Address to the Committee for the Republic, Metropolitan Club, November 15, 2016 By Mike Lofgren

Address to the Committee for the Republic, Metropolitan Club, November 15, 2016

By Mike Lofgren

Let me tell you a little about what led me to write my last book. For my entire career, I was a budget analyst on Capitol Hill. I had hardly written a word for publication, let alone a book, until I was almost 60, and safely retired. Writing openly about your opinions is not a good way to have a long and successful career as a staff member on Capitol Hill. In any case, my objective then was not being Diogenes and wandering about D.C. with a lamp; it was paying the mortgage and getting the kids through school. Much like Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: a man without any particular qualities; just an average bureaucrat.

But something intervened. Remember the 2010 election? Voters, in their infinite wisdom, selected several dozen new members, some of whom may have possessed an extra Y chromosome. Once they were duly sworn, they decided it was a fine idea to drive the United States government into a sovereign default. That was it; ever since the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, a policy predicated on the most blatant lying by the Bush administration and the most abject stupidity on the part of Congress, on a largely bipartisan basis, I had wondered how long I could deal with organized stupidity. But after 2010, Congress had deteriorated into a circus run from the monkey cage. Time to call it a day.

I began my tenure as a mainstream Republican in the early days of the Reagan presidency. By the end of my career, I considered myself a resolute nonpartisan, and increasingly viewed all political ideologies as mental and emotional crutches, or substitute religions: for leaders, a means of manipulating attitudes and behaviors; for the rank and file, a lazy surrogate for problem solving and a way of fulfilling the craving to belong to something bigger than oneself. Beyond that, ideologies represent the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where one mistakes an abstract belief or personal opinion for physical reality. I finally settled for being an analytic empiricist.

Back in private life, I wrote a book about my observations on Congress, titled The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Perhaps I can claim a modest amount of credit for helping to launch the now-thriving cottage industry of political pundits noticing the strangeness of the present-day Party of Lincoln with the mortified distaste of an Anglican bishop confronted by a tribe of cannibals. That said, I was hardly ready to launch myself into the arms of the Party of Jefferson and Jackson. That crowd had serious problems, too. To paraphrase a classic description of the Bourbon kings, the Democrats had forgotten everything and learned nothing.

Shortly after finishing the book, I began to feel that I had dealt with the symptoms – lurid symptoms, to be sure – rather than fundamental causes. Diseases always manifest themselves as symptoms, but these should not be confused with the underlying cause of the malady. America’s politics were broken, but so were its economic engine and its foreign policy. Social indicators of human development, like life expectancy and maternal mortality, showed that America was slipping in comparison with other developed countries. Economic inequality was growing. Infrastructure was getting rickety. Educational policy was confused and ineffectual. The Tea Party, as gaudy as its anger might have been, was merely one among several warning signs of a deep-seated dysfunction in the way American society was run at the very top.

This feeling that I had only dealt with symptoms led me to my next book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.

I use the term Deep State to mean an informal association of certain key elements of government with top-level finance and industry, which rules the country with only limited heed to the consent of the governed through the formal political process.

During the last several years, the media have been flooded with pundits condemning the broken politics of Washington. Conventional wisdom says that partisan gridlock and dysfunction are the new normal. We are often threatened with government shutdowns, and governance is on par with a banana republic.

Despite this gridlock, though, President Obama, like his immediate predecessor, has been able to kill American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners for years without charge, and conduct “dragnet” surveillance on Americans without a warrant. At home, this power is expressed through massive displays of force by militarized federal, state, and local police. Abroad, the president can start wars without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress.

These are not isolated contradictions; they are so pervasive they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During 2011 – a year so poisonous that I left Capitol Hill – when political warfare over the debt ceiling began to paralyze orderly governance and the Treasury was juggling accounts to avoid breaching the debt limit, the United States somehow scraped together one billion dollars to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.

Yes, there is another government beneath the one visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid of public and private institutions ruling the country and linked to but only intermittently controlled by the visible state whose leaders we nominally choose. Those who seek a conspiracy theory to explain this will be disappointed. There is no secret, conspiratorial cabal.

The Deep State is not the whole government, and it is not just the military-industrial complex. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement, plus key parts of the other government branches. The Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Justice and CIA are all components. We also include the Treasury because of its power over financial flows, enforcement of international economic sanctions, and its symbiosis with Wall Street. A lot of sanctions’ day-to-day execution is left to American megabanks in the same way that the Pentagon outsourced military logistics to contractors in Iraq. The Federal Reserve System is also part of the mix.

Some parts of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. There are also key trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive national security cases are tried.

The final government component is a rump Congress of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally fractious and partisan, is only intermittently aware of the Deep State, and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from its emissaries.

A word on the presidency: for all its power, and for all the anguished libertarians who call it an elective monarchy or a plebicitary dictatorship, it is in my opinion not those. The president wields not inconsiderable power, but as primus inter pares, not as an unconstrained autocrat. We have only to think of Bill Clinton in 1993, cursing because his economic policy was hostage to a bunch of bond traders, or George Bush’s 2005 plan to privatize Social Security, which did not get a single hearing from a Republican Congress. Or the Afghan surge of 2009, bulldozed through by secretaries Gates, Clinton, and General Petraeus over the severe reservations of Barack Obama. As chairman of the board, the president wields the most authority, but remains responsible to the stakeholders in the Deep State.

