The Deep State

A real shadow government or a conspiracy theorist's wet dream? Mike Lofgren, a previous Republican insider, gives us the answer.

Mike Lofgren was a Republican congressional aide for almost 3 decades. His final role was chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee. Consequently, his writing about the ‘Deep State’ is notable. It helpfully opposes State propagandists who label users of the term as ‘conspiracy theorists’. There are nuts, but less in the packet than they want us to believe.

LOFGREN QUITS

Lofgren first expressed his disgust at the state of politics with ‘Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult’. That he wrote it in 2011 paradoxically makes it more relevant now.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant…

The faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations’ bottom lines:

• Instead of raising the minimum wage, let’s build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it).

• Instead of predatory bankers, it’s evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

THE DEEP STATE

Mike Lofgren’s ‘Anatomy of the Deep State’ is essential reading, and the purpose of my post. This extract will persuade you to to click that link.

“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…

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.”

Thanks to A Skeptic for sharing Mike Lofgren in an aggregation of links at ‘Understanding American Foreign Policy’.

Understanding American Foreign Policy

You can read Mike Lofgren’s latest articles on his website. His book is ‘The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government’.

Header image credit to Robert Balog.