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Sunday, October 6, 2019

THE DEEP STATE


Now that I have completed at Columbia University my four week exposition of the thought of the greatest social theorist ever to live [a.k.a. Karl Marx] and Todd Gitlin is about to commence his wrestle with the second greatest social theorist ever to live [a.k.a Max Weber], I thought this would be an appropriate moment to say a few words about that bugaboo of the Far Right, THE DEEP STATE.

The deep state, according to Steve Bannon and his confrères in the Alt Right, is a malevolent collection of secret career government officials who, having wormed their way into the middle ranks of State, Justice, Treasury, and every other branch of the Federal Government, are now undermining Trump’s efforts to totally transform American domestic and foreign policy, thereby negating the will of the people.

Does this cadre of Civil Service boll weevils exist?

Of course it does!  As Max Weber taught us in his greatest work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, it is customarily called The Bureaucracy, and it is the universal structural feature of all modern societies, capitalist and [if there actually are any] socialist alike.  Every modern government is a bureaucracy.  Every modern army is a bureaucracy.  Every modern corporation, university and hospital is a bureaucracy.  The Roman Catholic Church is a bureaucracy [and has been for at least a millennium.]  The Boy Scouts are a bureaucracy, The Red Cross is a bureaucracy.   The Democratic and Republican Parties are bureaucracies. 

What we are witnessing today, newsbreak by newsbreak, is the revolt of the bureaucracy.  When the reformers I support win elections, they fume against the entrenched resistance of the bureaucracy, and entertain fantasies of digging it up, root and branch, so that the will of the people can be made into law.  But when evil men seize power and seek to destroy what remains of our fragile democracy, and dedicated Civil Servants step forward to bring them to account, I cry

            Thank God for the Deep State.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

But surely there are bureaucracies and bureaucracies? The Boy Scout bureaucracy may function in some ways like other bureaucracies, but that doesn’t begin to reflect on the amount of power it wields as compared with The Bureaucracy at the centre of the modern state. Perhaps that’s what you intended to convey and I’m just too obtuse to have noticed that.

Anyway, I tend to think of these matters in British terms, where “the permanent government” has for long been juxtaposed to the transitory ones based in electoral outcomes. and where it is usually seen to be closely linked in class terms to “the great and the good.” (The whole system can be seen in action in “A Very British Coup.”)

Of course, when Margaret Thatcher ran into the constraints Britain’s permanent government tried to impose on her and her goals, she pretty much decimated the British Civil Service and began putting business people in crucial positions within it. Given the way the American system worked, where every incoming administration put people it could rely on in the topmost ranks of the US Civil Service, it was a little bit less noticeable when Thatcher’s colleague, Reagan, started to populate the USCS with his people down to much deeper levels than had become customary in recent times. I guess Trump’s approach is to just leave key places in the USCS unpopulated.

I think what you also point to in your closing paragraph may also usefully be thought about in terms of Tariq Ali’s suggestive (to me at least) notion of “the extreme centre.” “The Bureaucracy” can generally be relied upon to vigorously maintain the system—which is primarily their system—in some sort of equilibrium against disturbances no matter where they’re coming from. So one shouldn’t necessarily view its actions as ‘on our side.’

Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D. said...

A question for Dr. Wolff and two for 'anonymous'

1) the modern bureaucracy is constrained by legislative intent, statutory language, and rules established under the authority of the legislation. They go through several iterations in a process that accounts for state gov't input, private and public sector input. It is the bureaucracy's to operate, but why characterize it as "their system?" Weber would surely object to that characterization!

2) I am not aware that Reagan repopulated the bureaucracy with deeper level appointments that other presidents. What have I missed Am I wrong in that assumption?

My favorite aphorism these days is "Fish rot from the head down, aka, the trickle-down theory of bureaucratic corruption." To do the job right, given where we stand after 3 years of corruption, we'll need to impeach the whole cabinet and all political appointees.

Dr. Wolf, I am compelled to disagree with your rankings. Sigmund is second, hands down, and Max is third, a close third, but third none the less.

