Hurrah for the Deep State

October 28, 2024

So Hurrah for the Deep State, because that's the source of insiders who can actually get something done.

Hurrah for the Deep State? Wait a minute, aren't you one of the first bloggers to delve into the evils of the Deep State? Yes and no: delve into the Deep State and its fractures, yes, categorize it as evil, no, any more than we consider the weather evil: it's simply a fact of life.

In 2007, well before the term Deep State entered the common lexicon, I sketched the interconnected public-private pieces of what I termed the elite maintaining and extending global dominance (EMEGD), the structure that maintains the full spectrum of hard and soft power that I term The Imperial Project. This is a much wider understanding of the nature of power than the Deep State, which Mike Lofgren, author of The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government defined in this way:

"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.

The Deep State is a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the nation without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process."

In other words, The Deep State's job is to keep the status quo humming along regardless of whomever has been elected to the Presidency or Congress--what Lofgren insightfully summarized as a shadow government that makes decisions behind closed doors which the visible elected government ratifies and implements.

You get the idea: elected officials, i.e. "democracy," play a modest role in the entire structure, which displays remarkable continuity regardless of which politicians and parties are currently in power. That's the whole idea, of course: continuity that can't be disrupted by an election. Put another way, politics plays a limited role.

The purpose of my diagram is to show that the structure required to maintain the full spectrum of hard and soft power--military, diplomatic, intelligence, scientific, finance, commercial, energy, media, higher education--extends far beyond what's generally considered the Deep State.

For example, DoD (Department of Defense) is obviously part of the Deep State, but DoD is only one part of the much larger structure that includes DoE (Department of Energy), the national research labs (Livermore, et al.), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the immense research capabilities of U.S. universities that are funded by these agencies.

The point of my diagram is to show the integral importance of all the soft power nodes of cultural and commercial influence. For example, establishing a reserve currency isn't just a matter of issuing a new currency: to make it essential, the new currency must have an entire galaxy of soft power nodes behind it: a structure equivalent to the World Bank, IMF (International Monetary Fund), Federal Reserve, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), global banks, and so on: an immense interconnected structure that cannot be assembled as easily as a currency.

Without this immense structure in place, there's no power at all in issuing a new "reserve currency."



The same can be said of all the other nodes of soft power, each of which requires a culture of institutional expertise to function effectively. It's certainly possible to throw a lot of money at a new entity with global ambitions, but making it work is, well, the hard part.

Since 2007, the power and influence of Big Tech has reached such heights that it is now a key node of soft power that operates on multiple levels--as profit-maximizing corporations and as an increasingly important source of global influence and reach in the Imperial Project. One has as much chance of accessing the decision-making processes inside Big Tech as one does in gaining access to the DoD's decision-making process.

So yes, there's a bit of tongue-in-cheek irony in my celebrating the Deep State, but there is also something worthy of study here. These interlocking organizations and nodes of power are complex, and the institutional graveyards are full of outsiders recruited to "reform the agency from top to bottom." It isn't that easy. To truly move the needle, you need insiders--yes, Deep Staters with long experience--who grasp the urgency of reform.

For example, consider the key players in the Reagan Administration. Don Regan, George Schultz, Caspar Weinberger, James Baker, to name a few among many--all insiders with the knowledge and experience to actually get stuff done in sclerotic, hidebound bureaucracies impervious to outsiders' enthusiasm to "drain the swamp."

Equally noteworthy is the length of their service. If the roster of key players is constantly being shuffled, there is no way anyone will have the time needed to move the needle. No one can make any reforms stick in 9 months or a year, or even two years. You need insiders willing to serve for a full four year term to make any impact at all.

So Hurrah for the Deep State, because that's the source of insiders who can actually get something done. Such individuals are scarce, but they're around. They must be valued and given enough leeway and time to change the culture, not just the budget.