You’re probably one of two people: either you believe in some kind of shadow government, or you laugh at those that do. I used to be more of the latter, but I wanted to take the idea of the deep state seriously, and what I uncovered was surprising. Let’s really think about every node of the deep state through a simple lens – either it’s democratic or it’s unaccountable, hidden, under deep layers, peddling influence, weapons, money, controlling democracy from behind the scenes. Doing so tells us a lot about democracy and what we should do about it.

Because in some way, every historical period and nation have had some form of deep state. Even in a direct democracy like Ancient Athens, legislation put forward for citizens to vote on was decided by the Boule behind the scenes. And historians have found that the boule – or council – was dominated by the aristocracy. During the Roman Empire, the Praetorian guard often became kingmakers behind the scenes. Emperor Pertinax was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard after just two months in power because he’d attempted to curtail their power. Behind countless King’s courts, powerful barons, nobles, elites quietly conspired to influence laws, dominate the court, or occasionally, overthrow monarchs entirely. Japanese Imperial Military Deep States in Manchuria, or within the army of the Ottoman Empire, global fruit corporations dominating entire banana republics, determining policy, and overthrowing democratically elected governments. FBI dossiers intended to blackmail democratically elected officials, British intelligence undermining leftist PM Harold Wilson, Russian oligarchs, globalist institutions, corporate backroom threats and deals – everywhere we look in history, a deep state stares back, asking a question: who is really pulling the strings?

NODES MAP – I want to lay out something not conspiratorial, but quite simple; if you have layers of democracy at the front – the ballot, legislative procedures, parliamentary debate, executive orders, judicial process, law, public opinion, polling, and so on – what’s going on in the deeper layers – what’s accountable and what’s unaccountable?

Because – and this is the crucial point – an influential 2014 study of over 1700 policy decisions found that the preferences of average citizens had “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”. That doesn’t sound like democracy to me.

Does the deep state theory explain why forever wars continue despite opposition, why banks are bailed out, but the economy still fails, why politicians say they’ll do one thing and end up doing another, why most of us work long hard days while others fly around the world in private jets?

Does the Deep State Matter More than Ever?

Why is the term so more resonant now? For anyone who takes politics seriously, it’s easy to laugh at pop culture political terms like being red pilled or the deep state, but they’re resonant for a reason, and they’re useful windows, perspectives into reality, the often point to something important.

In the US, the resonance has built up over time as trust in government has decreased. Take the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, in which Vietnamese ships fired on the USS Maddox in supposedly international waters. LBJ used it as an excuse to escalate the Vietnamese war. But it later turned out to be more likely a false flag – bad weather on radar – used as an excuse for the US Military-Industrial complex to ramp up the war effort. Watergate did little for public trust in an executive office that could have an off the books ‘plumbers’ unit that could wiretap the Democratic opposition. The false reports about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs added to the distrust, as did Edward Snowden’s 2013 whistleblowing that the state was engaged in mass surveillances of its own citizens.

In 2018, a Monmouth University Poll found widespread concern about government surveillance, reporting that ‘Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington’

But recently, the term has taken another twist courtesy of Donald Trump. Even before his first inauguration back in 2016, Breitbart published a lengthy and influential article entitled the Deep State vs Donald Trump. Trump called a whistle-blower a “deep state operative”. Stephen Miller blamed his impeachment on the Deep State. And Steve Bannon has talked about the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’ But the twist is that while they’re sometimes talking about the intelligence services, they’re really talking about something more banal: government bureaucracy.

But we need to go deeper than Trump. All of this of course aligns with the idea that since the 2008 financial crash and bank bailouts but increasing inequality, that what the people want and what politicians do and are two separate things. I’m going to keep referring back to this study – that the preferences of average citizens had “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” in 2014, because it was that year – 2014 – that Mike Lofgren, a retired Republican congressional aid of 28 years, began publishing influential essays and books about a very real deep state – he can be credited with giving the term more seriousness.

Lofgren put it like this: ‘There is the visible United States government, situated in imposing neoclassical buildings around the Mall in Washington, D.C., and there is another, more shadowy and indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is the tip of an iceberg that is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.’

Lofgren talks in nodes, with Washington at the core, Military and Industrial Contractors around it, Wall Street which ‘floods the town with cash and lawyers’, Silicon Valley which provides tech and surveillance, bureaucrats and lobbyists circling capitol hill, the CIA or FBI with their own contractors and networks; what’s fascinating about Lofgren’s analysis is the idea of proximity – all of the nodes jockeying to be as close to power as possible. And how it’s a model that be applied to any country.

