing a secret sex trafficking operation? Even if the hidden coalition has evolved to include some women as well, its inherent violent misogyny still remains; Ghislaine Maxwell’s gender certainly did not stop her from being an eager cog in Epstein’s barbarous machine.
This origin could certainly explain why the state has been so wary about any potential political fallout from the infamous Epstein Files. Its public release has been widely criticized with the Trump regime being lambasted for taking more precautions about the privacy of the perpetrators than their victims. Of course, any discussion of the public response to the files would not be complete without mentioning the flood of vitriolic antisemitism that has gone viral in response to it; it’s rather suspect that the word “goyim” and the labeling of the political elite as a “satanic synagogue” have spread so widely online in recent months. These popular reactions, artificially engineered or not, all serve to distract from what should be the real takeaway from the Epstein Files: our patriarchal political elite has suppressed and tortured the common person, the common woman in particular, for far too long. It must be undone.
A sortition-based government would expand the breadth of access to state apparatuses by appointing ordinary people to legislatures via random ballot. It would include all people and make the horrors committed by Epstein and his associates infinitely more difficult to even consider, let alone execute. Our hidden coalition exists as the result of a permanent ideological and cultural bottleneck, and the increase in ideological and cultural diversity would expose such cases of profound gender-based violence such as Epstein’s in a sortition-based government. This can be said even before considering the effect of sortition on gender representation; women making up 50.8% of the government in comparison to 32.3% would be a massive improvement in of itself. While sortition would not eliminate patriarchy itself, it would certainly help give the common people some of the tools to do so––those tools mainly being the means to directly implement common-sense policies through state apparatuses, from codifying equal rights laws to strategies to prevent human trafficking, so that another Epstein can never materialize again.
In the meantime, some of the first steps that we can take is making it clear that we will not tolerate those implicated in the Epstein Files to remain in power. We, as Yalies, have already taken action on this step; when it was revealed that professor David Gelernter had a personal correspondence with Epstein in which he sexualized one of his undergraduate students, our collective rebuke of such conduct as a campus helped lead to him being “relieved” of his teaching duties. We must continue to embody that same collective rebuke, not just as Yalies but as fellow citizens of the world. It is imperative to demand that those in power no longer be allowed to wage their campaign of violent misogyny and that those who have directly aided this campaign be removed from their posts. As we build to the eventual destruction of patriarchy and electoral “democracy” as we know it, may the barbarities committed by Epstein and his associates be the first call to action for many a comrade, and may those barbarities eventually be even more unbelievable to our descendants as they are to us today.
