In 1971 (55 years ago!) when the Pentagon Papers—also known as the Ellsberg files—were leaked to the American public, the nation experienced a shock that was intellectual, moral, and civic all at once.
The documents exposed years of deception by successive administrations about the Vietnam War, revealing how leaders knowingly misled Congress and the public while thousands of Americans died and millions of Vietnamese suffered. The fascination with the Pentagon Papers was intense, but it was also serious. Americans argued about executive power, national security, the role of the press, and the ethical obligations of government in a democracy. It was a scandal rooted in policy, war, and truth.
More than half a century later, the public fixation surrounding the gradual release of materials connected to Jeffrey Epstein feels profoundly different. To begin with, what we're learning is not particularly shocking, in part because nothing seems to shock anymore.
Also, the Epstein files—names, flight logs, testimonies, settlements—do not revolve around war, strategy, or constitutional authority. Instead, they're all about sex, exploitation, and alleged pedophilia among wealthy and powerful figures. The fascination is perhaps just as intense as it was in 1971, maybe even more so, but it is qualitatively different. Where the Pentagon Papers forced Americans to reckon with the moral costs of empire and governance, the Epstein saga draws attention to a moral rot of a more lurid, personal, and salacious kind.
The contrast suggests not merely a change in subject matter, but a shift in societal priorities and sensibilities. In 1971, ordinary Americans—factory workers, students, homemakers—followed dense newspaper articles about foreign policy and classified memos. The language was complex, the issues abstract, and the stakes enormous.
The outrage was not prurient; it was civic. People asked whether their government could be trusted; whether a questionable war in the first place was nothing more than an incestuous web of secrecy and lies. This was not a golden age -- America was riven by violence, protest, and division (sound familiar?) -- but it was a time when national attention was focused on matters of genuine public consequence.
Today, by contrast, our collective obsession often seems rooted in exposure rather than accountability. The Epstein files fascinate because they promise to reveal who did what to whom, behind closed doors, on private planes and islands. The focus is less on systemic reform than on voyeuristic revelation. Names matter not because they illuminate policy failures, but because they titillate and scandalize. The question is no longer “How did our leaders mislead us into war?” but “Who was involved, and how depraved was it?” It's patently prurient.
This shift reflects a broader cultural trajectory—what sociologist and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called “defining deviancy down.” Over time, behaviors that would once have provoked shock or moral consensus become normalized, relativized, or absorbed into entertainment.
This should surprise no one, when you consider that pornography has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Ever since Bill Clinton declared "I did not have sex with that woman," sexual scandal is no longer exceptional; it is expected. The boundary between news and tabloid has eroded, leaving a culture in which exposure substitutes for judgment and outrage is endlessly recycled, like a seedy salad of click bait, but rarely productive,
To be sure, this does not mean the Epstein case is unimportant. Sexual exploitation, especially of minors, is a grave crime, and the possibility that powerful individuals evaded justice is deeply troubling. But the way the story is consumed—fragmented, sensationalized, and stripped of broader ethical reflection—reveals something unsettling about us. The danger is not that we care about wrongdoing, but that we care in a way that trivializes wrongdoing and flattens all of it into just so much spectacle.
In 1971, we honestly believed that the release of classified documents strengthened the idea that citizens must be informed to be free. That was, after all, a vital part of the the modus operandi for the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Today, the constant drip of scandal risks dulling our moral senses. We know more intimate details about the lives of elites than ever before, yet still seem eons removed from the indulgent world they inhabit. At the same time. we're less capable of sustained attention to structural injustice, foreign policy failures, or long-term national decline. The serious competes with the sordid—and often loses.
What happened to us? Part of the answer lies in media economics, part in technological change, and part in a cultural turn inward. Have we become a society more comfortable judging personal sin than confronting collective responsibility? Is that the problem? Or is it the elites and our public institutions that have let us down by opening the doors to a culture without moral guardrails where excess is rampant and graft, corruption, deceit and promiscuity know no bounds, ushering in a new Babylonian age?
The trajectory from the Pentagon Papers to the Epstein files is troubling because this is not just a change in scandal; it is a mirror held up to our values. Once, we were transfixed by lies that sent young men to die. Now, we are mesmerized by secrets that confirm our worst suspicions about human weakness and our decline. The slide may indeed feel slow and sordid—but it is also revealing. It tells us not only what our leaders have done, but more than that. It tells us what we, as a society have become numb to (even as we gaze upon it) and what we are willing to accept, if not countenance.
Barack Obama: 161
Donald Trump [2017]: 199
