Joseph O’Neill came from the UK to take up residence in
the US in 1998. Coming from another
country at a time when political partisanship was really revving up, he could
provide an interesting and valuable perspective on our state of affairs. He makes that attempt in an article for the New
York Review of Books titled Real Americans. It is a wide-ranging article, but here the focus
will be on his initial hypothesis that there might be a “deep state” supporting
the Republican Party. That notion arose
from observations about how the two political parties comported themselves
during the attempt to resolve the Bush-Gore election battle.
“What struck me, in the chaos
that followed, was that the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption
of legitimacy. Bush had prematurely positioned himself as the president-elect,
and the media had largely deferred to him in this. It made no sense. Gore had
won the popular vote by more than half a million; there were strong reasons to
believe that the Democratic tally in Florida had been erroneously reduced by a
faulty ballot design; black Floridians had experienced outrageous voting
problems; and, astonishingly, the Republicans were actually trying to prevent
an accurate count of the vote.”
“Why the curious timidity of
Democrats in Florida and the unaccountable self-righteousness of their
aggressive Republican counterparts? Were my eyes and ears fooling me, or was
everybody somewhat scared of the Republicans? The penny finally dropped when
the Republican majority in the Supreme Court incoherently decided, in Bush v. Gore,
to halt the vote-counting while their candidate still held a lead. Oh, I
thought to myself. It’s a deep-state thing.”
Let’s leave the timidity of the Democrats for another
time and pursue this notion of a Republican deep state. O’Neill does not refer to a deep state as a collection
of elites who are in a position to take control should the momentum of the
state drift in an unacceptable direction.
Rather, he views our deep state as a concept, or viewpoint that was
formed before the United States of America was founded.
“The United States has secretive
agencies that do legally dubious things, but it doesn’t have a deep state in
the Turkish sense. It may be said to have a deep state in another sense,
however: America. America preceded, and brought into being, the republic we now
live in—the United States of America. Almost everyone still talks about
America, not about the United States; about Americans, not USAers. America, in
short, was not extinguished by the United States. It persists as a buried,
residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.
Primordial America (at least in the popular imagination) was where folks prayed
hard, worked hard on the land, and had rightful recourse to violence. In this
imaginary place, people were white, Christian, English-speaking. They had
God-given dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth. All of this inevitably informs the way American
nationals apprehend one another and their country. They feel in their bones that
some people are Americans and other people are merely citizens of the United
States.”
We seem to accept this notion that whites are more
American than others with the labels we use.
If you are black, you are an African American; if you are Asian, you are
an Asian American; if you are of Indian heritage, you are a Native
American. Every time we use these labels,
we are implicitly sending the message that only whites are “true” or “pure”
Americans.” This declaration was made
explicit when immigration legislation in 1924 was designed to limit immigrants
who were not white.
“In 1924 the United States
officially preferred immigrants of “Nordic” ethnicity and drastically reduced
its intake of Jewish and Southern European immigrants. Asian or African
immigration was largely out of the question. This regime more or less persisted
until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.”
Ronald Reagan and others made a conscious decision to try
to capture the white vote by promoting the notion that whites were “more
American” than others. This embrace of
whiteness involved welcoming racists, white nationalists, and Ku Klux Klan
types into the fold. This collection of
deplorables have been faithful Republican voters ever since.
However insightful O’Neill’s observation might be, there are
more participants in the Republican deep state.
The traditional alliance of the wealthy with the Republican Party has
been maintained, if not strengthened.
Once the party of fiscal probity, the Republicans have demonstrated
there is no length they will not go to in order to lower taxes on the
rich. That service is repaid with
generous campaign contributions, and financial support for the myriad think
tanks, universities, and advocacy groups that spew out conservative propaganda
and promote conservative policies.
