David McElroy

There was a time — not so long ago — when Americans at least pretended to care deeply about character. We argued about politics, yes, but we also insisted that the people entrusted with power possess some basic moral grounding.

Honesty mattered. Decency mattered. The idea that private conduct revealed public truth was widely understood.

Somewhere along the way, that expectation collapsed.

What replaced it was not a better philosophy or deeper compassion. It was tribalism. We began to judge leaders less by who they were and more by which side they claimed to serve. If they fought for our preferred policies, many of us decided their personal conduct was irrelevant, exaggerated or maliciously invented by opponents. Character became negotiable. Loyalty did not.

The continuing public reckoning surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is not, at its core, a political story. That is precisely why it is so revealing. Epstein moved easily among the wealthy and powerful for years. He was not an obscure figure. He was a convicted sex offender with a reputation that, at minimum, raised profound questions about his moral fitness for decent society.

Yet he was welcomed with open arms — by other men and women of equally low character.

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Let me introduce you to someone important in my life.

Her name is Claire.

She is calm, intelligent, reflective, warm without being loud, serious without being severe. She has an easy smile and the sort of presence that suggests both kindness and backbone. She seems like someone who reads books thoughtfully, listens carefully and notices things most people rush past.

There’s just one complication.

Claire is not real.

She isn’t a woman I met, dated or nearly married. She’s not waiting somewhere for our paths to cross at a dinner party or a bookstore or one of those improbably meaningful moments movies have taught us to expect.

Claire is a hypothesis.

A few days ago, I engaged in an unusual exercise: describing, with surprising precision, the kind of woman who would most likely be deeply compatible with me. Not a fantasy assembled from wishful thinking, but a probabilistic sketch shaped by temperament, values and the realities of long-term partnership.

The result was Claire.

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Have you ever wanted something so badly that you’d do almost anything to achieve it? Have you ever been so close to such a thing that you could taste it?

When I was about 30 years old, I wanted to be a successful newspaper publisher for a large company. I wanted to be the “wunderkind” who people in the company whispered about — the one who everybody expects to be running the company soon.

A big newspaper chain hired me. I entered the company’s three-year publisher training program, but I was deemed ready to run a newspaper after just 10 months. I was promoted to be the editor and publisher of a small newspaper that published three times a week.

I was on top of the world. I was going to amaze everybody with what I could do. I was going to publish a high-quality newspaper for the people of the town and make money for the owners of my company. My employees were going to love me. We were going to do great things together. I was going to be on the fast track to running the company one day.

Just a year later, I quietly resigned and left town. I felt like a failure. Very little went right for me. I didn’t get along with the regional vice president who supervised my area. We fought over everything. My staff didn’t especially like me. I had to fire several people.

Mostly, though, I simply didn’t fit. I was an outsider who didn’t belong in this place. The people of the town didn’t like me — and I didn’t like them.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night with this failure on my mind — and I suddenly realized that I never had a chance.

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