Revisting the Deep State

Jon D. Michaels, “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Fights Back,” Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2017.

Michaels begins his article with an observation.  “One of the strangest aspects of the current era,” he writes, “is that the president of the United States seems to have little interest in running the country’s government.”  It’s something of a truism that there are differences between the skills necessary to secure an office and those necessary to hold onto an office, and those necessary to both securing and holding differ from those necessary to actually doing the job implied by the office.   Likewise, initially, as is the case with all American politicians subject to election and re-election, the concerns of securing and holding office take on a sort of continuing precedence over “doing the job,” for the obvious reason that one cannot do the job if one is not in the job.   We all know, of course, there are many motivations for seeking office, most of them emerging from the recesses of personality, but there is another truism in American politics.  Politicians are, ostensibly at least, held to account.  It is the idea that, once elected, to hold onto the office, the politician must do the job well enough to gain the approval of the people, or at least a majority.

At some primitive level, Trump realizes that, to hold office, he must demonstrate to the people some level of adequate job performance.  He continually asserts, without much evidence to warrant the assertion, that his administration has done “more” than any previous administration.  There are, however, few positive achievements beyond the appointment of conservative, ideologically driven supreme court justices.  Even the tax-cut, much desired by the Republican party, is a negative achievement, an undoing of what has been done.  So, while it is true that Trump took office as “a political novice,” it is not exactly true that, as Michaels asserts, he has “no fixed ideology or policy agenda.”  At its core, one might suggest his ideology runs deep within the American grain – the idea that government’s single positive role is to facilitate the further acquisition of wealth.  Implicit in this role is the corollary idea that any action taken by government that impedes the further acquisition of wealth is illegitimate.   As an ideology, it is rather shallow, but it does suggest an on-going policy agenda, not least of which is the deconstruction of what Steve Bannon called the administrative state, to include the taxes that support it.  Trump may not be entirely incorrect when he suggests that he has done “more” than his predecessors – that is to say, through a combination of simple neglect, executive actions “undoing” Obama era regulatory acts, and the like, he has perhaps gone further down the path of deconstructing the administrative state than any of his Republican predecessors, including the mythical Reagan.

If one is searching to explain the Republican elite’s acquiescence to Trump, one needn’t look much further.  Insofar as Trump has “followed his own counsel,” as Michaels put it or, perhaps more precisely, has followed his own inclination to remove impediments to greater wealth, “displaying open contempt for much of the federal work force he now leads, slashing budgets, rescinding regulatory rules, and refusing to follow standard operating procedures,” he is performing well enough to overcome his coarse behavior.   He seems to have little interest in running the government, in part because the government, as Reagan famously put it, is the problem and he is busy dismantling what he can and subverting what he can’t dismantle.  As Michaels goes on to point out, “this has cost him allies in the executive branch, helped spur creative (and increasingly effective) bureaucratic opposition, and, thanks to that opposition, triggered multiple investigations that threaten to sap party and congressional support.”  In many ways, this is a prescient description of the impeachment currently underway.  It originated with a bureaucrat, alarmed at Trump’s refusal not only to follow standard operating procedures, but his blasé disregard for legal and ethical restrictions.  Although the House voted almost entirely along party lines, with the defection of a few endangered democrats, there are currently some signs of concern among Senate Republicans.  Whether it will threaten Republican party unity remains to be seen, but it is clear enough that the divisions across party lines undermine any positive action that requires congressional support.

Of course, Trump and the progressive sycophantic surrogates that have come to head various governmental agencies are “furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs.”   They have “responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the ‘deep state,’ a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda.”  In some respects, Trump is correct.  The bureaucrats are saboteurs, though they are saboteurs of the national interest if and only if one equates Trump’s interests with the national interest.  It is clear enough that Trump begins, to put it as charitably as possible, with the assumption that whatever might serve him also serves the nation whole.  Here again the impeachment provides a useful example.  One might suggest that the infraction under investigation stems from the depths of Trump’s personality, his sincere, albeit narcissistic belief that he is the “chosen one,” and as such it is in the nation’s best interest to have him as its president for as long as possible.  If he can “leverage” appropriated funds to assist in securing his reelection against a Democratic opponent, then why not do so?  The unelected bureaucrats, the whistleblowers, were not, however, “pursuing their own agenda” in opposition to Trump.  They were operating within, as Michaels put it, within “governmental power structures” that are “almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.”  They were responding to a contradiction, one deeply rooted in constitutional rules, one revealed by the singular self-dealing actions of Trump.  If it is in the national interest to resist Russian incursion into Ukraine, if Congress has appropriated funding for military aid in support of that national interest, then why are those funds being withheld?  If there had been a change in national priorities – i.e. rooting out corruption in Ukraine taking precedence over the resistance to Russian incursion – then why weren’t those changes articulated and properly coordinated with the appropriate stakeholders?

