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.
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…
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 psychologist
Irving 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 implied
quid 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-like control
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.
Mike Lofgren on the Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight
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 system
at 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.