Table of Contents

Military Industrial Complex

Let’s start with one of the most obvious nodes of the deep state – the Military-Industrial Complex. It sits around many governments, but Washington in particular. A combination of the total warfare of WWII, the scope of the Manhattan Project to build the Nuclear Bomb, the rebuilding of Europe and the Marshall Plan, plus the start of the Cold War – all contributed to never bever seen networks of factories, scientific research, infrastructure, raw materials, energy, and all of the political and business relationships that tied them together. Much of this type of thing – on a smaller scaler – had usually been deconstructed in some way after previous wars – but the scope of the change after WWII led President Eisenhower to warn in his famous 1961 farewell speech that:

‘This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’

What Eisenhower saw and was warning against were the unwieldy and large incentives for vast numbers of people – politicians, industrialists, generals, scientists, even ordinary workers in munitions factories, say, to keep the wheels of the military-industrial complex turning – to sign new contracts, build new weapons, record new profits, and push for new wars.

In 1961, the US defines budget was already $48b dollars, had 300 military bases in the US alone, and included millions of civilians in companies like Lockheed or Boeing plus all of the subsidiary companies serving them in providing machinery say, but also services as banal as food, cleaning, uniforms, transport, and so on.

Professor of Law Michael Glennon has called it it the ‘double government thesis’ – that in the US, national security is run by a “Trumanite network” of career military, security, and intelligence officials because theyre the ones who disclose to politicians the severity of a threat or the necessity of a new military vehicle, creating a vicious cycle.

Since Eisenhower’s warning, the Cold War, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the decline of the British Empire’s policing of the world, particularly by its navy, the shifting of that to America, and the forever wars on terror since 2003 have meant his warning has not only fallen on death ears but has become prophetic.

There are now almost 1,000,000 contractors with top-secret clearances, and in 2022, the defence sector spent over $100 million lobbying congress. There are around 600 American military bases in 40 countries, with US troops in 133 countries, drawing on a defence budget of almost $600 billion. From a deep state perspective, what’s notable is the vast number of contracts, local operators, relationships and networks this entails.

Take just one example of a node far away: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. IT has $322 million worth of contracts including a 25-million-dollar fitness centre. So even that has a network of people with information, access, incentives, ways of working. Plus relationships with likely thousands of business contractors either locally or flown in.

But most contractors want to be as close to Washington as possible. AS recently as the 90s, defence contractors like Lockhead, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics moved their entire headquarters to Washington, which as Lofgren notes, has grown as the deep state has.

Lofgren writes ‘A visitor to the city might be surprised to find ads in the city’s Metro system selling a fighter plane, or spot the huge sign on a telecom building near the Southeast-Southwest Freeway extolling the virtues of an aerial tanker aircraft. A reader of National Journal or Congressional Quarterly or Politico will discover full-page ads for the littoral combat ship.’

This has created a revolving door between politicians, businesses, and military figures.

Bloomberg News reported in 2011 that “The top 10 U.S. defence contractors have 30 retired senior officers or former national security officials serving on their boards.”

Take army general and NSA director Keith Alexander. He left government, setup a consulting company called IronNet Cybersecurity, which advises Wall Street lobbying groups, just one contract of which is worth $600,000.

Thinking in terms of our democratic accountability vs unaccountable influence, the military-industrial complex adds billions of dollars and millions of people in deep layers which can be both impossible for elected officials to understand entirely, difficult to control, and often even operates entirely in secret.

Relying on so many contractors adds an extra layer of unaccountability. Take the private security firm Blackwater’s infamous stint in the Iraq War. IN 2007 they killed 17 Iraqi civilians in what was dubbed the Nisour Square Massacre. Investigators into the firm found “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

Or take Obama, who is the perfect example of how the military-industrial complex captures the outlook of incoming politicians. Obama went on a journey from hesitancy on escalating Afghanistan, and firm on closing Guantanamo Bay, to becoming drone commander in chief.

In his first term, the Pentagon leaked information about the dangers of Obama weakening the US mission in Afghanistan, which turned into a media story, and Obama soon committed 30,000 extra troops.

CIA director John Brennan, said Obama did “not have an appreciation” of how national security works when he entered office, but that now “he has gone to school and understands the complexities.”’

In other words, the military-industrial complex, despite as we now know entirely failing in Afghanistan, took Obama to school, and it can do this by presenting certain information, certain threats, having a strong military take, knowing the field better. As the whistleblower Thomas Drake said: ‘“Obama—like any president—is literally a captive of the people who brief him on secret intelligence.”’

One Brookings Institute study has argued that “the real deep state is the contractor state,” consisting of “four intersecting networks”: giant defence corporations, state and local leaders lobbying for federal funds, big taxpayer-funded nonprofit institutions, and career members of Congress protecting spending – all feeding off federal budgets. This “contractor state” employs millions through government contracts and grants, far exceeding the number of civil servants on federal payroll.’