Michael’s principal concern is to differentiate between the administrative state and a more traditional definition of the “deep state.”  Two of Trump’s more effective rhetorical strategies are the misappropriation of terminology to mean something antithetical to its original meaning and the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” defense.  The “deep state” allegations use both strategies.   As Michaels put it, “the concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives.”  In Trump’s partial defense, the term “deep state” has been used in so many ways as to defy standard definition, but in Michaels’ telling one key aspect of the “deep state,” beyond its ability to wield power, is secrecy.  Its purpose, its governing intentionality, is to “defy democratic directives.”  There are several motivations behind the defiance of democratic directives, perhaps the most prevalent is simple, self-dealing corruption, referring to criminal or rogue elements that have somehow muscled their way into power or have somehow been given access to power.  The most pertinent example of self-dealing corruption might be Rudi Giuliani.  As Trump’s personal attorney, he operates outside the official structure of the bureaucracy and as such also outside their purview.  Whether or not his actions are criminal remain to be seen – though given that the Trump administration is vying with the Nixon administration for the greatest number of indictments, it would not be surprising – but one can say with conviction that his actions are clandestine and rogue.  If there is a “deep-state,” it is not, as Michaels put it, “the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the US federal government,” but those quasi-official individuals operating on the fringes of the state.  They share only Trump’s interest in the maintenance of power.  Unlike the bureaucrats who have stepped forward to testify, they have little interest and ultimately no stake in running the country’s government, except insofar as their access to power allows them to profit from the government.

Much of this is now old news.  On October 23^rd of last year, Peter Baker et al. laid out much the same argument for the New York Times under the headline “Trump’s War on the Deep-State Turns Against Him.”    They wrote that “the House impeachment inquiry … is the climax of a 33-month scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the government he inherited but never trusted. If Mr. Trump is impeached by the House, it will be in part because of some of the same career professionals he has derided as “absolute scum” or compared to Nazis.”  In their telling, it resembles something akin to “revenge of the nerds,” well-educated, highly intelligent, deeply committed bureaucrats calling out the self-dealing implicit in Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on his political opponents. 

In other ways, much of this is very old news.  On October 26th of last year, Margaret O’Mara laid out the historical context again for the New York Times under the headline “The ‘Deep State’ exists to Battle People Like Trump,” its thesis “a merit-based system for hiring federal employees was created in reaction to the rampant corruption of the Gilded Age.”  She credits Andrew Jackson with the creation of the spoils system.  If we can remember that far back, Trump touted Jackson as a particular role-model, referring principally to a vague notion of his populism.  Jackson believed “Rotation in office” would result in a more “egalitarian democracy.”  It would, he said, “transform federal service from the domain of a complacent elite into a vigorous voice of the people.”  It didn’t quite work out that way.  Conveniently, as O’Mara notes, “the practice also strengthened party power, as grateful appointees directed chunks of their government salaries as ‘assessments’ to party coffers.” As one wag at the time put it, “to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”  One can discern traces of this behavior in the money that government and foreign-officials channel through Trump’s properties, almost as tribute to the victor.   O’Mara credits the first Roosevelt with the initial creation of the modern, merit-based civil service.  “First as Civil Service commissioner and then as president,” she writes, “Roosevelt pushed to eradicate the spoils system,” and “by the time he left the White House in 1909, the majority of federal jobs were merit-based career posts.”  As she put it, “professionalization expanded in the decades that followed.”  In the physics of democratic politics, however, for every action there is a reaction, and a significant reaction had been brewing from the days of the second Roosevelt – in part fueled by the regulatory restrictions that many of those professional civil servants placed on corporate managers, inhibiting their further acquisition of wealth – in part, fueled by racial resentment as “merit-based hiring diversified the work force,” not only in the civil service itself, which outpaced “the private sector in representation of women and minorities,” but also in the private sector itself as those professional civil servants monitored and enforced the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act – in part, finally, by governmental over-reach, duplicity, and bungling of the sort that any government will produce and that allowed Reagan to quip, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

