The Deep State (27 page)

Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, but its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople, or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live off its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” Living off its principal in this case means extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion and siphoning it off into hubristic and unnecessary military expenditures.

We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money, and its ability to co-opt resistance, that it is almost impervious to change. Second, it is populated with leaders whose instinctive
reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those same policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the fictitious success of the so-called surge. This public relations deception helped justify the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya. The smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to get involved in Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the carcasses of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

—H. L. Mencken,
Notes on Democracy
(1926)

Keep your government hands off my Medicare!

—Statement by a constituent to Representative Bob Inglis at a town hall meeting in Simpsonville, South Carolina, 2009

The Deep State and the Tea Party

While it seems to float above the constitutional state, the Deep State's essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance: it thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills are passed on time, promotion lists are confirmed, secret budgets rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations approved without controversy, and too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But now that Congress increasingly reflects the ideology of the Tea Party, life for the ruling echelon has become more complicated.

That said, the gradual rightward journey of the Republican Party from a political group invested in orderly governance to a hyperpartisan cult with little interest in constructive solutions has on balance deepened the entrenchment of the Deep State. The core commitment of the present-day GOP, and particularly that of its extreme Tea Party wing, involves
worship of individual wealth and rejection of civil government as a democratic mechanism for collective problem solving. This attitude generally suits the vested interests of the Deep State's governing elite, who wish not only to keep their own fortunes intact, but to profit from the dismantling and privatization of government institutions, whether they are state highways, public schools, or Social Security.

The Republican Party has come to embrace a paradoxical worldview that can best be described as antidemocratic populism. The GOP's rhetoric is stridently populist, and the party has perfected propaganda themes that set it on the side of “real Americans” (as it defines them) and against the so-called elites. The fact that Republicans identify their elite bogeymen as university professors (many of whom are now adjuncts making hamburger flipper wages), unionized public school teachers, or GS-9 government employees rather than hedge fund managers or oil company executives is quite satisfactory to the hedge fund managers and oil company executives who fund the party. “Real Americans,” a phrase popularized by 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, generally refers to a white, increasingly elderly, and ever-more-rural segment of the voting population. Real America is a diminishing proportion of the electorate, and that fact provides a vital clue to the seeming contradiction between the current GOP's rabble-rousing populism and its antidemocratic instincts.

The demographically limited nature of real America explains the Republican Party's eagerness to restrict ballot access and gerrymander districts to a degree that infringes on many voters' rights to fair representation. Given the logical impossibility of gerrymandering U.S. Senate seats, some Tea Party adherents have even called for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for the direct popular election of senators. Representative Ted Yoho of Florida has gone further, suggesting that the franchise ought to be limited to property owners.
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Tea Partyers tend to see any electoral outcome that does not put them on top as inherently unfair and legally actionable: Chris McDaniel, the losing candidate in the 2014 Mississippi Republican primary, bitterly
challenged as fraudulent and unconscionable the idea that any registered voter could vote in a Republican primary, mainly because they tended to vote for his opponent.

Just as the early-twentieth-century populist Left trotted out Joe Hill as an example of an American Everyman fighting for his political rights, so the modern antidemocratic populist Right has constructed its own flesh-and-blood avatars of real America for the TV and Internet age. Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, George Zimmerman, the characters on
Duck Dynasty,
Cliven Bundy, Josh Duggar—all won nominations to the pantheon of conservative superherodom for their purported averageness, grit, plain speaking, and most of all, for being victimized by the pitiless liberal system. But no sooner was each one nominated than he (it has always been a he) has come down with an ignominious thump. The rough-hewn populist Everyman from central casting inevitably slips up under public scrutiny and reveals opinions that at best elicit an embarrassed cough and eye-roll from the audience, and at worst border on clinically insane. But there is something in the nature of antidemocratic populism—principally the need to distract voters from the regressive nature of its platform—that requires these lurid parodies of Tom Joad, so we may expect talk radio and Fox News to generate many more. These ideological symbols of a pure American have at least brought one small benefit: they refute the more naïve schools of democratic theory which hold that the raw, untutored voice of the people is the voice of wisdom.

As a congressional staff member, I heard Republicans say that the whole point of obstruction in the Senate was not so much to derail any particular piece of legislation as to lower the favorability rating of Congress as an institution by showing that it doesn't work. Fostering public cynicism and apathy will lower voter turnout, which in turn is supposed to redound to the GOP's advantage. Republicans can usually count on high turnout by its older, motivated electoral core, particularly in midterm elections. It is this electoral strategy—winning elections by lowering overall voter turnout, rather than adding adherents to their own party—that makes the Tea Party the true heirs of Karl Rove's technique
of the “politics of subtraction.”
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But ginning up the hopeless feeling that government is beyond redemption and that voting (at least by anyone who is not a real American) is pointless also benefits those in the invisible sphere of government who really do not want the public meddling with the ground rules.

Plutocratic Populism

The Tea Party has been the most politically effective upwelling of American populist anger in decades, but instead of besieging the prince's manor house, the pitchfork-wielding peasants have agitated against food stamps, health care, and increased oversight of banks. With a black comicalness worthy of an O. Henry short story, the creation myth of the Tea Party sheds a devastating light on its real objectives and its relation to America's plutocratic elites.

On February 19, 2009, a reporter for the financial network CNBC named Rick Santelli delivered an impassioned, high-decibel rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange denouncing the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, which the Obama administration had announced the previous day. Santelli claimed that the legislation, which was supposed to encourage lenders to reduce mortgage interest payments for homeowners, was about “promoting bad behavior.” To the approval of the futures traders on the floor, he suggested that a “Chicago Tea Party” might be an appropriate response, because borrowers stuck with bad mortgages were “losers” who deserved foreclosure. The
Chicago Sun-Times
later declared Santelli's outburst to be the opening round of the Tea Party political movement.