While the government as a whole may be attentive to the desires of all corporations, the particular Deep State components are even more intimately linked by a web of money, mutual goals, and careerism to key elements of corporate America. These elements include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. As one former NSA insider told me, the spy agencies are completely dependent on Silicon Valley’s technology and cooperation to perform their mission.

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that rules America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash to keep the political machine operating largely as a diversionary puppet show. Should the politicians forget their lines, Wall Street floods Washington with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice – well beyond the dreams of a government salaryman. Just look at General Petraeus’s career arc, which ended up at KKR on Wall Street.

That should serve as a thumbnail for the thesis of the book. I want to stress that this is the furthest thing from a conspiracy theory. I probably would have improved my commercial prospects by going full Alex Jones and talking about chem trails and alien autopsies – such is the American appetite for science fiction in the age of the Internet. Much more elusive, and much harder to render in vivid terms, is the sheer ordinariness of the Deep State. It is the vector sum of all the petty bureaucratic agendas of all the agencies, major corporations, and think tanks, all marching like a colony of driver ants to maximize their advantage.

My thesis is far more prosaic and grounded in the natural, organic evolution of social systems than any conspiracy theory will admit to. We may consider the Deep State to be a hybrid of Max Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy, whereby bureaucratic routine impels stereotyped behavior by human actors within bureaucracies, and Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy, according to which democratic institutions eventually develop a permanent leadership class and top-down control, with little accountability.

When I completed the manuscript, two years ago, two things struck me: first, there were popular rumblings of discontent with the Deep State not detectable before the 2008 crash. Slogans about the one percent had entered the vernacular. The Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency seemed genuinely to shock many people. And while the behavior of the Tea Party was often incoherent, its faction in Congress was beginning to throw sand in the gears of the orderly business of the shadow government: already in 2013 a Left-Right coalition in the House nearly passed an amendment to defund the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs. Something was up.

But my second conclusion was this: the Deep State seemed relentlessly well-entrenched. Its sheer ability to co-opt any centers of opposition with endless streams of cash, both through campaign contributions and the revolving door, had proven effective time and again.

Despite the greatest global economic meltdown since the Crash of ’29, the same Wall Street players were still in the saddle, stronger than ever. The five largest banks had assets equal to 43 percent of U.S. gross domestic product before the crash; already by 2012 they made up 56 percent. The pre-crash bank CEOs were still in their corner offices. It appeared that change was going to be a glacial process, with setbacks. But that was a false stability camouflaging a precarious equilibrium, as in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914, or the Soviet Union of 1980.

It is obvious in retrospect that the economic imbalances created by the Deep State, and its strange complex of paranoid fear and vaunting hubris in its relation to the rest of the world, had spilled over and affected the psychology of ordinary Americans who had little accurate information or concern about the intricacies of how government really works. But intuitively, they sensed something was wrong, even if their instincts led them to magical thinking and risky bets.

Racial and class conflicts such as we have not seen in decades are now back in full public view. Not in living memory have we seen two full-scale insurgencies in both major parties, one successful, the other nearly so. This is a major challenge for the Deep State. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, secret intelligence budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. Whether it can successfully assimilate a Donald Trump, or could have assimilated a Bernie Sanders if history had unfolded in a slightly different way, is the foremost question in front of us.

I would imagine that the Committee for the Republic is primarily concerned with foreign policy, and specifically, our unconstitutional state of perpetual war, executive overreach, and congressional nonfeasance. Bismarck once argued that in the hierarchy of importance for the state, foreign policy was supreme: das Primat der Aussenpolitik. But I think he was deluded, at least with respect to the United States.

Throughout American history it has been domestic policy which rules, and which determines the shape of foreign policy, however much the think tanks of Washington haughtily disdain that vulgar and inconvenient idea. The recently much-debated notion of American Exceptionalism is just a rehash of Manifest Destiny, already a cliché during the 19^th century that paleoconservatives consider our golden age.

The reason domestic policy dictates foreign policy is simple: unlike you, the vast majority of Americans don’t care about foreign policy, but when domestic tensions become too severe or too complicated, or polarization between domestic constituencies too intractable, the temptation is always there to resolve them through a bogus national unity, to be achieved on some foreign field of conflict. The war mentality thus developed at home then proceeds to infantilize and coarsen the population, with all kinds of negative effects well beyond the war mentality itself.

How will this tension be played out in a Trump presidency, with or without the hybrid state whispering in his ear and exacerbating his worst instincts? One reads that the share prices of defense contractors have risen sharply since the election. More significant, cheerleaders of the debacle in Iraq are openly auditioning for high-level jobs.

Finally, have the American people magically changed with this election? Statistically, which is the greater risk to the vast majority of what Sarah Palin calls “Real Americans” – is it terrorism as defined by the government, or Oxycontin washed down with Wild Turkey? Will popular perceptions of which of those two evils is truly the greater threat to public well-being miraculously change during the next four years, as opposed to the last sixteen? Alas, I am an historian, not a prophet.  

Thank you.