To lay bare an underlying theme that informs much of my own thinking – power abhors a vacuum.  In the current age, to discredit the civil service and its civil servants is to suck the air out of government power, creating a vacuum that economic power can fill.  While government has a role, the further acquisition of wealth as well as a secondary role in the protection of property rights, it is a role fully subordinate to economic power structures that exist outside the government.  Writers like Michael Klarman make a persuasive case that this subordinacy was hardwired into the constitution,[1] but the idea finds its most direct expression in Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society.  He writes that

the creeds and institutions of democracy have never become fully divorced from the special interests of the commercial classes who conceived and developed them.  It was their interest to destroy political restraint upon economic activity, and they therefore weakened the authority of the state and made it more pliant to their needs.  With the increased centralization of economic power in the period of modern industrialization, this development merely means that society as such does not control economic power as much as social well-being requires; and that the economic, rather than the political and military, power has become the significant coercive force of modern society.  Either it defies the authority of the state or it bends the institutions of the state to its own purpose.  Political power has been made responsible, but economic power has become irresponsible in society.

In other words, the American polity is, by default, conservative, and the coercive power of the deep state, such as it is, resides in economic power, not political and military power.  The first Roosevelt increased the power of the state relative to the economic, he did so most directly through the courts with his “trust-busting” actions, but he did so indirectly by increasing the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy.  Moreover, he did so also by “purifying” the federal bureaucracy – that is to say, by making it less reliant on the corrupting influence of external wealth, he made it more internally coherent, more an instrument of the state, less a sycophantic vassal to the emergent American industrial oligarchy.  The deeper irony, of course, is that Roosevelt had no desire to fully upend American power structures, only to moderate its influence and, not unlike the second Roosevelt, to save economic power from its own excesses.   This became apparent during the “Roosevelt panic” of 1907, when the responsible state turned to (or depending upon one’s point of view, sold out to) the economic deep state for what amounted to a partial bailout.  Although J. P. Morgan and the finance community rose to the occasion, providing their own funds to stabilize the economy, it also occasioned the further expansion of US Steel’s monopolistic empire and ultimately a conservative backlash.  “Whether I am or am not in any degree responsible for the panic, I shall certainly be held responsible,” as Roosevelt put it.  True to his prediction, as the journalist Ida Tarbell observed at the time, “from all sides, the business world, the press, leaders of public opinion – there came such a berating of the President as a man has rarely to endure.”  Or as another journalist, William Allen White, put it to Roosevelt, “the whole system is bending its energy to turn back the clock,” to reset to the default conservative position,[2] a position that prevailed until the next great crisis and the emergence of the next great Roosevelt.

I am not the first to make this assertion.  Mike Lofgren, a long-term congressional staffer, for example, claimed the rights of origination as the one who “popularized the term” deep state in his tome The Deep State: The Fall of the constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.  He writes a “corrective” for the Washington Post, suggesting that “there is no deep state as the right imagines it – that is, a secret cabal of government insiders hell bent on undermining the White House.”[3]  He goes on to suggest, rather, that it is “Trump himself, under the camouflage of populist rhetoric, who has overseen the open expansion of the deep state: entrenched interests gaining outsize influence and setting their own policy agenda, unchecked by the will of the people, their elected representatives or the civil servants meant to regulate them.”  Trump’s populist misappropriation of “deep state” is ironic on a couple of levels.  At the more obvious level, of course, is the degree to which he uses the bully pulpit to propagate a line of complete and utter bullshit.  Trump’s populism is rally deep.  As the bullshit artist supreme, he hangs out with “the people” who constitute his base only at his rallies, and he does this mostly because they are an occasion to stoke his ego with mass adulation.  As Lofgren put it, “the irony becomes obvious when we examine the Trump administration’s policies, which have amplified the worst features of his predecessors.”  He has appointed a “cabinet of billionaires and centimillionaires, like Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin,” and his “tax cuts are overwhelmingly tilted toward the rich.”   Although “the Pentagon is even more bloated than before,” he has little conception of military power as an instrument of statecraft.  Although his acolytes attempt to justify his actions ex post facto, Trump himself rarely articulates a vision for military expansion beyond its uses as a club to bully or threaten to bully recalcitrant foreign powers.  Then finally, of course, as already noted, there is his “rampant self-dealing,” to include “holding official events at his own properties and failing to divest his holdings or place them in a blind trust.”  While propagating the language and conspiracy theories of populist outrage, he shamelessly goes about dismantling the engines of state power.