Silicon Valley CIA Complex

When you factor in all of those contractors, the size of people working directly or indirectly for the US government reaches over three million people. Each of those individuals make decisions based on their own small networks of information. How much do congress, for example, know about those three million people? There’s an interesting overlap, in the modern world, between information and data and intelligence.

Take the CIA. It’s relatively small – around 20,000 employees – but the power of the intelligence it can collect is unparallel.

The drive for permanent intelligence services has a long history. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the upsurge of radical movements in the 19th century threatening to overthrow monarchies, governments developed increasingly sophisticated network of police and spies to collect information on their own citizens for the first time. Policing is a relatively young phenomenon – historically speaking – starting at around the same time.

During the wars of the 20th century, as technology improved, governments intensified their efforts in surveillance of enemies both foreign and domestic. Networks of spy planes, satellites, wire taps, informants have only gotten more numerous and more sophisticated, and understanding their reach, and the effect this has on democracy, is difficult to quantify.

The US government, for example, classifies 50 million documents each year. If this isn’t a node of an unaccountable deep state, I don’t know what is.

If decision making is based on having information, and let’s remember the intelligence and information here are pretty much synonyms, then those with the best information, the most crucial information, those with the cards in their hands, can decide what to release or withhold, what to twist, what to leak, governing the course of action better than anyone further downstream of the information. Does this mean that the CIA or NSA are, logically speaking, decision makers more than any politician, let alone the public?

Lofgren writes ‘There is no more potent sign of the triumph of the Deep State than the fact that contractor personnel are empowered to vet the secrets our elected officials are allowed to see.’

There’s no better proof of how concerning this is than the history of governments the CIA has helped overthrow. Iranian PM Mossadegh overthrown in 1953 because he nationalised British oil. Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 because of land reforms effecting US United Fruit Company. It’s happened in Hawaii, Chile, Nicaragua, the list goes on. In the UK, union leaders have spied on. France has a history of using intelligence influence in former colonies in Africa.

More recently and most notably, the extent of surveillance and it’s increasingly strong links with Silicon Valley was revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

CLIP

Snowden leaked 160,000 NSA records to journalists and analysis found that only 11% of the surveillance was on targeted individuals – with the rest being surveillance of over 10,000 ordinary civilians including their love and sex lives, mental health crises, their politics and religious views, and their finances.

But the documents also revealed Big Tech complicity in helping the NSA intercept internet traffic. The CIA has paid AT&T, for example, $10 million to provide information on overseas calls. And 70% of NSA budget is spent on outside contracts. More layers of deep state, fewer layers of democratic control.

Let’s return quickly to that initial frame – democratic accountability vs unaccountable layers Obviously, theoretically, on the one hand the military and intelligence in most countries are accountable to democratically elected officials or heads of state. But Snowden’s revelations, the secret plots to overthrow foreign governments, the WMD misinformation, and the very new scope, reach, and technological power of these organisations seriously problematises the idea that intelligence services are entirely accountable.

As Hans Born and Ian Leigh remind us in this paper ‘It should be underlined that democratic intelligence oversight systems have come into operation only comparatively recently (i.e. mostly since the mid-1970s and in many states only since the 1990s). This development represents a move away from a guardian state, in which important issues are left to the discretion of professionals, towards a democratic state in which important issues are subjected to normal democratic decision-making procedures.’

In other words, both democratic oversight of these institutions and the scope of the institutions themselves are very new historically speaking. We should remember that all across the modern era, all government institutions, and private ones, including what we’ll look at next – bureaucracies – have gotten bigger and bigger.

Bureaucratic Complex

In the 2024 primaries, Trump told supporters he would ‘shatter the deep state’. Vivek Ramaswamy said they’d be ‘shutting down the administrative state.’ For MAGA, and for so many across the Western right now, the federal bureaucracy and establishment politics is the swamp of the Deep State. But is this anything new?

Many of you will be groaning at me including government bureaucracy already, but thinking about the relationship between, for example, widespread suspicion that the CIA killed JFK and the banality of everyday bureaucracy reveals something about modernity that is crucial – that the bigger institutions get the less individuals feel that they are in control. This is one of the most powerful ironies of the modern world: the promise of democracy is about self-determination, that the people are accountable for themselves. To do that, we’ve built enormous institutions that dwarf any single individual. Is modernity running away from us?

If we’re starting again with our framing of democratic accountability vs unaccountable actors, we have to look at what is the largest node – the US Federal Gov employs around 3 million people. Add in the 1.3m serving military and that’s around 1.5% of the entire population. The UK employs around half a million – 0.75% of the population – but add then NHS and that reaches 8.5%. India also employs around 1.4%, whereas the Chinese CCP employs around 56 million people which is around 4% of the population.