The Troubled Asset Relief Plan, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, quantitative easing, and all the other government programs
that pumped trillions of dollars into the bankers' pockets did not garner the same hyperthyroid level of indignation. The one government program that did was ostensibly designed to assist homeowners, or as Santelli put it, losers. So the CNBC reporter's bottom line was that Wall Street CEOs get a pass, but ordinary citizens must not. Yet his indignation was founded on a misconception that the administration's mortgage relief program was genuine. Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary, later told Neil Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the integrity of TARP funding, that the administration's mortgage relief programs were merely intended to “foam the runway” for the banks—that is, to slow the rate of foreclosures just enough so that they did not overwhelm the lenders' capacity to process them.
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Thus, if we believe Barofsky's recollection, the programs were mere window dressing for the convenience of the banks. Thus the Tea Party may have been launched as a result of the category error of believing the Obama administration's handling of the economy was fundamentally different from that of the preceding Bush administration. Accordingly, the newly minted Tea Party believed Obama had to be stopped at all costs.

How the Tea Party Drags Everybody to the Right

This surreal backstory underlines the principal political legacy of the Crash of 2008. Despite the ferocious partisan mudslinging, the actual policy differences in the Democrats' and Republicans' response to the crash were far narrower than the public narrative suggested. Yet the emergence of the Tea Party has been far from inconsequential, even if it was based on mistaken premises. Its huge influence within the GOP has had the effect of pulling both parties to the right, and by distorting the terms of political discourse and civic engagement, the Tea Party movement has further entrenched the wealthy elites, at least in the short term.

The majority of present-day Republican officeholders, operatives, and their large network of conservative media supporters hardly bother anymore to formulate public policy or comment constructively on
current issues. Their function is identical to that of an Internet troll—to attack, get attention, and hijack the debate so as to render any attempt at intelligent discussion pointless. Whether the issue is the economy, health policy, or foreign affairs, they seize attention with hyperbolic attacks and use focus group–tested catchphrases and odd conspiracy theories (like insinuating that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the rampages of the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram).

Even George Will, for thirty years the voice of boring and respectable conservatism and a lot of pompous balderdash about Edmund Burke, has seen the need to keep up with Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter so as to appeal to readers who prefer entertainment to constructive proposals. Will claimed in one column that victims of sexual assault on college campuses enjoyed a “coveted status that confers privilege.”
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Note that Will, a fey, bow tie–wearing patrician from Chevy Chase, Maryland, by way of Princeton, defends rape by the populist tactic of intimating that those claiming to have been raped are elitist snobs who have wangled an unmerited, privileged position. Since the less politically engaged public hardly knows where to begin to refute these idiotic canards—would you really waste your breath rebutting a neighbor who was adamant that the sun goes around the earth?—their arguments usually go unrefuted, and thanks to endless repetition in conservative media, Republican talking points lodge themselves in the national political discourse like a tapeworm in the digestive tract. Donald Trump has mastered this technique.

The GOP's political strategy may do little to gain new party adherents—it is mainly preaching to the converted and mobilizing them—but its strategic effect, intended or otherwise, is to suck out of the room any oxygen that might support more intelligent political discourse, and reduce debate to the lowest common denominator.

The so-called IRS scandal of 2013 might have been the occasion for a serious national discussion about the proper role of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations in the United States. There are more than a million of them, their rate of growth has surpassed that of the business sector, and they now constitute 5.4 percent of the economy.
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Do they all support legitimate
charitable, educational, or social welfare purposes? Many so-called charitable organizations pay their CEOs seven-figure salaries. Why do these entities pay no taxes? It is difficult to justify the National Football League's nonprofit status when its commissioner, Roger Goodell, made $44.2 million during 2012, the most recent year to be reported by the NFL, and virtually all the team owners that make up the league are billionaires.
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Many so-called educational foundations are nothing more than overt political advocacy organizations for wealthy donors like the Koch brothers or George Soros. Some military contractors, such as the Logistics Management Institute, have organized as nonprofits. It makes you wonder, on which planet has a defense contractor suddenly become uninterested in profit? It is a bit difficult to associate the name Karl Rove with the cause of social welfare, but he is nevertheless the head of a nonprofit 501(c)4 “social welfare organization” whose sole purpose is to raise money for political activities. Yet all the media reports revolved around the question whether the Obama administration was victimizing Tea Party organizations because the IRS, amid an avalanche of applications, took so long to decide on whether those groups merited nonprofit tax status.

A similar principled debate might have taken place after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. What were the premises of an armed intervention in Libya to overthrow its government, an intervention far exceeding the terms of the United Nations resolution mandating only a no-fly zone? Was there no provision for the law of unintended consequences? What about investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's allegations that Benghazi was the focal point of a covert U.S. effort to smuggle arms from Gaddafi's inventory into Syria in support of insurgents trying to overthrow the government there?
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What we got instead was a
supremely uninformative partisan political tribunal conducted by the same chicken-hawk politicians who only recently had been cheering the Libya misadventure.

These hearings are typical of the Tea Party era. They act as a political theater to bait the media into representing them to the public as the legitimate issues of the day. Meanwhile, the fundamental social questions—Who gets what? How sound is our democracy in a period of increasing economic inequality? What are the limits of U.S. military power abroad?—are swept under the rug. Thus the Tea Party–influenced GOP, by seizing the megaphone and stridently repeating its increasingly deranged memes, has made intelligent debate and the search for constructive solutions a fool's errand.