He touches on a deeper irony, however, when he notes the “worst features of his predecessors,” and writes that “whichever party controlled [the] government, a kind of GPS ensured that the arrow always pointed in the same direction: toward money” and, one might add, economic power.  It is Niebuhr’s irony.  He suggested that “when collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it.”   If Trump is remarkable, and he seems to have generated a plethora of remarks, it is not his “agenda,” such as it is, but the shamelessness with which he pursues it.  If the bullshitter tells stories no one believes, but nevertheless find entertaining, Trump seems to speak with little expectation that he will be believed, but he does create considerable entertainment, not only in the sheer audacity of the bullshit, but in the “triggered” reactions of his “Democrat” opponents who, in their reactions, seem to be the butt of a cynical and somewhat nihilistic cosmic joke.  If the real cause of our political and social inertia is “our predatory self-interest,” as Niebuhr put it, those in on the joke understand just how much “our social conservatism is due to the economic interests of the owning classes,” and just how much even the moralistic self-righteousness of our religious conservatism is “based upon the economic interest of the dominant social classes who are trying to maintain their special privileges in society.”[4]  Dominance is, of course, a relative term.  While Trump and his cabinet are principally concerned with the dominant position extreme wealth provides within American society, others among his acolytes are concerned with more meager forms of dominance – i.e. the economic and social privilege associated with “being white,” or being “Christian,” or being a “white Christian male.”               

That said, there is a deeper irony yet, one that, if it could be addressed politically at all, could provide the backbone of a more intelligent conservatism and, for that matter, a more intelligent liberalism.  The bureaucrats, those who “fought back” against what they perceived as Trump’s inconsistent and consequently dangerous behavior were well educated and, through education, they earned their position within the civil service bureaucracy.  Take a trivial example (though its implications, arguably, are anything but trivial) the so-called “sharpie gate,” in which Trump or one of his staffers took a sharpie pen and simply drew a line on a weather chart to justify Trump’s inerrancy against what could have been shrugged off simply a case of “mis-speaking.”  That Trump felt the need to justify his inerrancy is one thing, the manner another.  It was, in effect, part and parcel of his more populist rhetoric, a way of dismissing out of hand the scientists populating the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric, a way of gratifying the egalitarian and anti-intellectual impulses of Trump’s base, the under-educated that he professes to love.  It was, in that sense, a winking form of rebellion against another form of dominance, an intellectual dominance, to borrow a phrase from Bell, “one form of reaction against the professionalization of society,” a reaction “against the emergent technocratic decision making of a post-industrial society.”[5]  It was, in another sense, to borrow another phrase from Bell, “a revolt against the idea of a meritocracy in which achievement alone becomes the criterion of place in the society.”  Regarding impeachment, it isn’t surprising that the testimony of the specialists, the technocrats within the state department and intelligence agencies, didn’t affect the distribution of public opinion.  That Trump dismisses their testimony out of hand, asserting its irrelevance, is just another form of rebellion against an overweening bureaucracy of educated specialists who think “they know better than us.”

The foundation of the conspiracy theory is implicit to the populist critique of “elites,” the sense that those elites are “conspiring” – i.e. “planning” – to serve their own interests against those of “the people.”  While the conspiracy theorists push to an extreme, they nevertheless find fertile ground in a suspicion of bureaucratic planning in general, a suspicion created in part by a less than sterling record of bureaucratic “planners” in education, welfare, and healthcare.  Such things present problems, as Bell put it, “more complex than they thought,” particularly if the requisite goal is some form of social justice.  The failure of liberalism is, then, again as Bell put it, “a failure of knowledge.” The conservative critiques of “planning” is well known and is perhaps most directly articulated by Fredrick Hayek.  For Hayek, and thinkers like him, free market, laissez faire capitalism underwrites liberal democracy.  As Hayek might put it, any form of centralized planning, especially economic planning, is anti-democratic because it inevitably requires “that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people."  Moreover, it is ineffectual and inefficient, in part because, no matter how adroitly conceived, any such centralized plan must elevate the interests of some at the expense of others, a disparity which in turn leads inevitably to the coercive repression of dissidents.  While no one would accuse Hayek of being “anti-intellectual,” and indeed, thinkers like him, Milton Friedman stands out as an advisor to Reagan and Thatcher, have provided the intellectual rationalization of conservatism through much of the late 20^th and early 21^st. century.  Implicit in this economic liberalism is an earlier critique by Niebuhr, who suggested that our liberal capitalist democracy was saved from “the dangerous illusions about the possibilities of managing the whole of man’s historical destiny,” in part by the corresponding illusion that “human history would bear us onward and upward forever by forces inherent in it” – that, in other words, the free market would not only encourage technical and social innovation, but that it would do so best without the intervening hand of government and “therefore no human resolution or contrivance would be necessary to achieve the desired goal.”

