Is there a "Deep State" controlling U.S. foreign policy?

[BrainGlutton]

The term “Deep State” has sometimes been used to mean a shadow government within the Turkish government, but lately some pundits have been applying the term to the U.S., to mean . . . something slightly different depending on the pundit, but it always means something that controls U.S. foreign policy in particular:

Mike Lofgren: “Anatomy of the Deep State.”

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]

<snip>

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.

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, by Mike Lofgren.

Andrew O’Hehir: Obama, the slide back to Iraq and the power of the “Deep State”. “Critics like Michael Moore are partly right – but Obama’s doomed presidency is more momentous than they think.”

Lofgren makes clear that he is not claiming the existence of a secret conspiratorial cabal, but you could almost say he’s protesting too much. What he really means is that the operatives of the Deep State do not see themselves in that light. They are the grown-ups who actually run things, irrespective of which party the bozo in the Oval Office belongs to, while the rest of us fight over marriage legislation and history textbooks and football players who beat their wives and other cultural effluvia that (to them) don’t much matter. One of Lofgren’s most interesting hypotheses comes in a footnote, the idea that the Deep State operates via stage-managed crises that force the hands of political leaders toward desired outcomes. (He doesn’t mean that 9/11 was an inside job or whatever; he means that al-Qaida in 2001, and ISIS in 2014, are framed as problems that can only have military solutions.) In other words, to an outsider the Deep State sure as hell looks and functions like a conspiratorial cabal, one that operates according to its own principles and views democracy with undisguised contempt. In practice, it is not much different from the entrenched bureaucratic elites that ran the Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire or whatever other top-heavy, sclerotic and self-deluding state apparatus you can come up with

Elias Isquith: Controlled by shadow government: Mike Lofgren reveals how top U.S. officials are at the mercy of the “deep state”. “A corrupt network of wealthy elites has hijacked our government, ex-GOP staffer and best-selling author tells Salon.” (Interview with Lofgren.)

Liam O’Donoghue: “Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”. “From World War II though JFK, “The Devil’s Chessboard” explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites.”

This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze [former CIA director] Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”

Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot.

Patrick L. Smith: This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control. “Foreign policy never really changes regardless of who holds the White House. This is why exceptionalism always wins.”

The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction.

Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy.

I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute.

Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state.

Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction?

The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions.

Strong stuff. Is there anything to it? If so, is there anything that anyone can – or should – do about it?

[marshmallow]

There’s a lot of terms for the same or similar things in dissident circles:

Managed democracy (appropriated and expanded from Lippmann/Bernays)
Managerial state (a paleocon term)
Inverted totalitarianism (Wolin)
Security State
Corporate State / Corporatocracy

You don’t see it much, but one of my favorites is squishy totalitarianism. The idea is that it’s a huge mass of goo. You can poke it in one place and it just expands somewhere else. Run at it full force and you bounce off. You can’t change it from the inside, you become part of the whole. It’s immune to conventional revolutions. To destroy it would require burning down everything.

squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called ‘technocratic’ merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or ‘safety-net’ programs that stabilize consumption and render populations (within limits) secure and dependent; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance; overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in conjunction with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignties combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.

Normal old MIC (military industrial complex) works too if you’re enough of a lumper.

Incidentally, there’s a less subversive term called the invisible or submerged state coined by Suzanne Mettle to describe government programs many people don’t recognize as government programs. I’ve also seen both those terms used in place of “deep state.”

There’s often a lot of debate on whether the leviathan of the state has taken over the private sphere (right) or if the government has been parasitized by private power (left), but I tend to think it’s a mutually beneficial relationship and making a distinction between them might not be helpful in a lot of cases. Which is basically the anarchist position I guess, but I diverge in thinking the best way to combat it is with the state, since it has the fatal flaw of being changeable by the public, at least in theory. The funny thing is I’ve seen some anarchists argue for increasing state power in order to destroy both.

It’s not like kings could do whatever they wanted all the time either, at least if they wanted to keep their head or not get stabbed by bodyguards. They had to contend with the churches, the merchant and banking classes, and the various noble families. The main difference now is the sophistication and reach of the systems of control.

[Twoflower]

Sounds like the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, essentially.