There is a third component to this deep state that is so
powerful that both political parties have proved unable to counter it: the
national security complex. The long cold
war generated a version of a military industrial complex that far exceeded what
Eisenhower had warned us about. We
acquired the need and the ability to project military power anywhere in the
world, to gather intelligence anywhere in the world, and to provide surveillance
of our own population in order to counter any domestic threats to our
agenda. When the cold war ended and our
one true enemy dissolved, we could have declared victory and reigned in our resources
and used the fiscal savings for domestic needs.
But there was no gain for the national security complex in peace.
A new mission and new enemies had to be found. The agenda became the spread of representative
democracy throughout the world, the expansion of free-market capitalism, and
the enforcement of a rules-based approach to foreign affairs. To execute this agenda would require that the
United States maintain overwhelming military superiority. With our broad trade interests and network of
allies, new enemies would be easy to find.
Any state that became a threat to an ally could be deemed our enemy; any
nation that threatened our economic power could become an enemy; any state that
insisted on following its own political path could become a target for military
or economic harassment; and any nation that refused to be cowed by our military
might would be a threat, if not an outright enemy.
It would be the Republican Party that would be the most
fervent supporter of this national security agenda. Those who gained financially or in personal
status from its related activities took note that life was better for them when
Republicans were in power. Supportive
politicians were repaid for their efforts.
David Hendrickson reports on these issues in his book Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition.
“The
dimensions of the national security state, the nerve center of the American Empire,
are not easy to describe. The core of
the network is the armed forces of the United States, but it embraces as well its
police and regulatory agencies. Included
within it are its impressive array of foreign bases, its panoply of external sanctions,
its global military commands, its vast spying and surveillance apparatus…Stretching
beyond the military et al. complex are the prison-industrial complex, the
homeland security complex, the multifaceted array of U.S. institutions
dedicated to the proposition that coercive powers to destroy or incapacitate
are indispensable remedies for the maladies of the human condition. They all reflect a movement in American maxims
from liberty to force.”
The military force tasked
with carrying out this national agenda has changed over the years, becoming less
a nonpartisan agency to one which has acquired its own agenda. Centers of power have also shifted throughout
the body politic.
“The
U.S. military that arose after the end of conscription in 1973 is markedly
different in outlook and sensibility from the military that arose out of World
War II. The new military is much more
conscious of its distinctness from society than the old, while remaining
decidedly invested in the liturgy of threat inflation. Its members are much more theological; once
largely Episcopalian, they became increasingly evangelical. The political loyalties of the officer corps
overwhelmingly skew toward the Republican Party, whereas previously they were
thoroughly nonpartisan.”
“Civilian
elites have also changed. The general
move of political power from North and East to South and West is one indication
of that; another is the rise of foreign lobbies. The Israel, Cuban, Taiwanese, and Eastern European
lobbies work together on Capital Hill and in attempts to influence the
executive branch. They have pushed an
expansionist agenda and have deployed profound influence over foreign policy, often
playing a key role in elections. These
efforts are complimented by the arms lobby and by the thick growth of think
tanks that depend on their largess.
Reinforcing all these interests is the profound dependence felt in
nearly every state and congressional district on the concrete benefits
conferred by military spending. A politically
potent multiplier effect really goes to work there.”
People mistakenly associate conservatism with a resistance
to change. In fact, political
conservatives are quite willing to accept change as long as that change
increases their power. For a politically
conservative party like the Republicans, possessing power is the first priority;
policy can follow later as needed to maintain power. It is this belief that any practice or policy
that helps Republicans get elected is acceptable that defines the party. Its firm base consisting of whites, the
wealthy, and the national security complex, provides it with a good shot at
winning elections. However, its support
from those directions creates the divisions that plague our society:
anti-minority biases, economic inequality, and lack of funding for social
needs.
And there is danger in the direction the Republican Party
is moving. Its base consists of special
interests rewarded by Republican loyalty, a profoundly undemocratic tendency. And the serving of the national security
complex is facilitated by a chief executive free to do as he/she wishes. Consider this statement made by Donald
Trump.
“I can tell you I have the
support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers
for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they
go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
If that isn’t a threat, I don’t know what is.
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