If the failure of contemporary liberalism is a failure of knowledge, the inability to apprehend the full complexity of a problem and solve it once and for all, the failure of contemporary conservatism is, at another level, a failure of admission.  Although the need for planning is perfectly apparent within the enclosed space of any corporate board room, and such planning requires a bureaucracy of corporate experts to effectuate that planning, they fail to admit that such corporate planning does have a goal, the further acquisition of wealth, and that goal does not necessarily serve the interests of communities or even, in the case of multi-nationals, the country.  The duplicity is perhaps most apparent in the realm of environmental concerns.  It is ultimately in no one’s long term interest to allow continued degradation of the environment, the results of which in the face of global climate change could well be apocalyptic, but it is clear enough that those long term interests do not necessarily shape corporate behavior.  As Timothy Cama reports for The Hill, however, “the Trump administration has quietly reshaped enforcement of air pollution standards in recent months through a series of regulatory memos.” These memos “are fulfilling the top wishes of industry, which has long called for changes to how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the nation’s factories, plants and other facilities.  The EPA is now allowing certain facilities to be subject to less-stringent regulations and is letting companies use friendlier math in calculating their expected emissions.”[6]  The memos, in short, are part and parcel of the transfer of power over environmental regulatory “planning” from the EPA, for whom it is a primary concern, to the economic forces of the corporate board, for whom it is at best a secondary concern, subordinate to and compromised by the acquisition of wealth.  It is part and parcel, that is, of a movement toward the creation of a “deep state,” beyond the reach of “democratic politics” in either the small “d” or the capital “D” sense of the word.  It is a failure to admit, paraphrasing Bell, that any large, complex society, especially one that necessarily must be future-oriented, requires planning in order to meet the on rush of technical, economic, environmental and social change.  We are faced, not with the theoretical dilemma of “laissez faire” vs. “planning,” but rather a question of who does the planning and to what end.

In a certain respect, it shapes up to be a competition between the so-called one percent and what might be called the 30 percent or those Americans who have succeeded in attaining a college degree.  One shouldn’t make too much of the simple fact of education, but one might suggest that the fact of education is increasingly definitive of social class in post-industrial America.  As has been observed on several occasions, in industrial America, one didn’t need a college degree to attain middle class status as working class.  To put it rather bluntly, while the historical evidence suggests that the one percent would have preferred to draw on state power to oppress the “working class,” such oppression was ultimately too disruptive both politically and economically, in part because their enterprises needed the working class, both as a laboring force and subsequently as a market.  The owners were ultimately coerced into negotiating with and subsequently “buying off” the working class with wage and benefit packages that assured a level of comfort and security.  Through a sense of class solidarity and identity, reinforced by union membership, they also received a less tangible sense of “worthiness” – they were an important part of the nation’s economy, it’s success in warfare and its prosperity in peace – they were “worth” something.  In post-industrial America, with the burgeoning of the knowledge economy and its growing army of “analysts” and “technicians,” the possession of a post-secondary has increasingly become a necessity to attain middle class status.  Although the 30 percent tends not to think of itself as “working class,” and it doesn’t fit either the standard definitions or stereotypes of the “working class,” the remnants of which still populate the vast warehouses of Amazon, one might nevertheless argue that it is the new “working class.”  As the remnants of the traditional working class are pushed further and further to the margins by economic forces beyond their control, the new “working class” comprised of college educated workers is still necessary to the knowledge economy, and to the extent that they are still necessary, the owners are coerced into negotiating with them and ultimately buying them off with wage and benefit packages that propel them into the middle class.  There are differences, of course, between the traditional and the new working class, not least a meager sense of class identity, undermined by a sense of individual achievement.  A college degree is important – and marketable – in part because 70 percent of the populace didn’t or couldn’t attain one.  Those who have escaped the remnants of the traditional working class, writers like J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, are quick to congratulate themselves on the individual characteristics that allowed their escape, while deploring – sympathetically, but nevertheless deploring – the characteristics that have held back many of their contemporaries.  Ultimately, it boils down to “I have” and “they lack” the “right stuff.”