[Ravenman]

Ever notice how, no matter which party is in charge, Congress always bickers too much and doesn’t get enough done? Why doesn’t anyone ask who the shadowy cabal is that forces this to happen?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Ravenman

Ever notice how, no matter which party is in charge, Congress always bickers too much and doesn’t get enough done? Why doesn’t anyone ask who the shadowy cabal is that forces this to happen?

That’s just human nature.

However, the notion that “nothing gets done” is really not correct. There are plenty of laws that are passed, regulatory authority granted, et cetera every congressional session. What is true is that although politicians make big splashy proclamations about values and rights, most of the real legislation either isn’t sensational enough or is too complicated for sound bites, so unless you read Congressional Research Service reports you have no idea what they are actually voting on or debating. In fact, I would wager the most congresspeople actually have little idea what they are voting on or debating; they have large staffs of functionaries and analysts who do all of the ‘research’ and give them summaries that essentially direct how they vote on most issues that are not near and dear to their hearts. And by ‘research’, I mean they get information from lobbyists and think tanks, many of whom are directly supported by a collection of corporate and private organizations like the American Enterprise Institute or the National Trial Lawyers Association (to name two of many) which ‘represent’ (i.e. are the mouthpiece for) a number of interests with a stake on what laws are passed and how they are interpreted. Although there is some degree of deception insofar as these institutions make a show of being independent, there really isn’t a secret cabal of people in shady rooms; it’s all being done essentially in public, and everybody who is involved in Washington politics knows about it. It’s a regular part of doing business, and if you try to avoid or reject it, you get shut out, unable to get any legislation even submitted, much less passed.

The most blatant example of this is the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”, i.e. The ‘USA PATRIOT Act’, ostensibly authored by Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh and introduced by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner. In fact, no adult human being capable of critical thought believes that Dinh and Sensenbrenner authored the act by themselves, or even with the aid of their respective staffs, in the matter of a couple of weeks. The act, weighing in at the size of a Scott Turow novel and adding or extensively modifying over a hundred sections to the United States Code, had clearly been authored by a host of individuals with the intention of instigating and normalizing an extensive public surveillance system that exceeded the Constitutional authority of Congress to enact under normal circumstances, and was being held for a favorable opportunity such as the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Reading through the act shows that it the authors had extensive insight into not only the structure and weaknesses of extant government surveillance capability but a canny understanding of surveillance and telecommunications technology. The way the bill was introduced and promoted made it almost impossible for politicians to vote against it, and since most of them never bothered to read more than the introductory pages they had no concept of what they were voting on, nor would it really be practical for politicians unversed in surveillance and telecommunications technology to really understand the implications of the act. It was blatant manipulation by fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

But you know what? The mass of voters don’t give a flying fuck. The “deep state” or whatever you want to call it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy, or really hide in the shadows. It just has to conceal itself in enough fear mongering and double-talk such that voters don’t really understand or want to put the effort into grasping the erosion of civil liberties. The people who get up in arms over a “wardrobe malfunction” or “twerking” are not people who are, frankly, capable of understanding how allowing a government agency to collect metadata from cellular and internet communications could be used in an adverse way. Hell, most people don’t even know what metadata actually is. The “deep state” requires about as much concealment as a marionettist at a children’t show. And let’s not pretend this is something new; this game is as old as politics itself.

The value of democracy isn’t that it incorporates everyone’s position, or represents the aggregate, or whatever other bullshit egalitarianism you may hear. The value is that in giving everyone an illusion of participation, it keeps people relatively passive and agreeable even in the face of bald lies and blatant manipulation.

Stranger

[BrainGlutton]

@Ravenman

Ever notice how, no matter which party is in charge, Congress always bickers too much and doesn’t get enough done? Why doesn’t anyone ask who the shadowy cabal is that forces this to happen?

Congressional gridlock is not caused by the Deep State, it is caused by ordinary politics. What the Deep State does is break the gridlock whenever the DS’ needs require something done – at least, that’s how Lofgren sees it:

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.

However:

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.

[BrainGlutton]

More from Lofgren – this is of the greatest importance:

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.”

[Ravenman]

Here’s why I bring up the character of Congress: nobody tells Congress to behave a certain way. But there is a character of various institutions – legislative bodies, unions, businesses, and even countries – that seem to persist over long periods of time. Reinvention is possible, but in my opinion, it just doesn’t happen very often.