How are these bureaucracies’ part of a Deep State? Well millions of people is pretty deep, and all of those people have varying goals, incentives, values, and ideas that it’s impossible to always hold to account democratically. If we take Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex as the model where there’s a nexus of incentives between politicians, the military, and industry – the same applies in some way to every department, every person, every relationship. A political-pharmaceutical complex? An environmental-protection complex? The duck-hunting-stamp-federal-complex? That is real by the way. My point is that any group who cares about what they do have incentives to do the thing better, to grow, to get more resources, to get more power.

Trying to curtail government bureaucracy is nothing new. Ever since the New Deal, conservatives like Buchanan, Nixon, and Reagan have, in different ways, wanted to fight what they see as a liberal bias in the state apparatus or dismantle institutions entirely.

But MAGA is new. Only with MAGA do we see the hyper sensational language of the deep state conspiracy wielded to the critique of bureaucracy. Is there any truth to the claim that the bureaucracy is a deep state? The issue with analysing these institutions is they’re so big, varied, and any interpretation is ideologically loaded. But we can poke around the edges.

Ok, a quick history here. Until the Pendleton Act in 1883, the federal roles were filled by what was called the patronage system – that elected politicians would fill all the government and civil services roles themselves. That’s right, all of them. They’d then all lose their jobs if they lost the next election. Of course, the government was smaller back then, but as it got bigger, filling every role as a party came into office became quite time consuming.

Patronage was like currency. Offices would be exchanged for support in elections. You back me, you can run X. But with the industrial revolution and the growth of modernity, more factories, products, more globalisation, bigger and more advanced militaries, more to manage civil services everywhere became more complicated. The main issue was the growth of this labor force. Politicians were spending all of their time filling government roles.

To take one example of the scope of the patronage or spoils system, during President Cleveland’s administration at the end of the nineteenth century, 43,000 postmasters were removed to make room for new Democratic Party ones. In fact, such was the extent of the issue that in 1870, James Garfield remarked that politicians spend a third of their time managing the patronage system. Ironically Garfield was assassinated by someone who was annoyed he hadn’t given him a role.

But this wasn’t the only reason. Patronage bred corruption, scandals, fraud, and inefficiency. Politicians were incentivised to give out roles, so departments became bloated and too large.

NYT reported that ‘“At no point had the defects of the previous method of appointment [patronage] seemed more obvious. . . . The customs service at the Port of New York had been properly considered as the climax of inefficiency and corruption”’

The end of the Patronage system is one of the major and most underappreciated turning points of history. The Pendleton Act of 1883 enacted merit hiring for a small number of federal employees. It then expanded across the next century, until in 1980 patronage accounted for less than 1% of the number. Similar changes happened in Europe – like Britain’s Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 – and in many countries patronage was replaced with a permanent civil service based on merit.

But this change was really the beginning of the deep state bureaucracy critique.

There are a number of criticisms historically that can be organised loosely into four buckets – inefficiency/incentives, unaccountability, policy drift, and departmental expansion.

The attempt to tackle inefficiency is nothing new. Take President Carter’s attempt to address it. His administration passed the Civil Service reform act in 1978, establishing merit pay for middle-managers based on performance. The aim was to provide incentives to innovate and improve. But as a result supervisors were just incentivised to rate their own department highly, metrics weren’t effective enough to work, and congress didn’t agree to big enough rewards for it to be effective. Carter’s reforms failed.

As Johnson summarises it in this book ‘most authors have concluded that the 1978 law did little to institute pay-performance incentives.’

Or take another example: one of the best-known hypotheses about bureaucratic behavior is that of William Niskanen (1971), who argued that bureaucrats are primarily motivated to maximize their agency’s budget. The idea is that by expanding their budget, they can increase their influence, staff, and prestige—ultimately improving the standing and effectiveness of their department. This theory has become popular fodder for the right. Jordan Peterson, for instance, has recently referenced Niskanen’s model when discussing the tendency of institutions to grow for their own sake, often becoming bloated and inefficient over time.

However, while the theory has intuitive appeal bureaucracy, it hasn’t held up well under empirical scrutiny. Johnson reviewed the evidence and found little robust data to support the idea that bureaucrats systematically act to expand their budgets as a primary goal. In practice, bureaucratic behaviour appears to be shaped by a more complex mix of motivations—professional norms, political constraints, institutional cultures, and personal values—not just budget maximization.

Another critique is the slow speed of bureaucracies. In response to David Cameron complaining that the civil service slows every down, Jeremy Haywood, a top civil servant, told a committee that ‘Part of our role is to give advice, as to whether something will work, whether something is contrary to the law. Occasionally that will come across as trying to slow things down or stop things happening – that is part of our job.’’

