A Brief History of "Deep State" Thinking

We have enough on our plate with the problems of class, without inventing supervillain society origin narratives

Just what is the “Deep State,” mentioned, constantly, by Bannon and Trump? What fresh hell is this? The “Deep State” — a sinister cabal to conspiracy obsessives — presently involves, according to them, a couple million civil servants creeping around in the dark corners of our inept, Brobdingnagian, bureaucratic government, scheming of ways to steal the vital forces of American freedom. This phantom menace, according to the conspiracy obsessives, works with powerful social and financial interests, conjuring thirsty evils. And sometimes, they harvest the blood of children for their unholy feastings.

This sort of — how does one put it kindly? — flatulent, Daffy Duck logic gained influence, particularly during COVID lockdowns when people were trapped in front of their computer screens for long periods of time without the structure of work or human contact. Paranoia, in fine, prevailed. “Google Trends shows significant spikes in searches for adrenochrome in March and June of 2020,” Brian Friedberg wrote for WIRED, on the blood harvesting virality. “It’s prevalent on TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram.” Adrenochrome quackery is a debunked QAnon theory stating that Democrat elites slurp the blood of children to remain youthful. Are they mistaking adrenochrome for Ozempic? One cannot fail to note here the obvious anti-Semitic tropes that form a through-line that goes back to the dawn of bigotry. Here also the inadequacies of the American education system — and our lack of a proper national civics curriculum — were laid bare for all the world to see. Even yoga teachers, otherwise pillars of sensible suburban thinking, have fallen prey to this … thusness. How else is one to call it?

But such yam-yammery is not new to this country. Conspiracy-obsessiveness is as American a pursuit of liberty as the consumption of apple pie with a side helping of Pizzagate. The yawning gap between the haves and the have nots — inequality — exacerbates these tensions, geometrically, giving rise to conspiracy theories about the doings of the global elite on their private jets and superyachts, at Skull and Bones and on their way to Bohemian Grove. Instead of going into these hysterical conspiracy theories, why not simply note the obvious, wasteful immorality of owning a SuperYacht when the environment suffers from its excess and so many are going hungry? We have enough on our plate with the problems of class, without inventing supervillain society origin narratives!

Richard Hofstadter, the great but now-forgotten midcentury American public intellectual, was the deepest thinker of this acutely American political phenomenon. In his seminal 1964 Harper’s essay on the paranoid style of American politics he began:

But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Though written in 1964, this article could easily count as an acutely observed essay on QAnon. Ed Luce writes in FT about the curiosity of Hoftadter’s formulation and why it proliferates in America. “Part of it must be that the US is a nation forged by creed, which creates debate about the meaning of the founding contract and people’s loyalty to it,” he observes. “In a country that tells itself it is evolving to a more perfect union, when things go wrong it must be because of hijack.” Interesting.

Beware, the All Seeing Eye

There have been many “unseen” enemies in American political history. Freemasons; monarchists; international bankers; Communists; the Bavarian Illuminati; the United Nations. Any casual reader of the papers of, say, John Adams — an entirely sober thinker, by the way — would come away with the uneasy perception that “Papists” and their “ilk in Rome” were plotting to overthrow the nascent democracy in the late 18th century. And perhaps that is where conspiracy thinking in America begins, back at the origins of country, geographically isolated and weak from an exhausting war with a great power.

Enemies, at that time, must have appeared to be everywhere — hidden, plotting … ”But by the late 1790s, this anxiety had broken along partisan lines,” Colin Dickey writes in Politico. “Federalists feared that France’s revolutionaries were bent on turning Americans against their nascent government, whereas Jeffersonian Republicans worried instead that Great Britain was scheming to reclaim its former colonies.” Is this where American conspiratorial thinking began? From the insecurity of American democracy?

The American obsession with the Bavarian Illuminati began in 1797 — roughly two decades after the birth of the nation. Masonic malfeasance, to be sure! A Scottish scientist, John Robison, had something of a bestseller at the time in his influential (and longwinded) pamphlet Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. “A Freemason himself, Robison worried the irreligious Illuminati had gained control of the Masonic organization and perverted it and was now working to root ‘out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe,’” notes Dickey. Dickey, by the way, believes that conspiracy-thinking tipped the scales in favor of Thomas Jefferson in the contested election of 1800. How little we have travelled, dear reader, 223 years later.