Anonymous said...

At least note the history of term “deep state”. In context it is not referring bureaucracy, but a subset of the state bureaucracy, that thwarts and circumvents politically legitimate government for the benefit of its members and ideology, Including violence. Recent instances include Egypt.

Jerry Fresia said...

I think your equation of the "deep state" with The Bureaucracy may be a way of dismissing
the various cabals that have fostered policy totally apart from and in opposition to the "public
state." I think Peter Dale Scott probes the concept of "deep politics" interestingly. What he
seems to be saying is that there are powerful, but hidden, bad actors that are able to and who
have from time to time subverted the policy makers within the "public state."

These bad actors often seem to be actors within the national security state, primarily in the CIA.
We know that Allen Dulles and his cabal moved in opposition to FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK
- often using assassination and covert (from the President) operations to achieve their ends.
The assassination of DIem may be one example. Following assassination attempts on his life, De Gaulle
complained to JFK who responded by saying that he was not in control of elements in his government.

I find it interesting to note that Nixon's taping system was revealed by Butterfield (quite possibly working for the CIA),that Russiagate began with Brennan and NSC perjurer Clapper, and now we have CIA whistle blowers leading the charge. In this case, the deep state activities by the CIA accord with our revulsion of Trump. The downside, of course, is that we are feeding a monster - not the same as The Bureaucracy.

Jerry Fresia said...

For a related comment on the CIA whistle blower(s), see Matt Taibbi's piece in the Rolling Stone:

http://bit.ly/33bS3Nk

Paul said...

Bob—
Doesn’t it bother you, or give you pause before you join in the chorus of centrists who sing the praises of Mueller et al., that the deep state-bureaucracy doesn’t oppose Trump because he’s evil, but because he’s much less effective at concealing the evil? I think Reagan, Cheney, Bill Clinton: they all were comparably evil (at least if we measure in terms of: willingness to kill innocent civilians, willingness to punish and harm the poor, workers, most people of color), but weren’t so deeply opposed by the deep state because they were just so darn effective at deception. Doesn’t it bother you, therefore, that the objection to Trump more has to do with his honesty in being evil rather than the evil itself?

Matt said...

A less than fully cooperative bureaucracy is something all governments face. Sometimes this is a reasonably good thing - bureaucrats are often professionals who are dedicated to impartially following rules and avoiding politics. This is often good. It can lead to bad results, and in areas where the government/executive is allowed discretion, it is often quite bad to have people not susceptible to political control making, in effect, policy decisions. (This was the case for the Obama administration, which which faced very significant difficulty in shaping immigration policy in areas where it legally had discretion to act because of recalcitrant rank-and-file enforcement officers and immigration judges.)

But - the idea of the "deep state" is often used to mean a group who really, or "really" runs the government - the paradigm example was the "generals" in Turkey for much of the existence of that country, who over-ruled democratic results on several occasions. My impression is that Trumpists are using "deep state" in this sense. Jerry also seems to be using it in this way, though I am not sure. I think that the idea that there is a comparable "deep state" in most democratic counties, including the US is, at least, not well supported, and many of the claims are little better than 9/11 trutherism or JFK conspiracy theories epistemically, but I'm not interested in spending time debating this in blog comments. (It is perhaps relevant that Trump has had 9/11 truther tendencies, and the whole Q-anon nonsense is closely tied up w/ the "deep state" claims.)

Jerry Fresia said...

Matt,

I don't think that the better use of the concept, The Deep State, is about running the government. It's about the setting of limits to what people in power, like Presidents, do. Further, any serious discussion of the Deep State, whether there is one or not, ought to consider the agenda, power, and practice of powerful people within the National Security State and in particular the CIA. Frank Olson wasn't tossed out a 10th-story New York City hotel room because he was an evil man attempting to seize power. I don't believe Weber's discussion of bureaucracy, now more than a century old, is especially relevant.

Dane said...