Or take one more criticism: policy drift. We’ve looked at the deep state’s ability to shape politics subtly through their actions – by choosing what to work on, how to work on it, by withholding or revealing information, by convincing a president a little coup is in order. Policy on a national or international scale is hugely complicated, and is made in collaboration with lots of people – from politicians to experts to lawyers to bureaucrats and all the rest. All of them effect the end result, and the design of the policy can drift over time, depending on how the system works. In other words, the system by its sheer weight and influence, usually gets what it wants.

Since Nixon and Reagan in particular, the right has complained that the system – including the media – has a liberal bias. If you’re on the left, the system has a capitalist or money interest bias, which we’ll get to.

The right, through think tanks like the Heritage Foundation has tried to counter this with a return to patronage and accountability.

Lofgren writes ‘Heritage has been very influential in formulating Republican policies, notwithstanding its nonprofit 501c(3) “charitable” tax status). In this document the authors stated the following: “The Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and . . . the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective.” The Leninist principle in a nutshell!’

Despite knowing us all knowing them quite intimately, being on hold to them, dealing with how frustrating they are, we rarely well understand bureaucracy.

The literature on bureaucracy is vast but complicated too. Maybe the most well-known is James Wilson’s book – Bureaucracy. In it he describes how government bureaucracy are not motivated by typical businesses they are often compared to, and so efficiency is not a good or only metric. There are often ambiguous and conflicting goals, unknown constraints, and an organisational culture that matters more than simple efficiency. Reform efforts, he argues, should focus on the political and structural constraints that shape bureaucratic action, rather than just blaming bureaucrats for inefficiencies.

And it’s worth remembering this when people talk about efficiency of governments. In the US, as the Brookings Institute reports ‘Eliminating the entire on-payroll federal workforce would reduce total federal spending by less than 5%.’

What’s more interesting from our perspective – accountable vs unaccountable – is the growth of that extra layer of contractors. John J. DiIulio at the Brookings Institute wrote that ‘The number of people who get paid from the U.S. Treasury but work for private businesses and nonprofits is now more than three times as large as the entire on-payroll federal civilian workforce.’

They argued that the real deep state isn’t inside government, but is rather ‘the contractor state. It consists of four intersecting networks: financially well-heeled and politically well-protected mega-corporations led by big defense contractors; state and local government leaders in both parties that bark and bloviate about federal bureaucracy and overspending but fight for their constituents’ shares of federal dollars; taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit organizations with multi-million-dollar annual budgets; and, last and most lethal to reform efforts, career congresspersons in both parties.’

We’ll return to this at the end, but it’s important to note that we think of the public and private sectors as separate when they’re not. As with every node we’ve looked at so far, and with the growth of contractors and the sheer size and power of the private sector, there’s another node that circles all of the rest – let’s look at the money complex

Money Complex

When taking on monopolies and trusts in the early nineteenth century, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said ‘We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’

We’ve seen how big the state has become, plus the influence of contractors, but Brandeis points to something more fundamental – the unaccountable influence of money on all of this. Around all of the other nodes revolve lobbyists, the revolving doors between the public and private sectors, and the wider influence of big cash.

Money makes the world go around so it make sense to include this node at the edge – or maybe in-between – with money going outwards from the state -contracts, infrastructure investment, social security and money coming in and through, influencing the state – lobbying, taxes, the promise of high paying jobs, wealthy benefactors, plus the influence of banking, bond and stock markets.

All of this is difficult to quantify and can be approached in different ways. Corporate money can finance political parties exerting influence before they even get into government. There are also strong ties between central banks like the Fed or the Bank of England and the wider banking sector or Wall Street. In short, the influence of money is both direct and indirect.

Recently, short lived UK PM Lizz Truss’s position was made untenable when the Bank of England essentially told her policies would bankrupt the country. Clinton reportedly once said that “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f*cking bond traders?”’

Much of politics revolves around the old adage that ultimately, it’s the economy, stupid. But is this unaccountable money power influencing – more than anything else- the outcome of democracy? The obvious answer is yes, especially in reference to our initial study about ordinary votes having “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”. But not in a simple way – political ideas and political elites have the ultimate power to change policy – but given their proximity to moneyed interests, the interests of the political elite and the economic elite have almost always aligned in some way. Disagreements between elites are more common than battles between elites and a pure democratic people.

History provides some big examples of how money influences of the Deep State straightforwardly. Many of the interventions and coups that America have engaged in over the years – from Panama to Hawaii to Haiti to Nicaragua have been found to have big money interests encouraging them behind the scenes.

In 1933 General Semdley Butler wrote ‘I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.’

He continued ‘I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.’

