Policy unstudied
and sliding into the future on entitlement is what emerges as the deep
state. Placeholders do not question why
they have a job. This iceberg is prone
only to melting as the water warms up through failure.
What is clearly
lacking in the political process is a pro-forma for bringing agencies to account
and prove their continuing worth. When
does a good idea become a bad idea? Who checks
and asks?
This sense of
deep state has been with us for a long time and it is an assemblage of driven self-interest
adhering to perhaps a common world view that may itself be logical enough but
also naturally excessively conservative.
Otherwise its longevity would be impossible. These guys abhor real change.
Its string is
showing signs of running out but that will still take time.
The "Deep
State" - How Much Does It Explain?
The US Capitol Building. (Photo: Rob Shenk/Flickr)Everyone
knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address,
President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or
democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”
Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff
member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk
about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the
national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it,
Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve
powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the
history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization
of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and
perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.
Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in
Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren
describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and
over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security
clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep
State.
In conjunction
with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written the following essay.
The Anatomy of
the Deep State
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared
it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no
industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers,
carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia
Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts
brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.
– The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade
(1871)
There is the visible government situated around the
Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable
government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the
White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan
politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and
which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the
iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own
compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]
During the last five years, the news media has been
flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The
conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become
the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest
critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the
limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On
one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see,
Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the
violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans
is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican
president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled
states are clearly intended to
accomplish). President
Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP
filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the
federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential
appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by
weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with
other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional
nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in
only one house of Congress.
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can
liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners
indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American
people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since
the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called
“Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is
characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized
federal, state and local law enforcement.
Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any
other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress,
such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state
over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans
about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until
recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor
exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats,
save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled,
either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured
congressional testimony under oath
by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
These are not isolated instances of a contradiction;
they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background
noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was
beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United
States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s
regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over
into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At
a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and
civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was
somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and
to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s
Government Communications Headquarters to
buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two
bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate
maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period
of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a
building in Utah that is
the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the
National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical
designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500
quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single
trace of your electronic life.
Yes, there is another government concealed behind
the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity
of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent
patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled
by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon
is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within
a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the
light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.”
All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its
own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and
sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by
itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is
not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is
relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as
those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the
Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows
them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2]
How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep
State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for
28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security
clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if
neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological
disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some
extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only
by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin
fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who
are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what
psychologistIrving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like
ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This
syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be
it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries.
Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were
radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the
mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of
people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work
for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult
to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.”
A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is
the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted
yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is
typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue
under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white
office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to
eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that
summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a
functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would
be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off
one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are
fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers,
quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless
one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to
the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable
Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a
couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire
government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies:
the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland
Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also
include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over
financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic
symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive
Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of
the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of
Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as
the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where
sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final
government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches
of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress
consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the
members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress,
normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the
Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from
the State’s emissaries.
I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One
memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Amendments Act of 2008. This
legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and
unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in
2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in
these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of
the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings
obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama,
soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National
Convention in Denver. He had already won the *most delegates by campaigning to
the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global
war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State
does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called
“private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series
in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the
scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized
after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with
top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared
civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country
and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs
is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have
been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of
almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the
intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane
between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National
Intelligence, James R. Clapper,
is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest
intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company;
Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors
now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are
increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it
quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or
the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.
Washington is the most important node of the Deep
State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible
threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall
Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and
operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget
their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash
and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The
executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On
March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder
stated the following: “I am
concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it
does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications
that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a
negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This,
from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has
practically abolished the constitutional
right to trial for poorer
defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall
Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for
no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with
a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly
beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]
The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a
well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the
period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence
Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic
involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the
government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR(formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th
Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR
specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus’
expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however,
is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of
the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus
also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at
Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm
school of the American oligarchy.[4]
Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State —
the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on
Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us
to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate
that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off
in the long run — are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their
preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered
advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in
the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is
neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might
privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion
or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”:
financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying
of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”:
the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world
with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more
than 400 years ago about treason,
now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it
ideology. [5] That
is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is
treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington
etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not
done.”
After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent
and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, it has become
publicly evident that Silicon Valley is a vital node of the Deep State as well.
