There was a collusion of colluders.

I am trying to capture a couple of complicated thoughts without getting drawn too far into the feeding frenzy of the Weinstein revelations.

The first perplexity that Weinstein brings to mind is: Why is it that the Democratic Party and allies have been so prone to sexual predators? Granted that there was Bob Packwood back in the day and obviously recently Roger Ailes in conservative media. But they seem somewhat peripheral and there were few enablers and no defenders.

I do want to stipulate that all people are fallible. In that sense, this is a non-partisan issue. We all fall short of our own expectations of ourselves and from the expectations others might have of us. Not only do we fall short but we usually try to either deceive ourselves that we have not or we try and justify why we fell short. I am not focusing on aberrant peccadillos and the normal degree of human failure. A sexual predator is a different beast than an isolated tryst.

What started me on this trail is the obvious parallel between Weinstein and Bill Clinton. Indeed, Ann Althouse speculates that perhaps the Democratic coalition's actions that were necessary to protect Bill Clinton was what enabled Weinstein.

I think we can probably agree that with a couple of dozen women's accusations of affairs, assaults and rapes, that Bill Clinton warrants a moniker more than philanderer. I'll go with predator. Were there any other Presidents of such voracious and unconstrained physical appetites? Holding ourselves to the post-war era there are at least: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. All Democrats. Hmm. And there was the near, but never there, serial candidate Ted Kennedy, lion of the party but with his own trail of victimized women.

I leave aside Trump for two reasons. A lifelong Democrat, donor to Democrats, and socializer among Democrats, it is a little hard to make the case that he is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, as evidenced by the legions of Republican Never-Trumpers who view him as an interloper. Secondly, the documentation of his predatory habits seems skimpy which is odd given the virulent hatred of him by the press. If there were more concrete accusations, you would think they would have emerged by now. The most complete list I have come across is this piece from PBS. While it is lengthy, the bulk of the accusations are inappropriate touching and most of them are decades old. Most of the predator accusation seems to rest on a trash talking tape rather than direct accusations of victimization. Perhaps he is a predator but I would have thought there would be more substance than I have so far seen. Because of lack of specificity of charges and because of his mixed political heritage, Trump seems an aberrant.

Why would it be that Democrats are more accommodating of sexual predators? There were models of domesticity among Democratic presidents such as Truman and Carter so it is not like the whole party was infected. And goodness knows Republican presidents had their own failings. Just not, as far as I recall, that of being a sexual predator.

The irony is that equality of sexes has been a cornerstone of Democrats for decades and Kennedy and Johnson were architects of civil rights legislation that cemented rights of women in law. In addition, in recent decades, under the influence of postmodernism and third-wave feminism, the party has become increasingly puritanical (see college campuses as examples where government regulators have been attempting jesuitical arguments about where expressed spoken or physical interest crosses the line into physical assault.)

Is the frequency of sexual predators among Democratic candidates simply a function of contingent history as Althouse suggests? Once you become accustomed to defending one sexual predator it becomes morally easier to defend the next?

Or is it simply a brutal trade-off on the part of feminists? They are willing to betray their principles for Democratic sexual predators because they fear the principles of Republican even more?

Is it that the magic trinity of media, academia, and Democrats are so integral to one another that their joint success or failure requires them to all turn a blind eye for their coalition interests at the expense of their shared principles?

I have no settled idea why this has happened. And maybe it is simply a random fluke because the data set of post-war presidents is so small (thirteen). It just seems a profound irony that there is such a disconnect between the party's declared values and principles (equality, women's rights, freedom from harassment, believe the women, etc.) and the revealed preference they have for sexual predators.



The second oddity arising from the Weinstein revelations is even more complex.

There certainly seems an appropriate public revulsion because of the predatory sex (exploitation through power). And there is a related appropriate revulsion because of the cultural hypocrisy of media (saying one thing while tolerating another: accusing American as a group of being misogynistic and oppressive of women and yet accepting that as a norm among themselves).

What seems to be missing is that we are looking at this asymmetrically. Every crime has a perpetrator and a victim, sometimes an individual victim and sometimes a collective victim. In the public discussion so far, we appear to be focusing on those actresses physically coerced into sex with Weinstein and to a lesser extent, those whose careers were hobbled by their refusal of his advances. We are not considering the colluders. Those who went along with the bargain proposed by Weinstien.

