Some years ago a longtime congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, wrote a book that launched a meme. It was caled “Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of the Shadow Government.”
Amusingly, the original idea of the deep state that Lofgren put forward bears little resemblance to theTrumpian propaganda that we all live with now, as Lofgren explained recently in a Washington Post Op-Ed.
The deep state he had in mind wasn’t one in which hard-working, smart, non-partisan, career civil servants like Marie Yovanovitch, Alex Vindman or Fiona Hill were part of a villainous cabal out to subvert democracy. But that is what deep state has come to mean when a Rand Paul demonizes the whistleblower who outed the Ukraine plot as “a deep state operative.” This is bunk, fake news and misdirection.
In fact, Lofgren argued the exact opposite. He was worried that it increasingly didn’t matter whether government was controlled by Republicans under a George W. Bush or Democrats under a Barack Obama because there was a perennial deep state made up of entrenched interests who had gained an outsize influence and were now able to set “their own policy agenda unchecked by the will of the people, their elected representatives, or the civil servants meant to regulate them.”
Days before leaving office in January 1961, Eisenhower warned of the risk of “unwarranted influence” by what he called the military-industrial complex. Now it has been joined by the medical-industrial complex, the fossil fuel and financial complex and the Silicon Valley cyber-monopolies.
No government matches the power of these oligarchies. Indeed, governments are elected by their money, staffed by their minions, and reported on by their propagandists. This deep state has avoided being outed by the rhetorical jujitsu of claiming the deep state is not them but rather any politician, party, reporter, or critic who opposes them. It’s a neat trick.
Trump ran against this imaginary deep state, but he is its apotheosis. He promises tax cuts for working people but delivers them to himself and his cronies who can pay $200,000 to join Mar-A-Lago and $14,000 annual dues. His conflict-of-interest cabinet is filled with billionaires and their lobbyists regulating their own industries.
Under Trump, doing the bidding of the deep state has been job one. Is Wall Street in danger of being regulated? Is the fossil fuel industry at risk of having its contribution to apocalyptic climate change curtailed? Are constantly rising healthcare costs going to be curbed? Of course not. Predatory capitalists have been singing “Let the good times roll” ever since Trump took office.
The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who was no enemy of regulating the real deep state, understood people like Trump and the threat they pose. He warned of “the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are nor ought to be rulers of mankind.”
Why? Because they are “an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an intent to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
In theory, then, the government ought to be a check upon the rapacity of what the 19th Century populists called “the money power,” but as Smith warned before America was even a county, any government “instituted for the security of property” soon turns out to be, in reality, “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
How does this work in practice? An unpopular plutocrat demagogue like Trump gets aid from an enemy country to win an election using modern technology to spread false narratives, fake news, and smears that appeal to racial, ethnic, and class prejudices. Then, to win re-election, he is soon trying to do the same thing again, by blackmailing an embattled ally to gin-up dirt on a rival in exchange for needed military aid.
Though caught, it is widely expected that a jury of his peers in the Senate, politicians of the same party, will not vote to remove him from office. They see nothing wrong, will use his demagogue’s playbook to blame the deep state and spread more fake news in order to stay in power. Is this any surprise?
Senators with an average net worth of $14 million and House members with an average net worth of $7 million are not the paladins of the common people but the tools of the oligarchs. They will do anything necessary to maintain power especially the power to write the laws that regulate the businesses and tax the wealth of themselves and their donors.
They will lie, cheat, steal elections, gerrymander districts, suppress votes by of partisans for the other party and minorities, pack the courts with like-minded jurists, and even solicit help from foreign oligarchs with whom they have more in common than with their fellow Americans.
Luckily help is on the way. Michael Bloomberg, with a personal Wall Street war chest of $52 billion, intends to enter the lists for a joust with Trump for control of the Republic. Those worried about the entrenched power of the money interest can rest easy.