Here too, in a certain respect, the Democratic party has come to represent the 30 percent.   For writers like Michael Geoghegan, it is cause for alarm.[7]  He calls the Democratic party “educated fools.”  Like Geoghegan, I admire our past president and find our current president a blight on mankind, but as he points out,

what did a white working class hear as the president’s number one solution to the scourge hollowing out communities and life prospects in dying factory town and communities?  He said: “We’ve got to up our game. … It starts by making education a national mission … In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.”  The White House website made the mandate even starker as it played up the president’s speech: “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few; rather it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.”

Obama is, in one way correct, but more education as the path to a more equitable distribution of income is profoundly misleading.  On the one hand, it ignores the reason that a college education leads to more money.  It is the same reason that athletic or performance talent leads to more money – the combination of skills necessary to succeed as a professional athlete or singer are desirable, but relatively rare and, at the higher reaches of success, very rare.  The same is true for academic attainment.  If more people attain college degrees, it would simply mean that some degrees would be “worth less” than other degrees, a reality already visible in the premium placed on admission to prestigious Ivy League and other institutions, and some degrees – e.g. community college degrees – would be virtually “worthless.”   It would remain “just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few.”  On the other hand, it ignores a growing urgency – what to do with those who don’t attain a postsecondary credential? 

For Trump, the answer seems simple enough.  Invite them to a rally, stroke and stoke their egos by flaunting a prestigious education, at which he succeeded brilliantly by his own account, and simultaneously disparaging it by dispensing with any trace of the sophistication, any vestige of the intellectual and cultural distinction class distinctions, that would normally result from a prestigious education.  Although narcissistic and messianic enough to believe that everything he does is perfect, he is nevertheless at one with the “basket of deplorables.”  He speaks like, acts like, and thinks like the world of deplorables that the talented (or lucky) few like Vance managed to escape, and Trump does so with apparent sincerity.  One shouldn’t discount his intelligence, but it is a feral intelligence, neither a civilized nor civilizing intelligence.  Having said that, however, one suspects that the final consensus on the Trump administration will be a matter of personality, his feral personality, and its projections.  Trump can invoke the deep state in part because he is the useful fool of one sort of deep state, the shadow government of corporate lobbyists that haunt Washington.  He is also a controlling operative of another sort of deep state, the machinations of his daughter and son-in-law and, of course, the bumbling antics of Rudi Giuliani and his cronies, all of whom are only tangentially connected to the actual government, cognizant of its norms and regulations only insofar as they become an impediment to be circumvented, and, consequently, contributors to a generalized climate of irresponsibility.  He is convinced, one suspects, that Vice President Biden used the influence of his office to secure wealth for his son, in part because that is the sort of thing that he would do and has done.       

For the Democratic party moving into the 2020 elections, the answer is more complex, and the complexity is daunting.  The signature issue, as Obama recognized, is not only income inequality, but also social mobility.   A change to the tax structure along the lines recommended by Thomas Picketty is the principle remedy for income inequality,[8] and many of the Democratic candidates are proposing to reverse the conservative tide and impose greater taxes on wealth, but such wholesale changes are themselves daunting.  At a high level of abstraction, virtually everyone favors tax reform, but the proverbial devil is in the details and gathering any sort of consensus around those details is almost impossible to imagine.  A plague of deep state lobbyists would descend on Washington like locusts and consume any effort at reform with a thousand nibbling bites. The remedy for a stagnating social mobility will ultimately prove to be even more daunting.   Education would seem to be the answer, or at least part of the answer, but not without changing what is meant by “education,” the current forms of which more effectively serve to reinforce class distinctions, particularly for the children of the 30 percent.[9]  There are, of course, anecdotal exceptions, the compelling Horatio Alger stories of individuals like J. D. Vance in his Hillbilly Elegy or Sarah Smarsh in her Heartland,[10] that do more to prove the general rule of social stagnation than provide any imitable path out and up the social ladder.  Ultimately, each book reemphasizes, to borrow a phrase from Niebuhr, “the extravagant emphasis in our culture upon the value and dignity of the individual and upon individual liberty as the final value in life.”  Or as Smarsh put it, if she ever wanted to receive “the chances” she desired, if she was ever going to escape the “environment [she’d] been born into,” she must accept a simple reality.  “As the American Dream will tell a poor child,” she tells us, “[her] ability to do the right thing rather than the wrong one hung on [her] shoulders” – “it was up to [her] alone.”  