Unlike military and intelligence contractors, Silicon Valley overwhelmingly
sells to the private market, but its business is so important to the government
that a strange relationship has emerged. While the government could simply
dragoon the high technology companies to do the NSA’s bidding, it would prefer
cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy, perhaps with
an impliedquid pro quo. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary indulgence the
government shows the Valley in intellectual property matters. If an American
“jailbreaks” his smartphone (i.e., modifies it so that it can use a service
provider other than the one dictated by the manufacturer), he could receive a fine of up to $500,000 and
several years in prison; so much for a
citizen’s vaunted property rights to what he purchases. The libertarian pose of
the Silicon Valley moguls, so carefully cultivated in their public relations,
has always been a sham. Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial
purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device, so it is
hardly surprising that the Deep State should emulate the Valley and do the same
for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should conscript the
Valley’s assistance.
Still, despite the essential roles of lower
Manhattan and Silicon Valley, the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly
situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and
consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent
pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That
the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock
between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government
in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-likecontrol on the one hand; and on the other, the
ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to
the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public
infrastructure.
The results of this contradiction are not abstract,
as a tour of the rotting, decaying, bankrupt cities of the American Midwest
will attest. It is not even confined to those parts of the country left behind
by a Washington Consensus that decreed the financialization and
deindustrialization of the economy in the interests of efficiency and
shareholder value. This paradox is evident even within the Beltway itself, the
richest metropolitan area in the nation. Although demographers and urban
researchers invariably count Washington as a “world city,” that is not always
evident to those who live there. Virtually every time there is a severe summer
thunderstorm, tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of residents lose power, often for many days. There are occasional water
restrictions over wide areas because water mains, poorly constructed and
inadequately maintained, have burst. [6] The
Washington metropolitan area considers it a Herculean task just to build a rail
link to its international airport — with luck it may be completed by 2018.
It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned
and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even
as the city of Rome disintegrates from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts
leading down from the hills begin to crumble. The governing classes of the Deep
State may continue to deceive themselves with their dreams of Zeus-like
omnipotence, but others do not. A 2013 Pew Poll that interviewed 38,000 people around the
world found that in 23 of 39 countries surveyed, a plurality of respondents
said they believed China already had or would in the future replace the United
States as the world’s top economic power.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is
the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and
deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social
structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep
State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may
be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as
Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in
the face.” “Living upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State
has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.
We are faced with two disagreeable implications.
First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by
surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is
almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires,
the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the
failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the
future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic
success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in
Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the
functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the
Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed
merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back
of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself,
despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted?
The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted
themselves in like manner.
But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State
and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded
the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter,
the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East,
this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he
changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by
Vladimir Putin. [7]
Has the visible, constitutional state, the one
envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself
against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps.
The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance
have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator
Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically — from their
knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful
and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the
Deep State’s decade-old tactic of crying
“terrorism!” every time
it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek
obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.
But there is another more structural reason the Deep
State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float
above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature
means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The
Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day
operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get
passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get
rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved
without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the
gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress
is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.
If there is anything the Deep State requires it is
silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as
they have in the past. It is even
willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural
issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional
antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of
default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium.
And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that
continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for
both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might
want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot
fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases.
And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot
void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans
insisting on entitlement cuts.
So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must
restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften
sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime
soon. Even Wall Street’s rentier operations have been affected: After helping
finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America’s Big
Money is now regretting the Frankenstein’s monster it has created. Like
children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the
nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of
capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had
hired to knock it off.
The House vote to defund the NSA’s illegal
surveillance programs was equally illustrative of the disruptive nature of the
tea party insurgency. Civil liberties Democrats alone would never have come so
close to victory; tea party stalwart Justin Amash (R-MI), who has also upset the business
community for his
debt-limit fundamentalism, was the lead Republican sponsor of the NSA
amendment, and most of the Republicans who voted with him were aligned with the
tea party.
The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy
and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the
Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through
FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into
technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public relations requirement
to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is difficult to take the
tech firms’ libertarian protestations about government compromise of their
systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against
their own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is
accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas
business from
companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high
tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep
State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be
combatted: Unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and
batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat.
This pushback has gone so far that on January 17,
President Obama announced revisions to the NSA’s data collection programs,
including withdrawing the agency’s custody of a domestic telephone record
database, expanding requirements for judicial warrants and ceasing to spy on
(undefined) “friendly foreign leaders.” Critics have denounced the changes as
a cosmetic public relations move, but they are still significant in that the clamor
has gotten so loud that the president feels the political need to address it.
