The Assault on the State
Unlike the previous two books on our current societal shit-storm by journalists, this one is by two political science professors, Stephen E. Hanson at William & Mary and Jeffrey S. Kopstein at UC Irvine. (I make nothing off this link.)
They start off trying to define what the phrase deep state even means, and where it originally came from.
With the metastasizing of the notion of a hidden deep state from the sensible depiction of the workings of Turkey’s military-led regime in the 1990s to a generalized critique of the global power of the military-industrial complex [on the left], to a conspiracy theory that the entire modern administrative state is secretly organized to thwart the popular will [on the right], the term has begun to poison political discourse on a truly global scale.
The Anti-phant
It’s sort of the opposite of the old story about the elephant.
What makes the deep state such an attractive political slogan is precisely its all-encompassing nature. Now that the deep state has become a synonym for the modern administrative state, opponents of state bureaucracy from diverse political camps can all join the chorus in attacking it.
No conspiracy necessary.
Which is not to say that conspiracies do not exist. There definitely are bad apples, and not just a few of them. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI as his own personal fiefdom for almost 50 years. Hoover’s COINTELPRO was real, extensive, and illegal. The CIA has overthrown democratically elected governments and experimented on American citizens. There is certainly an argument to be made that the 20th century barrel was pretty well spoiled.
But you don’t burn down the whole orchard. Democracies can self-correct.
Remarkably, notwithstanding Hayek’s warnings in The Road to Serfdom, not a single country with a reformist social democratic government has ever “slid” into one-party tyranny.
When they fail, it’s because the previous elites rebel and overthrow them (sometimes with the help of those meddling kids at the CIA). Peter Turchin lays out the basics in great detail: whenever inequality grows too much, the few spots at the top become too valuable, and people who believe they deserve one of those spots but can’t get one (Turchin calls them “counter-elites”) feel fully justified in burning it all down to make room.
But what if they don’t have to burn it down? What if they just weaken it enough that they can corrupt it, co-opt it, crawl inside it and take it over? That’s the real dream, the cancer dream — the benefits of a functioning body without the responsibility of maintaining it. It’s not permanent, or stable, because the body eventually dies.
Putin pulled that off, with the whole world watching. As Anne Applebaum lays out in Autocracy, Inc. from last week, Hugo Chavez did the same thing, even more effectively in a way — he fooled me (which Putin never did; John MCain never trusted him, and neither did I). I bought a lot of CITGO gasoline in the 90s and early 2000s, thinking Well, he can’t be worse than the Saudis, using my money to fund terrorists.1 Chavez also had the good luck to die while his country was only circling the drain.
When I was in Caracas in 2020, I saw hard-currency stores where people with access to dollars could buy Cheerios or Heinz ketchup. Meanwhile, people without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation.
Gasoline from Russia became the only gasoline available in Venezuela.
Let that sink in.
Applebaum goes on to detail relationships between Maduro’s “government” and China, Cuba, Turkey, and Iran. It seems unlikely it could have survived this long without those relationships and their financial and material support.
Adding a Dimension
What these academic authors of The Assault on the State want to point out is that the important distinction is not too much government vs too little government. It’s also the type of government.
It’s the rule of law that we on the bottom and in the middle value. What we see as fair is, Everybody wins, some of the time. What the elites see as fair is I win, all the time, because I’m better than you. To them that’s fair; they win because they deserve to win. Whether they are better because of genetics, or history, or the will of God, the real issue is that they can’t stand to lose, because that makes them feel small.
Well, you know what? They are small. We all are.
That probably sounds self-righteous. I don’t mean it that way. I’m just thinking back to another piece of art by William Blake that I wrote about three years ago,
This is Not a Sermon
First thing, Substack is hiring, for several positions. Just to throw that out there.
and about an article in Lion’s Roar that I just read last Friday, called The Four Points of Letting Go in the Bardo, by Pema Kandro Rinpoche.
It’s hard to remember that the villains are not monsters or demons. They’re humans like we are, literally addicted to power and pleasure and advantage. When I said above that they don’t like losing, that was true. I was also being a little snarky. But just a couple days later, after hearing about local journalist / publisher Brian Clarey’s life-altering car accident, I’m remembering how that’s true of all of us.
This was before the fracking boom that has made the US the world’s number one fossil fuel producer of all time. Right now, in 2024. 13 MILLION BARRELS PER DAY.
"When, if ever, is it 'okay' for another country to try to call our political shots?"
https://mlclark.substack.com/p/what-is-democratic-interference
A good follow-up to the battle between elites and counter-elites I mentioned above.
"Once you stop insisting that the only noble outcome for any and all children is to go to a top twenty university and join the ranks of our Brahmin class, we can dramatically broaden the purpose of school and our definitions of success."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-148649213