I guess Trump’s approach is to just leave key places in the USCS unpopulated.

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Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D. said...


We are in an era where paranoid delusions are widely held, deeply believed and acted on by political elites. Republicans have been fostering these delusion for years: fraud and abuse in welfare programs, welfare queens, food stamp recipients and drug use, etc. The Christian right believes that fetal tissue is bought and sold and Planned Parenthood and Medical schools are profiting off this market for baby body parts. The far right in Texas, i.e., the governor, believed that military exercises were a cover to arrest and detain law abiding right wing conservatives in abandoned Wal-Mart stores. This is black helicopter crowd.

I find it problematic, to say the least, that the "deep state" concept has migrated to the left. To be clear, there may be actors in bureaucracies who may form a group and seek to oppose, alter, or change policy and/or to influence events toward their ends. But that does not a deep state make. J. Edgar Hoover and his aides can be characterized as a group abusing their power to keep their power and/or to attain their conservative political ends. Was that a deep state thing?

I cite that example because many of the examples presented above are simply assumed to be proof of a deep state without much, or any evidence. Hoover's long record of abuse is well documented, and coming from a rabid opponent of communism, is certainly an example of right wing paranoia and delusion. But there doesn't seem to be a clear definition of "deep state" offered here. Given the proclivities of the second greatest (maybe) social theorist, Max Weber, it should be incumbent on us to come up with a clear, functional definition that can be defended theoretically and applied usefully to the evidence.

While unclarity, per Marcuse, may be a virtue, a serious dose of clarity is needed in this discussion.

Jerry raised an interesting point: are the national security bureaus organized in a fashion different that of a Weberian bureaucracy, or do they operate differently. Does the nature of their business cause them to operate against the political interests of their bosses and is this a regular thing or a a once in a while thing?



Ludwig Richter said...

Remember The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hoftstadter? Relevant as ever.

Ed Barreras said...

That Matt Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone is question-begging in that it assumes that any whistle-blower must be badly treated, by definition. That strikes me as absurd. The Ukraingate whistle-blower is being protected, first and foremost, because he went through the proper legal channels, unlike Snowden and the others. (Which is not to pronounce on the morality of what Snowden did, or whether he deserves to be criminally convicted, or pardoned.) Indeed, Taibbi seems to undermine his own point when he grants that T***p would certainly like to punish the whistle-blower — and grants that T***p probably could do so and get away with it, given how whistle-blowers in the past have been punished with impunity. (So is he a whistle-blower or not? Which is it?)

Taibbi’s larger point seems to be that only whistle-blowers who count as *real* whistle blowers are ones who expose wrong-doing that’s being covered up by the entire ruling political class. If one faction of the ruling class blows the whistle on the other faction, that doesn’t count — again, by definition.

Conspicuously absent from Taibbi’s argument is any pronouncement on the legitimacy of the charge against the current occupant of the White House: that he used congressinoally appropriated funds as a bargaining chip to compel a foreign power to manufacture dirt on his opponent, and then worked to cover it up (or at any rate, those around him covered it up). Is this an impeachable offense or not? I certainly think it is. Taibbi seems to want to wave it away by insisting that governments do bad things all the time. Why, he wonders, did that CIA officer choose to blow the whistle on this particular offense? I would say it’s becaue thist really is a unique and egregious abuse of the power of the office, one that’s without precedent. If anything deserves to be checked, this does.

Zooming out even further, I doubt Taibbi shares my short-term political goals (and those of many others here). I think *anything* that damages T***p is welcome. But Taibbi doesn’t want T***p’s defeat to come at the cost of victory for the other faction of the political ruling-class — because he thinks they’re just as bad.

Charles Pigden said...

Just a quick response to Jerry. I am pretty sure from having read MacNamara's The Fog of War that Kennedy semi-okayed the anti-Diem coup which was highly likely to result in his death. Did he Ok the assassination? Well kinda , sorta ....

Ed Barreras said...