This is one dimension of the money nexus. Another, more recently, is how banks have usually gotten their way.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, chair of the Fed Ben Bernanke put it bluntly, supposedly saying about granting the banks massive £700b bailout, “If we don’t do this tomorrow, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”

Bankers and the Fed said that is should be passed immediately with no amendments.

Lofgren writes that ‘It was barely three pages long, and it was the greatest grant of power to the executive that I had ever seen: $700 billion—the largest single purpose request for money in history up to that time—would be handed to the Treasury Department with no strings attached to bail out the banks as Paulson saw fit (Paulson’s subordinate Neel Kashkari was to be the administrator of the money; he later told an economist friend of mine that the $700 billion figure was “a number plucked out of the air”).’

Democrats had been pushing that the plan should include provisions for keeping those losing their mortgages in their homes. But the banks got what they wanted, and despite crashing the global economy, came out broadly stronger. Growing their assets from 43% of the US economy to 56% in 2012. The popular narrative has been that the quick acting bailout was both necessary and saved the economy for ordinary people. Especially when compared to the drawnout depression in the 1930s. But is this really true? The rich have only gotten richer, inequality has grown, economies have been stagnant, need I go on. The $700b TARP program – Troubled Asset Relief Program – was unpopular with voters but supported by bankers. This is not the place to explore that further – only to say that the bankers got what they wanted.

Bankers, economists, the fed, the bank of England, wall street, the bond market – all have a huge influence on policy not just by being thought-leaders, being technically knowledgeable, having command of scarce and valuable economic data and, of course, resources– but also by simply having relationships with people in the deep state network. A tapestry woven through with big money.

This happens even more directly through lobbying. The influence of money on politics here is both direct and often hidden. Conversations behind closed doors can never be legislated against. Take the infamous Koch brothers’ network.

In the 70s, business leaders including the Kochs and Joseph Coors responded to a memo from the lawyer Lewis Powell Jr arguing that business needed to step up its pressure countering the growing cultural and political power of the left.

A powerful network of pro-capitalist, anti-state, business pressure groups grew from there with money from chemical, oil, and munitions industries funneled into lobbyist and pressure groups like the Heritage Foundation and Cato

Charles Lewis of Public Integrity writed that “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

The by now pretty uncontroversial open secret is that, as Republican Senator Vance McAllister said ‘Money controls Washington.’

In fact, one of the nodes we could insert between the Washington Capitol Hill buildings and outer nodes like Wall Street are the tax-exempt foundations set up to more efficiently direct the influence of money on those in power. There are more than a million in the US – about 5% of the economy – and about 1600 of them with HQs in the Greater Washington area. and they include military contractors that call themselves charitable and get tax free status despite paying their CEO’s millions of dollars.

These are literally deep state satellites revolving around government, funnelling money and pedalling influence down the channels that matter to steer the direction of the state. They also provide a revolving door of job opportunities and big payouts for retiring politicians, incentivising them to keep on their good side at best and do as they say at worst.

Let’s just look at a few examples of how the revolving door works. In 2013, Jim DeMint resigned from congress despite having four years of his term left because, he said, he could exert more influence as the president of the Heritage Foundation than he could as a senator. Not to mention that he could become wealthier while doing it.

Or take Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs. He became Clinton’s treasury secretary, lobbied to repeal Glas-Steagall which separated commercial and investment backing, seen to be contributing factor to 2008 crash, became director Citigroup ion X, earned over $126 million, at the same time as Citigroup was being bailed out by the taxpayer.

Or take Clinton himself – he’s earned around $105 million from the business world since he’s left office. That’s quite a big incentive not to annoy them while in office.

We could go on. The point is that not much of this democratically accountable. Billions are spent by just a handful of donors on elections each year, while 72% of Americans support imposing more limits. Does this happen? Democracy indeed.

Ideology & The Media Complex

In 2013, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250m, promising to respect it’s editorial independence. Bezos joined a long line of businessmen who has ventured into publishing, from LORD Northcliffe in Britain, Berlusconi in Italy, and Jay Gould and William Randolf Hearst in the US, whose own father was a mining tycoon and a senator.

This year, Bezos released a statement that said ‘I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.’

Bezos owns Blue Origin, who, along with Musk (who of course owns media platform X) both have billions of dollars of government defence contracts.

Ultimately, this deep state tapestry has another node – the cultural node, the media node, the PR node – that also sits somewhere around the periphery, and running through, both influencing and being influenced.

Media nodes are in some ways the most important, as they’re how we get any insight into the deep state at all. There is no simple model that says that the media is all propaganda or entirely independent. The reality is of course much more complex. Sometimes, a story might have been pushed by a senator and a military contractor to further a specific idea that they have. Other times, the media publishes a story entirely independent of any sources within the state. And other stories might sit somewhere in between – coming from a begrudged civil servant or a Silicon Valley whistleblower. Some stories are shaped by the releasing of material, others by the withholding of details, or the selective presentation of intelligence from the CIA, for example.