Based on the evidence so far, it appears clear, reduced to its essence, that Weinstein offered a credible bargain to actresses. In return for sexual favors, he would enhance actresses careers but if rejected, he would destroy those careers.


So how many actresses accepted that bargain? Clearly there must be some. He seems to have offered this bargain indiscriminately. We are seeing those who were physically subdued and those who rejected the bargain. Who were the ones who accepted? This is a profession where there is one star for every thousand(s) of aspirants. That raises the stakes for the aspirants to cheat the system, to succeed by cutting corners.

For a societal system to function, it has to do so through consent. One of cultural cornerstones is rule of law. We seek a level-playing field for everyone to succeed or fail as their talents and abilities warrant. We reject collusion, monopolies, backroom-dealing, feather-nesting, bribery, rent-seeking, plagiarizing, etc.. All of these moral taboos/crimes are renounced because they represent a stealing of opportunity from the whole of the community on behalf of a subgroup.

If a group of companies band together (a subgroup) to set prices, they not only steal from the whole community through falsely elevated prices, but they also steal from the community by preventing other competitors entering the market to lower the costs.

These things happen even though we have laws against them. Often times these crimes are hard to prove and not nearly as many offenders are convicted and punished as we might wish. Criminal law is bolstered by cultural norms. In general, even if not convicted, a businessman, a politician, a scholar will be societally punished when they breach the cultural norms which call for level playing fields.

They are thieves who steal from all of us and to our collective detriment.

Collusions of this sort ultimately are sustained by the silence of participants. A purchasing officer in a large corporation insists on kick-backs from suppliers if they are to win a bid. Pay-to-play. The purchasing officer is clearly both a law breaker and a moral reprobate. But what of the vendor?

They are in a difficult situation. The system is rigged against them. If they hold true to their cultural compact and walk away, they will be good citizens but suffer financially and no one will know they were morally upright. If they become a whistle blower, all the institutional players, no matter what they say about ethics and good community citizenship, will come down on them like a ton of bricks and the vendor's business will be destroyed and no one will make them whole. Heck, even the federal government is unable to protects its own whistle-blowing employees from departmental retribution and punishment.

By the far the easiest thing for the vendor to do is to go along with the offered bargain of kick-backs for contracts. They are a victim but they are also a perpetrator. Honest vendors are the victims of their perfidy. They have become part of the problem.

And that is the position of these actresses whose careers were established by providing sex for success. They are victims of Harvey Weinstein and perpetrators against all the other actress aspirants.

Yes, in some ways they should be considered victims as well but they are also perpetrators. They entered into a bargain with Weinstein to deprive other actresses of a level playing field. Together they deprived others from succeeding based on talent and instead, some portion of those at the top of the acting profession are there solely because they cheated their way to success. They cheated on our societal norms. They circumvented achieving success through competition and talent and achieved it through private bargains which deprived others of their rights and opportunities.

I have not seen anyone discussing this aspect of the case. There is much fussing about how this could have happened so pervasively and for so long. There is much posturing about Weinstein's willingness to exploit those weaker than he. There is some discussion of the degree to which this was an open secret within the industry and Hollywood's collective turning of a blind eye.

What I don't see is discussion that Hollywood collectively, and the colluding actresses in particular, committed a crime against aspiring actresses and against our nation at large. Anyone who rigs the system and rejects the ideal of a level playing field is attacking the core of our culture. The tactical damage to our culture is not easily measured but it is real.

We look at the rest of the world and we can see that the most impoverished nations are those with the weakest institutions and the least trust. The more that leading heights of the nation are practitioners of the collusion and backroom dealing for personal profit at the expense of everyone else, the poorer and more dysfunctional is the nation.

We know academia is rigging the system for some students and not others (affirmative action and kangaroo courts). We know the media is selective in what they choose to report, suppressing some stories for partisan or ideological reasons and promoting others. We know that politicians are always prey to a smorgasbord of temptations. And now we know that Hollywood is rigged as well. The stars we see are the ones who chose to collude with the morally bankrupt to deprive other actresses of opportunity and to deprive the nation of the best acting talent. A pox on them all as betrayers of trust.

Hollywood was self-servingly silent about Weinstein. The media was self-servingly silent about Weinstein. Politicians were self-servingly silent about Weinstein. Academia was self-servingly silent about Weinstein. There was a collusion of colluders.

No wonder we have a revolts of the normals. Eventually the bulwarks have to be reinforced against the tide of lies.