In my opinion, just because an institution of some sort possesses a character, does not mean that there is a mechanism of control whereby decisions are made by some to do some particular thing. In other words, it’s not that institutions are being controlled by decision makers who are possibly hidden in the shadows, it is that institutions tend to have characteristics that make them resistant to change.

I strongly disagree with the notion that there is some type of coordination among subnational actors that result in particular patterns of decision making. To the opposite: subnational actors tend to be in competition with each other, with each actor generally acting along predictable lines according to their own interests (“where you stand is where you sit”). The outcomes of policy therefore usually don’t change in drastic tos and fros over time.

This is easily seen by comparing the foreign policies of all sorts of countries. Look at Putin’s foreign policy and compare it to Stalin’s: not identical, but boy, there are a lot of similarities. The trend of India’s foreign policy has certain tones since the development of the Non-Aligned Movement. It took China a revolution to get to where its foreign policy is today, and in my opinion that foreign policy rubric is more rigid than any other major power I can think of.

But this idea that there are people who are exercising secret control of things, and perhaps intimidating reformers to not pursue their aims, is an inaccurate interpretation of facts. If anything, the term that should be applied to the general consistency of foreign policy isn’t “the Deep State,” it is probably more like “groupthink.” But groupthink is not as good a boogeyman, is it?

[BrainGlutton]

@Ravenman

But this idea that there are people who are exercising secret control of things, and perhaps intimidating reformers to not pursue their aims, is an inaccurate interpretation of facts. If anything, the term that should be applied to the general consistency of foreign policy isn’t “the Deep State,” it is probably more like “groupthink.” But groupthink is not as good a boogeyman, is it?

Regarding “groupthink,” here’s Lofgren again (all these quotes are from the first article linked in the OP – and it’s a long one, Mods, I ain’t even close yet to C&Ping 1/4 of it):

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.

[Ravenman]

Uh, ok.

It might help if you explain why you think I’m right or wrong, rather than quoting someone talking about groupthink. Perhaps you could respond to this specific argument I made: the foreign policy of basically all major powers tend to be remarkably consistent over time. So:

1. If a deep state exists – which I’m not conceding – does that make it the normal state of affairs?
2. Does the “deep state” overrule the wishes of top leaders? Or does it brainwash leaders into thinking their way?
3. If you wanted to eliminate the “deep state,” how would you go about it?

[Inbred_Mm_domesticus]

I am not one to believe in conspiratorial organizations that form a deep state or a deep state that is not conspiratorial and out in the open. This is one of those things that if you are inclined to believe in it, you will see it everywhere. Correlated with that is a complete inability to see it for what it is: inertia.

I can’t directly argue the existence of this entity, but I can try to warn you Brainglutton against believing in some kind of entity whose existence is part of the national myth in Turkey. I can’t say I know a great deal about the history of this belief but I do know that it is used in Turkish politics to arouse fear and paranoia against some vaporous enemy. This doesn’t seem bad by itself, Progressives in America tend to have such populist sentiments after all, but more recently this national belief has been used by Prime Minister turned President Erdoğan to eviscerate the military (look up Ergenokon) and then independently eviscerate the Gülen movement. Both were deemed shadow organizations out to topple Erdoğan’s party and government. All the while, Erdoğan has moved to authoritarian rule. He and his AK party are attempting, at almost all costs, to convert Turkey’s parliamentary democracy to some perverse form of Presidential system where all power resides in the executive which directly controls the judiciary and legislative branches, All the while, Erdoğan has cast himself as a defender of Turkey and Islam against these shadowy forces. Yet he is the only illiberal and undemocratic force currently.

If there is a problem with how think tanks work then convince people of the mechanism of that problem and fix it, if there is a problem with how lobbying works then convince people of that problem and fix it, if there is a problem with how whatever aspect of our government’s functioning works then convince people of the problem and fix it. Nothing good can come from selling people on the belief that there is a deep state that is somehow keeping America on the wrong course or whatever. It’s a concept without any physical representation and it’s dangerous because it can never be identified and understood. It warps and changes shape according to the user’s needs. Populist politicians will use such beliefs to their ends. See for example Trump and Sanders. They’re relatively mild when compared to Erdoğan, but it doesn’t seem like a healthy way to make political decisions.

