The Deep State (6 page)

Accordingly, Congress has been as indulgent toward Silicon Valley as it has toward Wall Street: the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a public auction of votes for money, and in return the industry received extraordinary leeway to abuse its market power over consumers, as any cable subscriber will attest. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 upset the traditional understanding of copyright as a balanced legal protection afforded to creators for a finite period of time and skewed power in favor of the copyright holder to the point where fair use and competition have sometimes been threatened. The Stop Online Piracy Act, first introduced in Congress in 2011 and periodically reintroduced in modified form, would further shift the balance to copyright holders such that innocent computer users could unknowingly become criminals.

While nothing in America can rival the material opulence of Wall Street or Palo Alto in recent years, the center of gravity of the Deep State remains situated in and around the nation's capital. Washington's explosive expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncements that national governance is breaking down. The institutions of the visible state may be dysfunctional, but the machinery of the Deep State has been steadily expanding. That this secret and unaccountable shadow government floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American governance in the twenty-first century: drone
strikes, data mining, secret prisons, and Panopticon-like control
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of citizens' private data thanks to the technology of Silicon Valley on the one hand; while the ordinary, visible institutions of self-government decline to the status of a banana republic.

The Deep State Is More Than Just the Military-Industrial Complex

The ruling structures of large and complex societies are never uniform. A coalition of dominant factions operates according to an unwritten (or even unspoken) agreement that wary cooperation is better than open strife, and that any clash of conflicting interests ought to be shelved—or at least hidden from public view—in favor of longer-term advantage. Critical analyses of the various components of the Deep State tend to view them as stand-alone entities rather than cooperating factions in a larger social environment. Ever since Eisenhower's critique of the military-industrial complex, whole libraries have come into print about American militarism and its impact on domestic politics. Likewise, harsh critiques of Wall Street and its periodic seizure of the political process in Washington go back to the nineteenth century.
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Silicon Valley, the newest of the three corporate sectors I have mentioned, has by contrast almost escaped attention as to its national political impact: admiring biographies of its hero-entrepreneurs and breathless futurologies of the wonders that the high-tech revolution will achieve
have been the literary staple so far. Critiques are usually limited to grousing about how the Valley's moguls are responsible for skyrocketing real estate prices in San Francisco, or wonderment over billion-dollar market capitalizations for apps that tell you when your pizza is cooked.

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq stimulated many more books and articles grappling with America's military-industrial complex and its baneful political consequences. The financial meltdown of September 2008 was followed by an avalanche of volumes describing in minute detail the chicanery of our largest financial institutions and their near immunity from accountability. In the wake of Edward Snowden's exposure of domestic surveillance by the NSA, much public debate has focused on the vast extent of that surveillance, how much Congress, the NSA's ostensible overseers, didn't know about it, and the ambiguous role of Silicon Valley.

Few have stood back to examine these seemingly separate stories as related and synergistic components of a much larger story: the transformation of the United States from a quasi–social democracy to a political oligarchy maintaining the outward form, but not the spirit, of constitutional government. My argument is that a different kind of governing structure has evolved that made possible both the rapacity of Wall Street and the culture of permanent war and constant surveillance. These superficially distinct phenomena are outgrowths of the same political culture, so they must be seen as related, just as a house cat and a leopard are related through a common ancestor.

The state within a state that promotes and benefits from militarism, a plutocratic boom-and-bust economy, and a comprehensive surveillance state is hiding in plain sight. Its operators pursue agendas that are hardly secret. That they are uncompromisingly self-seeking should hardly be surprising, nor is it evidence of a deep-laid plot. As the political scientist Harold Lasswell observed more than half a century ago, a society's leadership class consists of people whose “private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest.” It slightly misses the mark to fall back on traditional terminology and refer to the leaders of the Deep State simply and without elaboration as “the 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 is in a class by itself: sheer quantity can achieve a quality all its own. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it possesses menacing aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya; its manifest incapacity to anticipate, avert, or appropriately respond to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression; even its curious blindness to the obvious potential for a hurricane to drown New Orleans—are routine enough that it is only its protectiveness toward its higher-ranking officials that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.
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Far from being brilliant conspirators, the prevalence of mediocre thinking is what frequently makes the system's operatives stand out. We had better debunk an erroneous popular notion which holds that structures that arise from evolutionary processes are qualitatively “better” than the ones preceding them. The Deep State is a wasteful and incompetent method of governance. But it persists because its perverse incentive structure frequently rewards failure and dresses it up as success. Its pervasive, largely commonplace corruption and creation of synthetic bogeymen and foreign scapegoats anesthetize the public into a state of mind variously composed of apathy, cynicism, and fear—the very antithesis of responsible citizenship.

