The Dreams of the Deep State

The Deep State is called by many names.  Politicos from the left call it the blob; from the right, the swamp.  Others call it the iron triangle, the shadow government, and the military-industrial-congressional complex.  These names convey a degree of autonomy to the Deep State, yet reveal little about its nature.  Herein lies the problem with political language.  As Orwell said, political language “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines, and covering up all the details.”

Today, America finds itself in crisis and a central villain (or hero, depending on your politics) is the Deep State.  Before condemning or celebrating the Deep State, citizens must answer important questions.  Does the Deep State possess its own will?  What is the Deep State beyond the political rhetoric? Is it a really an autonomous and powerful force in American politics?  Like a machine progressing toward artificial intelligence, at what point could the Deep State dream?  

Historian Richard Hofstadter argued in his 1948 work, The American Political Tradition, that “it is imperative in times of cultural crisis to gain fresh perspectives on the past.”  A fresh perspective is an essential first step on the path of uncovering the truth about the Deep State. Fortunately for us, Hofstadter can serve as guide.  Like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, his analysis assists Millennials in uncovering the nature of power and control in our system so that we can evaluate the Deep State.

To support these goals, I divided this essay into three parts.  First, I distilled Hofstadter's work to three core principles arguably representative of the American political tradition prior to 1945.  Second, I applied Hofstadter's principles toward rethinking our common narrative of America's post-World War II history.  Last, I attempt to draw conclusions about the nature of the Deep State and whether it can dream its own dream. 

Part one: Hofstadter's Principles

Ordered Liberty

The first principle of the American political tradition is ordered liberty.  Although most governments value order, America's founders also desired liberty. Liberty and order are rarely correlated, so the Founders studied the Greeks, Romans, Judeo-Christian ethics, and British law to figure out why.  They discovered the secret for ordered liberty is basing government's constitution on a pessimistic view of human nature.  For the Founders, human nature was violent, selfish, and dangerous. As a result of that assessment, the Founders designed a system of rules to harness and channel human nature toward a positive goal: the pursuit of happiness.  The Constitution grants individuals the legal protections and boundaries to pursue their interests.  Government action limited itself to a minimal set of areas aimed at setting conditions for prosperity.  In this way, Hofstadter notes general agreement among historians that the “…Constitution itself is one of the world’s rare masterpieces of practical statecraft.”

Factionalism

A second principle of the American political tradition is the ever-presence of factionalism and partisan politics.  They are the hallmark of republican governance.  If ordered liberty required providing outlet for personal ambition in the American dream, maintaining fairness for everyone's pursuit of the American dream required constant calibrating, balancing, and realigning of partisan interests.  Battles raged between political parties representing labor and capital; democracy and republicanism; institutions and individuals; states and federalists; rural and urban; and farmers and manufacturers.  America’s leaders protected the American dream by balancing the interests of the factions. 

Interpreting factional interests is a main task for the American heroes and villains in Hofstadter’s essays.  When economic crisis, unruly labor, or big business tipped the balance toward one interest group or another, government intervened to restore balance.  Presidents such as Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt removed the “restrictions and privileges which had their origins in government” to ensure government’s neutral role as economic referee. In all cases, minimal levels of consensus was required prior to any major legislative action.

Foreign Policy Inseparable from Economic Policy

A third principle of the American political tradition is that foreign policy was inseparable from economic policy.  The first 27 presidents (from Washington to Taft) dealt with foreign policy mostly as an extension of domestic economic concerns.  Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were the first presidents to deal with substantive foreign political concerns.  Each, despite enormous pressure to the contrary, mobilized a deeply isolationist population to war and built and maintained domestic support for foreign operations.    

Hofstadter's Principles Summarized

Hofstadter's three principles -- ordered liberty through economy, factionalism, and a foreign policy inseparable from economic policy -- were key features of American history prior to the Cold War.  However, Hofstadter became somewhat de-emphasized in the post-war period.  Whereas President Wilson failed to persuade America's political factions to support global engagement through the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War brought with it the existential menace of the Soviet Union.  American leaders coaxed their political factions to sign up for the United Nations and the Brenton-Woods Conference.  These policies were designed to build an international legal and political framework to deter conflict and counter the Soviet threat.  These policies required America's leaders to reevaluate their priorities and suppress factional interests in favor of an apolitical grand strategy.

