The spectacle of a former US attorney general squirming under questioning about the Jeffrey Epstein files is a tableau that would not have been out of place in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is a moment of profound historical irony: the nation that once lectured the world on justice and transparency now finds itself on the defensive, its legal elite caught in a web of obfuscation and half-truths. The United Kingdom, ever the moralising bystander, demands ‘transparency in global justice’. How quaint. As if Whitehall itself has not hosted its share of aristocratic perverts and establishment cover-ups.
Let us be clear. This is not about justice. It is about the crumbling facade of Anglo-American moral authority. The Epstein case is a modern echo of the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal that exposed the rotten core of the French Third Republic’s pretensions to Enlightenment values. Today, the Epstein files serve a similar function: they reveal the decadence of a transatlantic elite that has spent decades trading in secrets, blackmail, and complicity. The US attorney general, whatever his name, is merely the latest in a long line of functionaries forced to perform the ritual of accountability while the real power brokers remain cloaked in immunity.
Why does the UK demand transparency? Because it can. Because the decline of American hegemony has created a vacuum for moral posturing. London, with its own sordid history of Establishment complicity in the Savile scandal and the ‘aristocratic abuse network’, now poses as a champion of openness. This is not hypocrisy; it is the natural behaviour of a declining empire that seeks to distract from its own decay by pointing fingers at another. The Romans did the same when Constantinople hectored Ravenna about administrative corruption.
The Epstein files are a mirror. They reflect a global elite that has abandoned any pretence of public service in favour of a transactional approach to power. The ‘transparency’ demanded by the UK is a cipher. It will reveal sordid details, names of the powerful, and perhaps even a few sacrificial lambs. But it will not change the system. The system is designed to absorb such scandals, to co-opt outrage, and to continue its slow, decadent dance. We have seen this before: the Profumo affair, the collapse of the Soviet nomenklatura, the endless cycle of financial crises. Each time, the elite rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic of its own legitimacy.
What, then, is to be done? Nothing. The intellectual must resist the temptation to offer solutions. Our role is to diagnose, to provoke, to annoy. The Epstein files are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the loss of any shared sense of national purpose, the atomisation of society, and the replacement of civic virtue with transactional cynicism. The US and the UK are not exceptional. They are late-stage Rome, bickering over the distribution of bread and circuses while the barbarians sharpen their swords at the gates.
So let the attorney general squirm. Let the UK demand transparency. Let the files be released in dribs and drabs. It will change nothing. The elite will find new ways to shield themselves, new scandals will erupt, and the public will forget. This is the rhythm of Imperial decadence. And the historian’s job is to note it, to laugh bitterly, and to remind the reader that we have been here before. The question is not whether the empire will fall, but how long the farce can continue.