As Niebuhr goes on to point out, however, “our exaltation of the individual involves us in some very ironic contradictions,” not least of which is the contradiction between the communal, egalitarian impulse behind “income equality” and the individualist, meritocratic impulses behind “social mobility.”  One such resolution would seem to be “college for all,” an egalitarian response that promises broader social mobility.  Even assuming the doubtful proposition that “college for all” results in meaningful degree attainment for a broader segment of the American populace, the likely result will not be a redistribution of income.   For that, one must assume the even more doubtful proposition that there will be meaningful work throughout the economy for a significant influx of college graduates.   A more likely result will be a devaluation of the college degree, in two respects.  On the one hand, to improve on the 30% mark, to push it to even 40% or 50%, there will be considerable pressure to decrease educational standards and, consequently, devalue what it “means” to attain a college degree.  The long-noted phenomenon of rampant grade inflation is just one bit of evidence in this regard.  On the other hand, it will simply increase the premium already associated with elite education.  The recent college admissions scandal involving the starlets Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman suggest not only the premium attached to admission into elite schools, but also the accessibility provided by wealth.  Another more likely result will be the alienation of the graduates.  Looking at the “alienation of the youth” in the 70s, Bell suggested that “in a previous time, possessing a college was an assurance of place in society.  Yet in the modern technological revolution, a college degree is no longer the means of stepping on to the high plateau of society.”  The result will be an increasing “competition for place,” and “increasing pressure on the young” and on their parents.[11]  There is little reason to suspect that the competition will be fair, and every reason to believe that the inevitable disappointments will breed disaffection and resentment, a sense that the system remains “rigged” against them.

The Democratic party, in short, has not resolved the contradictions between its egalitarian impulses and a membership increasingly dedicated, directly or by default, to preserving the benefits that come with belonging to an educated elite.  To date, the US has been saved by “the very force of democracy,” which, as Niebuhr saw it, “makes for a fortunate confusion in defining the goal toward which history should move.” Here, one might suggest for a future discussion, the economic elite, the so-called one percent, are not particularly confused in their goals.  If there is a “deep state,” it is the one percent, and if there is a difference between the Democrat Michael Bloomberg and the Republican David Koch, it is less a difference in goals, more a difference in the degree to which (and the manner in which) they are willing to “buy off” the 30%.  Conversely, one might also suggest that the party affiliation of the 30% stems in part from their “place” in society.  As a colleague of mine once put it, “if you want to know what I think, look where I sit.”  Those that sit in government or in the nether world of the University are likely to think “differently” than those sitting in corporate cubicles.  If Niebuhr is correct, if “the distribution of power in a democracy prevents any group of world savers from grasping after a monopoly of power,” the feuding at the top might give some comfort as well that there remains enough contentiousness to likewise prevent any single world owner from grasping after a monopoly of power.  It’s small comfort, however, since it leaves in place conditions for populist appeals and the seething class struggle reflected in the resentments directed at the various “elites” in the media, in the government.  Geoghegan is correct to suggest that the Democratic Party is “saved” by racism – that is to say, many blacks and Hispanics belong to the under-educated and economically marginal 70%, and were it not for Trump’s racism, his populist appeal would likely reach deeply into those communities.[12] To borrow a phrase from Bell, the resentments that led to the election of Trump suggest the class-struggles of a post-industrial society, “just as the machine-wrecking movements of the period of 1815 to 1840 presaged the worker-employer class conflicts of industrial society.”[13]  Such class struggles rarely presage good for a society.     

       

   

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[1] Michael J. Klarman, The Framer’s Coup.

[2] Quotations drawn from Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, 528 – 32.

[3] November 19, 2019. 

[4] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Introduction.

[5] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 203.

[6] Timothy Cama, The Hill, April 18, 2018.

[7] Michael Geoghegan, New Republic, January 20, 2020.

[8] Thomas Picketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. 

[9] Cf. for example Richard H. Hersh, Declining by Degrees, for a discussion.

[10] Sarah Smarsh, Heartland, 141.

[11] Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 189.

[12] Michael Geoghegan, New Republic, January 20, 2020.

[13] Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 189.