Part 2: Hofstadter Applied to the Cold War

The Cold War pushed America—to borrow a phrase from Dante’s Inferno—into the “dark wilderness” of international politics.  America set aside its political tradition in favor of sustained global leadership.  Global leadership, a key component of America’s Cold War grand strategy of Containment, required a peace time security apparatus.  Therefore, the Congress passed and Harry Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947.  The Deep State was born.  

Many Americans viewed the Deep State as illegitimate.  First, the Deep State focused policy attention and financial resources away from growing the economy.  Second, the Deep State demanded apolitical grand strategy and bristled at factional politics.  Third, the Deep State pursued foreign policy objectives perceived as, at best, only indirectly advancing America’s economic interests.  At worst, those goals were viewed as being distinct from America's domestic agenda. 

Despite initial opposition, the Deep State grew throughout the 1950s.  As the Soviet threat waxed and President Eisenhower’s first inaugural address warned of communism’s danger, only eight years later Eisenhower's farewell address warned of the military-industrial complex (the Deep State).  It weathered the Vietnam War and unpopular activities such as those conducted under the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, with minimal reform.  

Then, in late 1991, the Cold War ended.  Without the Soviet menace pressuring America's factions to submit to apolitical grand strategy,  Hofstadter’s principles began to resurface.  Politics again focused on prosperity.  President George H.W. Bush sought a “peace dividend.”  President Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan was, “the economy, stupid.”  Factional politics, although always present, intensified.  The 1990s witnessed bitter disputes over the federal budget which shut down the government.  The lines between domestic and foreign policy blurred.  In his 1993 inaugural address, President Clinton argued in defense of continued global engagement by saying that “there is no longer a clear division between what is foreign and what is domestic.”  The next year, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Toward the close of the century, Hofstadter's principles returned in force.  In response, the Deep State took steps to stay relevant and perpetuate its existence.  Defense strategists expanded “spectrum of warfare” to stability operations and interventions in civil conflicts.  The Congress authorized and funded the use of national security capabilities to counter narcotics and foreign organized crime.  State National Guard units received federal funds to establish military ties with former Soviet republics.  Membership in the NATO military alliance expanded haphazardly.  Despite these actions, the Deep State was adrift strategically and looking everywhere for new missions.

The 9/11 Effect 

The attack on September 11, 2001, reversed the ascendancy of Hofstadter's principles.  Sunni Islamic terrorists (fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon) destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and murdered 2,996 innocent people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  Hofstadter’s America—personified in the image of a domestically-focused President George W. Bush’s reading to school children—was again de-emphasized.  Factional politics gave way to bipartisan action against a second existential menace.  The American dream was subordinated to primal goals of security and order.  

The Congress declared global war on terror with almost no opposition.  It surged resources toward the Deep State, which added new layers of bureaucracy.  After ten years of strategic drift, the Deep State again found a requirement for apolitical grand strategy.  Only this time, apolitical grand strategy was confused with the tactic of counterterrorism.  When countering terror in Afghanistan proved insufficient to address the root cause of Islamist terror, America's leaders turned to the freedom agenda.  With overwhelming bipartisan support, the Congress authorized the Iraq war and aimed to bring democracy to the Middle East.

By 2003, the world’s most powerful and indispensable nation (at least according to the Deep State) began to pour out its blood and treasure.  However, the Freedom Agenda could not sustain domestic support.  National security issues became rapidly politicized.  In 2006, U.S. voters swept the minority party to power in the Congress.  In 2008, the American people elected a president who campaigned on a promise to end the wars.  After spending more than a trillion dollars and losing thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, America withdrew from Iraq in 2011. 

