The left was right about Larry Summers all along. Democrats didn’t listen

In former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’ now-legendary memoir “Adults in the Room,” he recounts a conversation with Larry Summers, conducted in a Washington hotel bar late on a spring night in 2015 over (one imagines) glasses of excellent single-malt Scotch. The former Treasury secretary and Harvard president was, in effect, making the charismatic young radical — a newly-minted official in Greece’s left-wing government — an offer of the sort you’re not supposed to refuse.

Varoufakis had to choose, Summers suggested, between being an insider or an outsider:

“The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.”

If Summers’ “sacrosanct rule” was meant to sound sinister a decade ago, it carries considerably darker resonance today. As we now know — and as numerous insiders no doubt knew all along — Summers continued his longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein right up to the eve of the latter’s final arrest in 2019, asking the convicted sex trafficker for advice on how to cajole a younger female colleague into a sexual relationship. (Epstein valiantly volunteered to serve as Summers’ “wing man” in this quest.) “Never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do,” it would appear, is also meant to apply to whatever those insiders get up to in private, not just to matters of state or the backroom shenanigans of high finance.

Varoufakis might agree, I suspect, that the Summers anecdote, which he presents in a mildly self-ironizing mode, reflects less well on him now than it did at the time. He was clearly aware of the contradictions involved in a private meeting with someone he had already described as the “Prince of Darkness,” and by his own account told Summers that he’s no insider and never will be. But if the episode is meant as a moral fork in the road, in which the hero refuses a Faustian bargain, Varoufakis nonetheless seems a bit too impressed with himself over this intimate encounter with the ultimate insider, a man who had haunted the capitalist world’s corridors of power for more than 30 years.

But can you and I say, with absolute certainty, that we would have felt differently or behaved with vastly greater integrity? The establishment red pill that Summers seemed to offer over those tumblers of Glenfiddich promised access to the innermost sanctum of the Matrix, and a chance to see and perhaps to manipulate the secret levers that made the world go round. That’s a potent drug under any circumstances, and those of us who have never met Summers can only assume that he possesses a potent combination of charm and intelligence, along with the kind of seductive charisma that derives from feeling certain that you’re right and almost never being told otherwise.

At least that’s the only possible explanation I can imagine. Because the truth about Larry Summers has been obvious, or at least should have been, for many years. That did not prevent him from being one of the most dominant figures in global finance and economics, or the leading apostle of the disastrous worldwide gospel of deregulation and privatization now known as “neoliberalism.” It didn’t prevent Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Harvard University and any number of investment banks, hedge funds and corporations from swooning at Summers’ sermons on austerity — which invariably confirmed their prior assumptions that wealth was virtuous and virtue led to wealth — and offering him second, third and fourth bites of the apple.

It serves no purpose to tax readers’ patience on a holiday weekend with anything close to an exhaustive catalogue of Summers’ career, or the many, many reasons he should have been cast on the political dung-heap long ago. To have been the government official most responsible for the uncontrolled epidemic of financial deregulation that led directly to the global economic collapse of 2008 is remarkable; to also have been the adviser most responsible for the oligarchic plundering and ruination of the post-Soviet Russian economy is flat-out astonishing.

Those headlines only scratch the surface of Summers’ long and accomplished history of rendering government increasingly subservient to Big Capital, especially when we consider the overweening arrogance that has led him time and again into self-inflicted crisis, long before his links to Epstein came to light. His career nearly short-circuited itself in the early ‘90s, when a memo he authored (or at least signed) at the World Bank surfaced, arguing that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable” and suggesting that “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.”

Summers’ initial excuse that the memo was a sarcastic thought experiment meant “to stimulate internal debate” (in the words of a 1998 New Yorker profile) doesn’t mesh well with his more elaborate later excuse that a subordinate wrote the memo and he didn’t read it attentively, and that someone else later doctored and distorted the memo in order to discredit him. Yeah, whatever: Summers has never denied that the memo said what he said or that he signed it, and the entire world decided to avoid the question of whether that reflected the kind of judgment and sensitivity expected of the chief economist at the world’s leading financial institution. In other words, he skated, and not for the last time.

More than a decade later, Summers’ dramatic upward trajectory, which had carried him through two terms at the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton and five years as president of Harvard, was once again interrupted by “an attempt at provocation” (his own words). This time it was a 2005 speech about the paucity of women in science and engineering, which Summers attributed mainly to “issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude.” Beneath the laborious pseudoscientific language, he was essentially saying that really smart women didn’t come along as often as really smart men, and that if employers were looking for “high power and high intensity,” well, they would probably hire dudes and, honestly, who could blame them?

After a year of internal furor at Harvard and a faculty vote of no confidence, Summers eventually stepped down as president. It was widely assumed that the lingering damage explained why he wasn’t invited to join Barack Obama’s Cabinet — and had to settle for, um, directing the National Economic Council and serving as the president’s principal economic adviser during the recovery from the Great Recession his policies had helped to create in the first place.

Progressive economists, feminists and environmental activists have been calling out Summers as an intensely toxic force in both politics and finance realm for years. For that matter, his parasitic or symbiotic relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has been a matter of public record since at least 2003, when the Harvard Crimson earned his eternal enmity by reporting on it. He has survived multiple damaging scandals and found his way back to power every time, like a wily Renaissance courtier or an unkillable horror-movie villain, and may well survive this one.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this month’s public show of mock-penitence, which was certainly not his first, Summers described his decades-long friendship with Epstein as “a massive failure of judgment.” OK, that rings true. But as is customary with Summers’ explanations, it raises more questions than it answers. How are we supposed to think about the enormously consequential public judgments of someone who maintained a close friendship with a convicted sex trafficker for more than 20 years? More to the point, perhaps we should ask whose judgment has really failed here, on the most massive scale imaginable?

Was it the self-important con man and shameless flatterer who poured poison into the ears of presidents and became the “dark eminence behind banking deregulation and mass home foreclosures,” to quote investigative reporter Greg Palast? That was just Larry being Larry. Or was it the political leaders, nearly all of them Democrats or alleged liberals, who were stuffed so full of corporate dollars and so high on their own supply that they fell for his shtick over and over again?