To follow up, here is a piece from the Atlantic that is much better on the issue of whistle-blower protections and Snowden:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/problem-whistleblower-system/598555/

The bottom lines that the whistle-blower system is indeed flawed; legitimate complaints are too easily buried and it’s not clear that Snowden’s revelations could have seen the light of day if brought through the sanctioned channels. Taibbi is right, at least, that the Ukrainegate scandal could have been successfully quashed if Adam Schiff and the House Democrats didn’t see it as to their advantage to have it come to light. To which I say: Okay, but so what? That’ doesn’t make the Ukrainegate whistle-blower any less of a real whistle-blower, and it doesn’t make the wrong-doing he exposed any less serious or impeachment-worthy.

Jerry Fresia said...

Ed,

Snowden tried to go through official channels multiple times (http://bit.ly/2VqUXel) but was repeatedly rebuffed. The current whistle blower has had institutional cooperation. So again we find powerful actors advancing important secret truths and white blocking and persecuting others. At some point it will be interesting to learn how this current whistle blower decided to blow the whistle, i.e., did he have encouragement and/or direction from higher authorities or did he act entirely alone.

s. wallerstein said...

I've always taken the phrase "deep state" to refer to the fact that the real structures of power within the government do not correspond to the text book structures of power, that people who have never faced an election, in the CIA, NSA or the Pentagon, etc., often are able to boycott or to undermine or even to ignore a Presidential or Congressional decision.

In this case the deep state seems to be working in our favor insofar as the whistleblower contributes to a possible impeachment of Trump. I agree with Jerry that it seems that this whistleblower, unlike Snowden, probably has backing from higher authorities, who, for different reasons than we do, see Trump as dangerous. One can imagine that Trump's recent decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the Syria-Turkey border and to give the Turks the green light to invade northern Syria and to attack the Kurds might also upset certain members of the deep state.

J. Fleming said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
J. Fleming said...

Sheldon Wolin, former professor of politics at Princeton University, portrays the nation as a "managed democracy," where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst, it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls, but is instead a close collaborator. See Democracy Inc. 2008 Princeton University Press.
See also Andrew Bacevich's article https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-real-impeachment-scandal-isnt-about-trump/

LFC said...

Charles Pigden, above, is correct on the substance; Fog of War, however, is a film about McNamara (by Errol Morris).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

LFC said...

@s wallerstein

Trump's recent decision on Syria was very poorly prepared and implemented, from what I've gathered. If you're going to pull the rug out from under a steadfast ally, you shd give the latter at least some notice/consultation. That apparently was not done here. As w other of his impulsive decisions, T. may now be trying to walk some of this back. I haven't had time, regrettably, to follow it in detail. Btw, T yesterday made a series of false or dubious claims about the role of U.S. soldiers (who were/are largely Special Operations forces) in Syria, e.g. that they were engaged in "policing". The statement wd be funny if it weren't so revealing of T's complete disconnect from basic facts re what the forces of which he is Commander in Chief are doing.

LFC said...

It occurs to me, belatedly, that 'Fog of War' might well have been turned into a book, which wd explain C. Pigden's remark about reading it...

Ed Barreras said...

Jerry,

I haven’t had a chance to read fully and carefully that (very long) Vice article re Snowden. But from what I gather the situation still seems opaque. Obama and others have always maintained that Snowden could have gone through the sanctioned whistle blower channels, which I assume would be through he inspector general. I don’t think that complaint has been undermined by the mere fact that Snowden voiced concerns to higher-ups (though to what extent he did, and the timeline in which he did, remains unclear as far as I can tell). Merely raising concerns or asking for clarifications about statue is not the same as filing a formal complaint.

In any case, I still think it’s fallacious to impugn the Ukrainegate whistle blower by pointing to Snowden bad treatment. One might not like the fact that this whistle-blower is handing a gift to establishment Democrats, but how is it not a good thing to have yet another aspect of the current occupant’s shadiness brought to light? And for what it’s worth, I think Snowden deserves a pardon, especially given the flaws in the whistle-blower system that have recently been exposed.