How Groupthink Drives the Deep State

How did I come to write about the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a specialist in national security with a top-secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But like virtually every person employed by a bureaucracy—and it makes no difference whether that bureaucracy is in government or the private sector—I became partially assimilated by the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting just before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are what George W. Bush would call “the deciders.”

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.
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This syndrome is endemic to Washington: the town is characterized by sudden fads, be it biennial budgeting, grand bargains, or the invasion of countries that our citizens can barely locate on a world map. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. Just as in the military, everybody has to get on board, and it is not a career-enhancing move to question the mission. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be small. 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 weight of its boring ordinariness once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time. Your workday is typically
not
some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the government-issue clock affixed to the off-white office wall when it's eleven in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another slice 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 they simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is
classified
?”
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No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the draconian retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, it is easy to grow immune to the often Kafkaesque strangeness of one's surroundings. To borrow the formulation of the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, who bloviated about “unknown knowns,” I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had been a few years away from government to reflect upon it.

Key Turning Points

Although the problems I shall discuss have roots reaching back many decades before I came to Washington, I had the privilege to be present, in a small capacity, at a few key historical inflection points that locked in tendencies and habits of mind. I was handling a member of Congress's armed services portfolio when the Berlin Wall fell and, shortly after that, American forces defeated Saddam Hussein's army in the Persian Gulf War. A sense of euphoria bordering on hubris was palpable. Triumph in the cold war was supposed to mark, in the words of Francis Fukuyama's exuberantly silly essay of the time, “the end of history,” the dawn of a Periclean age of unparalleled American might made even more attractive by American fast-food franchises straddling the globe (
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman bookended Fukuyama's essay with the even more shallow observation that no two countries with McDonald's restaurants had
ever fought one another—a statement that was false even at the time he wrote it).

A few years later, when I was a staffer with the House Budget Committee, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan regularly gave testimony heralding the “New Economy,” which would mysteriously conquer the business cycle and balance the federal budget while curing unemployment and inflation. The dot-com revolution, well under way as he uttered those pronouncements, was supposed to unleash a golden era of prosperity, creativity, and personal freedom. It didn't quite work out that way.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack and the botched response to it delivered a twofold lesson: first, perpetual intervention in conflicts abroad is likely to spawn what the CIA, the author of many such interventions since World War II, calls “blowback”—the unintended negative consequences of an intervention suffered by the party that intervenes. It is irrefutable that America's funding and arming a religious-based resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created a Frankenstein's monster that little more than a decade later brought the war back to the United States. But we have largely been unwilling to connect the dots beyond that. Invading Iraq in 2003 spawned further instability in the Middle East, and more terrorist groups. Why is it that so few of our pundits have noted the obvious fact that the civil war in Syria and the rise of ISIS are the direct results of our actions in Iraq? Beyond that, the United States government's ham-fisted meddling in internal Ukrainian politics helped set in motion a predictable chain of events that has sparked a new cold war. Actions such as these have drained our treasury, reduced our international prestige, and destabilized large areas of the world.

Seven years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the idol of free-market dogma came crashing to the ground. All the imbecilities of 1980s and 1990s economic policy that had been masquerading as common sense—unregulated Wall Street speculation as the most efficient way to allocate capital; markets as self-correcting mechanisms; tax cuts that pay for themselves; a rising tide lifting all boats—were comprehensively discredited in a titanic blowout that erased
$12.8 trillion in wealth, equal almost to an entire year's gross domestic product. For the first time since the Great Depression, the raw material was at hand for national economic reform based on an empirical critique of the performance of free-market ideology over the previous thirty years.

We were at a historical turning point and yet history somehow failed to turn. The actual policy choices that followed the disaster of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq on the one hand, and the 2008 financial meltdown and the collapse of the housing market on the other, were neither the choices that a dispassionate examination of the facts would have suggested, nor what dozens of public opinion polls implied the American people wanted. The American leadership class (in the broadest sense of that term: government elites, top business executives, corporate media management, newspaper editorial boards, “opinion leaders” everywhere) succeeded in bandaging together a top-down consensus that the failures could not have been predicted, no one in charge was to blame, and the malfunctions were isolated and episodic rather than a systemic moral corruption of America's leadership class. The disingenuous testimony of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, to the 9/11 Commission that no one could have foreseen that someone would fly airplanes into buildings was echoed a half-dozen years later by one Wall Street executive after another trooping to the witness table on Capitol Hill and swearing under oath that selling no-documentation mortgages to people who couldn't pay them back seemed like a sound business model at the time.