Hofstadter's principles of ordered liberty through economy, factionalism, and domestic-focused foreign policy can only be suppressed in response to a threat capable of sustaining congressional consensus. 

The brief period of bipartisan consensus after 9/11 fell away to a bitter (and normal) partisan environment in the mid-2000s.  The partisan vitriol erupted during the Obama Administration.  The Budget Control Act and sequestration reduced spending on the Deep State even though America was still “at war.”  President Obama summed up his foreign policy doctrine as avoiding “stupid shit” and focused on economic issues. America’s left-leaning political factions used their stewardship of all levers of power to implement a partisan domestic agenda.  After a series of highly uni-partisan domestic policy steps, including major social legislation that, for the first time U.S. history, passed without any minority party support, they set in motion a pendulum that would come crashing back.

Part 3: A Return of Hofstadter’s America 

The 2016 presidential election was a reckoning for those with vested interests in the Deep State.  Deep State voices sounded the alarm of retrenchment, isolationism, and abdication of American leadership.  The election reset American statecraft to Hofstadter's principles of economy, factionalism, and a U.S. foreign policy more closely linked to U.S. economic interests.  Although assumptions about America's role in the world are being reevaluated today, Hofstadter's principles are the underlying drivers.

As America comes to grips with the politics of our past, a small minority of Deep State technocrats are reacting—in many cases, by unlawfully releasing (leaking) information.  However, the traitorous actions of a few does not mean that Deep State is an autonomous entity.  Hofstadter would suggest the opposite. 

The main lesson of reflecting on Hofstadter's work is that power and control do not reside in the Deep State bureaucracy.  Power and control reside in the interests represented by the Congress, industry, the States, and the presidency.   

Dreams of the Deep State 

If the Deep State could dream, it would probably prefer to run itself like a business: efficiently, without compromise, and self-interestedly.  The Deep State would not waste money and it would more aggressively pursue fraud and abuse. It would seek to streamline business practices: for example, producing its military equipment and capabilities in one location instead of spreading the money around to multiple congressional districts. 

If the Deep State could dream, it would probably dream about eliminating excess organizations that serve only to reduce efficiency and increase employee frustration.  In 2017, the Deep State consists of : (1) an intelligence community with seventeen participating members; (2) a department of defense compromised of three military departments, five military services (including now the Chief of the National Guard Bureau), 54 state and territory national guard forces, a joint staff, nine combatant commands, and dozens of defense agencies and field activities; (3) a department of homeland security leading twenty-two separate agencies; and (4) the Department of Justice with multiple federal law enforcement agencies.  This is not a complete list. 

Even within the defense establishment, there is significant redundancy.  The Deep State would probably dream that it would never again need to purchase three variants of airplanes (such as the Joint Strike Fighter).  The Deep State would not permit America to field three different air forces in the same military (Navy, Marines, and the Air Force) or four different cyber forces.  The Deep State would question why the U.S. Army fields nearly as many aircraft as the Air Force and more aircraft than the Navy and Marine Corps.  It would ask why the U.S. Army fields large ships like the Navy. 

Streamlining these organizations requires a realignment of seventy years of entrenched interests. This is no small task.  However, in today's era, Millennials should begin demanding such accountability in their leaders.  We must never forget that the purpose of American statecraft is the maintenance of ordered liberty for its citizens to pursue their goals and dreams.  To serve this purpose, leaders must balance factional politics and interests and, absent an existential threat, keep foreign policy focused on serving economic policy.  Most importantly, we must understand that, by design, our political tradition precludes running government like a business.  Millennials should take note that if the government could operate like a business, it would require a form of government unrecognizable in America. 

Conclusion 

At the end of Dante's Inferno, Virgil ushers Dante to the center of Hell.  There, Dante finds the multi-headed Devil chewing on history’s most infamous traitors (Judas and Julius Caesar's murders).  If Hofstadter were escorting we citizens to the center of Hell, the Devil would not be chewing on anyone yet.  Instead, he would be holding a mirror.  In that mirror, we would see our reflection and an inscription that reads: “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”