What’s most fascinating, and a subject for continual analysis, is how this entire network shapes ideas. Take this comment from Obama:

‘Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means —law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. . . . I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations.’

And in a way then, because we really have no consistent idea of which stories have been shaped and which are entirely bias-free and rational, the deep state exists in all of us, in here.

Take this comment Elizabeth Warren made about Larry Summers in 2006. She said he told her ‘I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.’

This is a great distillation of how the deep state functions. Either you get invited to all the dinner parties, get all of the latest information, be in the club that stays ahead of the game, get the funding, the contacts, the privileges, or you can say whatever you like, outside on your own, in the cold.

In many ways, the elite networks that undergird the deep state are transmitted in two ways – through cultures of institutions and through elite universities. In Britain, for example, since 1900, 71% of PM’s have attended Oxford or Cambridge, with many learning how to ‘think’ through the infamous Oxford PPE course – that’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics – just the right sort of philosophy, politics, and economics. Similarly, in France the enarques are the elite figures that are educated by the grandes ecoles and go on to serve in elite positions in military, banking, or politics. They all join the same student clubs, the families know each other, and they can ring a newspaper editor or a investment banker over lunch.

What we’ve seen is that the Deep State functions as a nexus, a meeting of relationships across different sectors, like an apex, with elites navigating and building coalitions within that network – the nexus both structures ideas – by having to convince and tow the line and stay on the good side of peers, plus has gaps, points of contention, some wiggle room.

Someone like Noam Chomsky would argue that something like the Deep State extends to the media, who manufacture consent by filtering out information that’s against the establishment’s interests. Group think, establishment dinner parties, the revolving door, the profit motive – they all filter what’s presented to the public.

Editors in the media are picked, Chomsky wrote, by ‘the selection of right thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy’. Ultimately, ‘The filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become “big news”.’

The powerful subtly manage to filter the news environment, emphasising some things and deemphasising others. Most notably for us, one of the filters Chomsky and Edward Herman point to in Manufacturing Consent is PR.

They write that the media ‘are dependent on a finite number of sources that are embedded in institutions like the White House or police departments or trade groups or embassies.’

The Pentagon, for example, spends billions on PR, the US Chamber of Commerce – a pro business lobby – spent $65 million in the year they were writing, and today that figure is over $200 million.’ – me

So that’s another node we could add – the network of Public Relations firms, spin doctors, branding and marketing experts that have built slowly up over the past century. All of which is very costly, is driven by profit, and have become firmly situated within party and government machinery.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that ‘The press office is now the focus of the whole congressional operation in order to pump out a smokescreen of misleading propaganda claiming that Congressman X really cares about you.’

Many today criticise the propaganda model as being too monolithic, ignoring the good will, hard work, fractures, and points of freedom between actors within the media establishment Gore Vidal famously said that ‘it’s not a conspiracy, it’s that they all think alike.’ But is this fair? How can the millions of people that we’ve looked at all think in exactly the same way, all filter deep state propaganda in exactly the same way.

In fact, thinking carefully about how and where disagreement and dissent happens within this monolith we’ve painted, is a perfect way to finish analysing how it works, and helps us all think about how we can improve and counter it.

Dynamics

At this point, the deep state is varied enough to invalidate the idea that it’s a single monolithic conspiracy directed from anywhere simply at the bottom or top. At the same time, all of these nodes tend to settle around a group ideology that is hegemonic. The nodes shift like a kaleidoscope, and there are disagreements between and within, maybe we should talk about deep states, rather a deep state.

Let’s look at some of the big issues that have kept coming up and think about some possible solutions.

The first and most obvious thing to say about our accountable vs unaccountable lens is get money out of politics. That’s a given, is both easy in some areas and difficult in others, and is the subject of another video. But if we’re talking about unaccountable influence over democracy, big money and lobbying is obviously number one.

The second thing, if we’re talking about accountability within all of this, is transparency.

Transparency and oversight.

During and after the covid-19 pandemic, the UK health minister, Matt Hancock, came under fire when it was discovered that a £40m government contract for covid tests had been awarded to Hancock’s local pub landlord.

Hancock is known as a somewhat tragicomic figure here in the UK. The even more comical fact that a pub landlord was given a multimillion pound contract for delivering medical devices he had no experience of over a pint points to something often underappreciated about the deep state – it’s banality. Hannah Arendt famously talked about the banality of evil. What comes up again and again for us, is the banality of conspiracy.

