If you want to picture the relationship between the 60 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and the Deep State seeking to unseat him, DON’T picture a Venn diagram. There is no overlap between the two solitudes.
Rather, picture a giant amorphous amoeba, geared toward survival. This single-celled organism will galvanize all systems within to preserve its threatened integrity.
Much like our parasitical one-celled protozoa, the Deep State has an overriding purpose and a fixed repertoire of reflexes. “Some amoebas protect their bodies by covering themselves with sand grains.” The Deep State organism protects itself by throwing dust in our eyes.
Hence the Russia probe. The production that is the Russia probe is courtesy of agents of the Deep State—the “managerial society” and its ruling elite, as political philosopher James Burnham (1905-1987) called it.
Like nothing else, the Trump populist revolution has exposed the sub rosa presence in American lives of a “transpartisan elite with its own interests.” “Such an analysis of the political and economic elite—its composition, its genesis, its beliefs, its myths, and its failures—is the common strand running through the [prescient] writings of James Burnham,” observes Julius Krein of American Affairs.
“Increasingly power is shifted away from individuals elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government … Like all managers, they derive their power from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to the political community but to the other managers that define their qualifications.”
“Deep State” is no conspiracy theory. There’s nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who’ve risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold.
The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are, in my opinion, reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs.
Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus.
But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.
The “technocratic elite” has a corporate extension. Engorged government bureaucracies are complemented by colossal corporate entities, whose virtue-signaling managers have occupied “the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and culture.” As Burnham warned they would.
The corporate element of this government-within-government superstructure (yes, the conservative Burnham had a Trotskyite beginning) has special access by virtue of its obscene wealth. Think the liver-spotted George Soros, who moves to overthrow governments in “lesser” countries. Think Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Brad Smith, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, or Google’s Sundar Pichai. They all sprang into action against Trump’s secession from the Paris Climate Accord.
Candidate Trump got considerable support for his promise to secede from or renegotiate this or the other agreement between the U.S. government and various supranational systems. Successive U.S. governments have ceded the rights and sovereignty of Americans to these supra-state systems.
Deplorables voted for more, not less, sovereignty. But bien-pensant Elon Musk of the Tesla and SpaceX fame is having none of this sovereignty stuff.
Musk, worth $15.2 billion, is muscling the Trump administration to further tax Americans so as to fund the Europeans and their polluting cosignatories to the climate accord.
Mr. Musk trashes the environment with his “Commie Cars,” electrical cars which discharge into the environment lead, cadmium and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—and whose impact on the environment has been shown to be worse than that of the gasoline-powered car.
Trashing the popular will is all in a day’s work for the corporate arm of the Deep State.