When the contradictions within a ruling ideology are
pushed too far, factionalism appears and that ideology begins slowly to
crumble. Corporate oligarchs such as the
Koch brothers are no
longer entirely happy with the faux-populist political front group they helped
fund and groom. Silicon Valley, for all the Ayn Rand-like tendencies of its major players, its offshoring strategies and its further exacerbation of income
inequality, is now lobbying Congress to restrain the
NSA, a core component of the Deep
State. Some tech firms are moving to encrypt their data. High tech corporations and governments alike seek
dominance over people though collection of personal data, but the corporations
are jumping ship now that adverse public reaction to the NSA scandals threatens
their profits.
The outcome of all these developments is uncertain.
The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and
corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events
may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way
of toppling the altars of the mighty. While the two great materialist and
determinist ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and the Washington
Consensus, successively decreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat and
the dictatorship of the market were inevitable, the future is actually
indeterminate. It may be that deep economic and social currents create the
framework of history, but those currents can be channeled, eddied, or even
reversed by circumstance, chance and human agency. We have only to reflect upon
defunct glacial despotisms such as the USSR or East Germany to realize that
nothing is forever.
Throughout history, state systems with outsized
pretensions to power have reacted to their environments in two ways. The first
strategy, reflecting the ossification of its ruling elites, consists of
repeating that nothing is wrong, that the status quo reflects the nation’s
unique good fortune in being favored by God and that those calling for change
are merely subversive troublemakers. As the French ancien régime, the Romanov
dynasty and the Habsburg emperors discovered, the strategy works splendidly for
a while, particularly if one has a talent for dismissing unpleasant facts. The
final results, however, are likely to be thoroughly disappointing.
The second strategy is one embraced to varying
degrees and with differing goals, by figures of such contrasting personalities
as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and Deng
Xiaoping. They were certainly not revolutionaries by temperament; if anything,
their natures were conservative. But they understood that the political
cultures in which they lived were fossilized and incapable of adapting to the
times. In their drive to reform and modernize the political systems they
inherited, their first obstacles to overcome were the outworn myths that
encrusted the thinking of the elites of their time.
As the United States confronts its future after
experiencing two failed wars, a precarious economy and $17 trillion in
accumulated debt, the national punditry has split into two camps. The first,
the declinists, sees a broken, dysfunctional political system incapable of
reform and an economy soon to be overtaken by China. The second, the reformers,
offers a profusion of nostrums to turn the nation around: public financing of
elections to sever the artery of money between the corporate components of the
Deep State and financially dependent elected officials, government “insourcing”
to reverse the tide of outsourcing of government functions and the conflicts of
interest that it creates, a tax policy that values human labor over financial
manipulation and a trade policy that favors exporting manufactured goods over
exporting investment capital.
All of that is necessary, but not sufficient. The
Snowden revelations (the impact of which have been surprisingly strong), the
derailed drive for military intervention in Syria and a fractious Congress,
whose dysfunction has begun to be a serious inconvenience to the Deep State,
show that there is now a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What
America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the
twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that
have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will
unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.
[1] The term “Deep State” was coined in Turkey and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime. In British author John le Carré’s latest novel, A Delicate Truth, a character describes the Deep State as “… the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” I use the term to mean a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.
[2] Twenty-five years ago, the sociologist Robert Nisbet described this phenomenon as “the attribute of No Fault…. Presidents, secretaries and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations. This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon and now the Persian Gulf.” To his list we might add 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
[3] The attitude of many members of Congress towards Wall Street was memorably expressed by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, in 2010: “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
[4] Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.
[5] In recent months, the American public has seen a vivid example of a Deep State operative marketing his ideology under the banner of pragmatism. Former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates — a one-time career CIA officer and deeply political Bush family retainer — has camouflaged his retrospective defense of military escalations that have brought us nothing but casualties and fiscal grief as the straight-from-the-shoulder memoir from a plain-spoken son of Kansas who disdains Washington and its politicians.
[6] Meanwhile, the US government took the lead in restoring Baghdad’s sewer systemat a cost of $7 billion.
[7] Obama’s abrupt about-face suggests he may have been skeptical of military intervention in Syria all along, but only dropped that policy once Congress and Putin gave him the running room to do so. In 2009, he went ahead with the Afghanistan “surge” partly because General Petraeus’ public relations campaign and back-channel lobbying on the Hill for implementation of his pet military strategy pre-empted other options. These incidents raise the disturbing question of how much the democratically elected president — or any president — sets the policy of the national security state and how much the policy is set for him by the professional operatives of that state who engineer faits accomplis that force his hand.
Producer: Gina Kim. Segment
Producer: Lena Shemel. Editor: Rob Kuhns. Intro
Editor: Sikay Tang.
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