[puddleglum]

Politicians are expert at only one thing, getting elected. To actual pass legislation that doesn’t blow up stuff, they need help from experts. For example if events in North Elbonia act up and it looks like the US has interests that might be effected, the president could spend the next six months doing nothing but becoming an expert on North Elbonian culture and politics, which would mean neglecting all of the other responsibilities. Alternatively, he could ask the experts on North Elbonia who are employed at the Department of Defense, State, various intelligence agencies, and various think tanks. Regardless of who the president is they will receive similar advice and take similar action.
This is not a conspiracy or any kind of interconnected web. Politicians need to rely on experts to actually do anything and those experts reflect the consensus of whatever that particular field is. The larger and more complex a government is the more it reflects the consensus of the experts and the less democratic it is. This is a necessity.

[Ravenman]

One other thing just occurred to me: what was the “deep state”'s role in the Iraq war?

On one hand, we have have this article that implies that the “deep state” pulls the levers of power, and is probably the real brains driving US foreign policy, presumably including the invasion of Iraq.

On the other hand, we have a traditional narrative that many bureaucrats knew for sure that the WMD claims in Iraq were bogus, and they were bullied by the top leadership, like Dick Cheney and various Bush political appointees, into supporting the war.

It seems like a contradiction that all these mid-level government employees who constitute the shadow government get to boss around the top leaders because the mid-level types constitute this awesome “deep state” secret power structure; except when the top-level leaders boss around the mid-level experts to lie about WMD to justify an invasion that the hushed-up civil servants knew was a mistake.

So, BG, how does that work?

[bump]

@marshmallow

Incidentally, there’s a less subversive term called the invisible or submerged state coined by Suzanne Mettle to describe government programs many people don’t recognize as government programs. I’ve also seen both those terms used in place of “deep state.”

If you’re one of the persons listed on Mettle’s graph as not knowing that ANY of those programs are government programs, you’re a total mouthbreathing idiot. Every one of those things is very clearly a government program, and most have something to do with taxation or government assistance, both of which are so firmly government functions that it amazes me that people would think they’re anything else.

I mean, I can see how someone getting a Coverdell ESA through a bank might not have any direct interaction with the government, but clearly the government had to allow for that sort of tax advantage, otherwise the IRS isn’t getting their cut.

Claiming that there’s a some kind of “submerged state” because people are idiots is kind of dumb. It’s right there in plain sight and not even hidden in the least bit.

[BrainGlutton]

James Howard Kunstler writes:

Since then, the country see-sawed between the long tenures of two Deep State errand boys from each major party, putting both parties in such a bad odor that Trump now rises on their mephitic fumes. Which raises the question, of course: what exactly is this Deep State? Answer: A leviathan of symbiotic rackets producing maximum incompetence affecting adversely the majority of citizens. It’s a blood-sucking beast of a hundred-thousand heads draining the USA of its dwindling vitality, lying about its intentions while it advertises the pietistic certainties of the Left and superstitious shibboleths of the Right, leaving a smoking hole in the middle where the practical problems of everyday life used to be worked out by practical means.

The Deep State is also the sum of unintended consequences and diminishing returns of a late-stage, bureaucratic, techno-industrial economy cannibalizing itself to stay alive. One obvious conclusion is that this economy has got to change before there is nothing left to eat, and no political figure on the scene, including Trump and Bernie Sanders, has a plausible vision of where this takes us. Both really just assume that the engine keeps chugging down the track of ever more material wealth that can be distributed differently. The truth is, there will be a lot less material wealth of the kind we’re used to, and a lot less capital representation in the things we call “money.” In fact, the scene at hand today is just a spectacle of the shrewdest and biggest rodents scarfing up the table-scraps of a 200-year-long banquet.

Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Deep State incarnate, which is the real reason so few citizens trust her. Every poor schnook getting shaken down for a $90,000 appendectomy bill looks at Hillary and knows exactly what she represents. Every 25-year-old jobless, couch-surfing millennial carrying fifty-grand in college debt sees the face of the Deep State in her self-satisfied demi-smile. Mainly, she has gulled the diversity pimps — because they are wards of the Deep State — and women, because it’s Mommy’s “turn” to direct the Deep State. Writer, financier, and Deep State rogue operative Jim Rickards keeps insisting that Uncle Joe Biden will end up as the Democratic nominee. (He said so in a Tweet just the other day). You have to wonder what this guy knows. Don’t suppose that Uncle Joe is the knight on a white horse you’ve been waiting for. After all, he’s vice-president of the Deep State.