America’s early 19th Century involved, largely, the fear of the fraternal indulgences of a Masonic planet. Slaves, by contrast, were in constant fear of the lash. Still, the fear of secret societies harboring foreign invaders out to snuff the young pseudo-democracy took root. And that conspiratorial root system, over the centuries, has grown in diameter and now extends many times beyond the high water table.

In the 1830s anti-Catholic sentiment — particularly anti-Jesuitical — made a comeback. Irish immigrants were coming to the new democracy for unskilled infrastructure jobs, and with the immigration wave came the usual backlash of hate. “Foreign spies have clothed themselves in a religious dress, and so awe-struck are our journalists at its sacred texture, or so unable or unwilling to discern the difference between the man and his mask, that they start away in fear, lest they should be called bigoted or intolerant, or persecuting, if they should venture to lift up the consecrated cloak that hides a foreign foe,” wrote Samuel Morse in 1835.

Hofstadter writes of the anti-Catholicism of the time, with the gimlet eye of the scholar of the paranoid:

Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

It is remarkable in retrospect how long the dead baby canard has been going around in American history. It is, of course, convenient and effective rhetorically. Who among us would not come to the aid of an infant in danger? A monster, that’s who. A Benghazi monster inside of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In the intervening years there were replacements for the Jesuit agents. Other spectral evils perpetrated by Kafkesque bureaucrats against the white American male protestant. Pearl Harbor was a cover up, they say, and so was 9/11 (Gore Vidal believed both). The end of World War II saw the rise, midcentury, of the John Birch Society and various other ultra-right wing anti-Communist organizations. Communism was a great big candy-colored enemy; boob bait for Bubba.

Midcentury — when Hofstadter was king — was the apex of American paranoiac thinking as well as the height of American prosperity. “Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention,” Hofstadter formulated. “This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.” And the link from John Birchers to Trump’s MAGA hordes is all too clear.

Which brings us to Robert Kennedy, Jr. RFK, Jr — in name and in likeness— harkens back to one of the biggest conspiracy obsessions in American history. Who killed his brothers? And so, of course, shady figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone would embrace his absurd candidacy, calculated to vex the President and, quite possibly, divide the party. According to the sleazy mythology of QAnon, John Kennedy, Jr. never died and is setting to make a comeback as Trump’s Vice President. Given the metaphysical complexities surrounding resurrection — even for a Kennedy — it is more likely that RFK, alive and well, ends up on Trump’s shortlist, siphoning off what voters Cornel West does not already take from Biden. RFK, Jr., whose laughable views on, vaccines and wifi and the origins of AIDS was “educated” — allegedly — at Harvard and University of Virginia Law school. So there’s that.

I’ll conclude this brief tour with a couple of paragraphs from Charles S. Kirk’s thoughtful essay in Government Executive, written during Trump’s term in office:

Trump experienced a rare moment of bipartisan support in April (2018), when he authorized the launch of 59 cruise missiles into Syria after its government used chemical weapons. He couldn’t have done it without an administrative state. “They can criticize the deep state all they want, but why 59 missiles, why that time of day, and why was it aimed at that particular spot in the desert?” asked Kettl. When Trump made a policy decision, “it was executed in a way that only people who knew what they were doing could do it.”

The Trump administration’s skepticism about the deep state has led to a number of self-inflicted crises and prompted endless discussion about the president’s decision-making process. The questions include why he issued a court-blocked travel ban last February without consulting Justice or the Homeland Security Department. Why he tweeted a promise to remove LGBTQ service members from the military without looping in the Pentagon. Why he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” without a team of foreign policy specialists molding the language.

Trump’s natural distrust of government and conspiracy-obsessiveness here collides with his authoritarian tendencies, creating a perfect psychological storm of right-wing autocrat. He will have had four years in the political wilderness to tighten up his game, which should worry us even more. Trump 2.0 will be more effective and less haphazard in suffocating American democracy. And as if that were not a bad enough outcome to fear, his dismantling of “the deep state” as his “retribution” — all but assured should Trump get a second term — will ironically achieve the very sort of incompetence of government he thought, foolishly, to have avoided through minimalism.

It will be as great a victory for MAGA world as it will be for Putin and Xi.

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