Voters seem attracted to Trump because he’s so eager to give the finger to the Deep State. It deserves the finger, but it also needs to be carefully disassembled without blowing up what remains of this country. Trump already has a good start on blowing up the Republican Party. Never before have so many party officials dissociated themselves from the (so far) presumptive nominee. I expect to see more extreme measures against Trump to be yet attempted by the party mandarins in the two months before the convention. I doubt you will hear about them before they happen.

This Kunstler, BTW, may be a visionary or a crackpot or something of both – it’s a really tough call in his case. For years he has been warning of (and, some might say, looking forward to) the impending collapse of global industrial civilization, mainly because of the Peak Oil effect, and he keeps beating that drum even as global petroleum consumption declines and alternative energy sources expand. I said “mainly,” not “entirely” – he also sees unsustainable financial arrangements as a factor, and that argument gains more salience every year. But, while financial crises have disrupted civilizations many times, none has ever destroyed one yet. (Hitler came to power only after Germany had reined in its hyperinflation and fully recovered from the Depression.)

I recently finished Lofgren’s book and will post a summary here soon.

[John_Mace]

“The Deep State is also the sum of unintended consequences and diminishing returns of a late-stage, bureaucratic, techno-industrial economy cannibalizing itself to stay alive.”

@BG

This Kunstler, BTW, may be a visionary or a crackpot or something of both – it’s a really tough call in his case.

No, BG, it’s not a tough call at all in this case.

[TriPolar]

@Twoflower

Sounds like the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, essentially.

And the New World Order among other names. It’s our system, industry, bureaucracy, a rigged political system, and a populace of fearful wienies that can be led by the nose. Giving it a new name doesn’t change anything.

[Lemur866]

If the leadership of the “deep state” include Hillary Clinton, then that’s not much of a deep state, is it? I thought the presidency didn’t matter? And yet here we have the literal physical embodiment of the Deep State crystallized into the human form of Hillary Clinton, and she thinks it’s worthwhile to become president.

So which is it? I guess it turns out after all that the Presidency and all the elected and appointed offices really are consequential.

I take the point that there’s an elite that runs the country. They run the country in various ways, but a really important way they run the country is by holding positions that make important decisions. They run companies, they own companies, they hold office, they call up their friends who hold offices. They actually want to be president, or vice president, or senator, or supreme court justice, or CIA director, or National Security Adviser, or Republican National Committee Chairman, or CEO of Microsoft, because these are the people who have the final say in thousands of important decisions.

Calling it the “Deep State” is a seriously stupid way of looking at it. These people operate in public. The “way things really work” is not secret. Are people in powerful positions stage managed by their staff? Yes, yes they are. But the staff doesn’t form a permanent power structure with an identical set of interests. Who chooses the staff? OK, Karl Rove and vast influence on George Bush. How does Karl Rove get to be the guy who whispers in Bush’s ear? And who had more power, Bush or Rove?

So there are unelected people who sit there in the room where it happens and help to make it happen. These people are not secret. They influence the government by being the guy standing there when the President asks people what they think.

Is there a continuity of government, no matter who holds what position? Sure there is, because only certain types of people get asked to be Supreme Court Justice, and when one justice dies another one takes their place. Does John Robert’s chief of staff, some guy we’ve never heard of, wield enormous power? Sure he does. And when he retires and Roberts chooses another chief of staff, that guy will wield enormous power. But he’ll wield his vast powers in pretty much exactly the same way the first guy did, just like when Roberts leaves the court some other guy will fill the role of Chief Justice pretty much the same way Roberts did.

So if you think there’s a vast conspiracy in your town, and the cops and the mayor and the business leaders and the city bureaucrats and union leaders boss everyone around, well, there you go. The leaders turn out to be the leaders. Yes, in some places there are “bosses” that run things and the mayor or the police chief owe their jobs to him. And people know who that guy is, just like Russians didn’t suddenly forget about Putin back when Medvedev was president for a while.

[DrCube]

The idea that large corporations and their rich owners have an outsized influence on US government, and that their foreign policy goals are significantly different than those of the American people as a whole, seems unarguably true.

I don’t know if that is what people actually mean by “deep state” though. People often see sinister competence when there is only random chance and aggregated, spur-of-the-moment, selfish decision making.

[Deeg]

This sounds like stuff the Bundys would love.