One study found that a third of contacts awarded by the conservative government during the pandemic had red flags. The banality of it is, there is no conspiracy, there are rich people doing deals with their rich friends. Oversight and transparency then is key.

Harvard’s Stephen Walt has remarked that “there is no deep state” but that instead “it is hiding in plain sight” – think-tanks, lobby groups, and civil institutions. But I think hiding in plain sight is an exaggeration. For every deal like Hancock’s that gets reported on, there are thousands behind the closed doors of power that we never even hear about. What’s reported, disclosed, made public is inevitably decided by elites.

There are many examples we could point to for improving oversight and transparency.

To take just one – In South Korea, corruption was improved by implementing ‘Online Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications’ – a portal to see permits, applications, complaints with transparency at its core. A survey found 68.7% of citizens believed corruption decreased after it was implemented.

There are many other things we can talk about – freedom of information acts, when something is or isn’t classified, government databases being open to the public, making the revolving door between government and the private sector more difficult, and – and this is really important – making sure whistleblowers are legally protected. We should be encouraging whistleblowing not making it difficult. In fact, if we could add anti-nodes amongst our nodes – whistleblowers would be one of them.

Next, we should always be thinking about how to improve these systems. Some on the left ironically criticise Musk stripping back government but are often the same people who criticised USAID for being a vehicle for the promotion of US imperialism for decades. This is a good conversation on that, by the way. Obviously any discussion about improving the state will be ideologically loaded, and the right often used ‘efficiency’ as a front for deconstructing institutions entirely. But liberals and the left have not been particularly good on the ways we should be improving institutions.

Just take a look at this list of drives to change how government works over the years from this book. 1905 – Roosevelt tried to make the state more efficient. Taft – 1912Commission on Economy and Efficiency, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee in 1936, Pres- ident Truman’s Hoover Commission of 1949, a second Hoover Commission in 1953 under President Eisenhower, President Carter’s Reorganization Project of 1977, President Reagan’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in 1982. President Clinton’s National Performance review. In the UK Rothermere used the Daily Mirror to publicise his Anti-Waste League which sought to mobilise opinion against ‘excessive’ government spending. 1921- , the Lloyd – the Geddes committee to find cost-cutting measures.’ My point is, DOGE is old as the hills.

So how can we make sense of this? Let’s look at the evidence. There are a few themes that keep coming up.

What we really want, in all of this, quite obviously, is decent, smart, innovative, hardworking people who are accountable ultimately to the electorate. Ideology aside, we need mechanisms for selecting talented people.

Efficiency, innovation, dynamism

But what do talented people do? Are they efficient, productive, accountable, innovative, upstanding? In their book looking at the civil service and the problems of bureaucracy, scholar Ronald Johnson says that performance is a problem because of the unusual protection civil servants have from firing and rehiring, and the rigid pay structure. Seniority is privileged over merit.

Johnson concludes that the fear of a return to patronage as evil presents ‘an obstacle to meaningful reform.’ That there’s no returning to the patronage system, but we might have gone too far the other way. He writes ‘it became increasingly difficult for federal politicians to motivate or to manage the bureaucracy. As tenure provisions were strengthened and bureaucratic rules extended, the ability of politicians to dismiss employees was reduced, weakening their control over the bureaucracy.’

Continuing that ‘The fear of patronage is a convenient ploy to which federal employee unions can turn in responding to criticisms about the performance of the bureaucracy, For example, the National Federation of Federal Employees opposed provisions of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 granting supervisors authority to award merit pay. Union representative Sam Silverman claimed that the bill “allows for the ready politicization of the civil service.’

Just swap politicization in that last sentence for democratisation – words that are pretty much interchangeable – and you can see that there are two very different ways of looking at this.

The challenge is a difficult one though – as one of the benefits of a protected civil service is that employees can work in a neutral way across administrations. It’s a strange paradox – because as soon as this happens, it has the potential to become unaccountable, non-democratic. In some ways, effective administration requires a deep state that functions pragmatically and is somewhat immune to the back and forth of democracy. The question is always how much democracy, how much accountability – no one wants a public meeting and the village square every single day.

There are no easy answers here. In his review of the literature, Johnson says ‘no consensus on the role that bureaucrats play in policy formation and implementation’ Plus that ‘no satisfactory explanations for the persistence of the problems of bureaucracy have been offered.’

But the suggesting is that more patronage and more accountability might be a good thing. This is a theme that comes up often and is key to understanding the deep state. Who is ultimately accountable? It’s why whistleblower protection is key – it forces accountability between the gaps of the nodes. It’s why transparency is key, journalists, citizens, and employees all become more accountable for keeping an eye on what’s going on.

Or take this book – Dan Davies argues that big institutions have incentives to build in accountability sinks, where accountability is kicked down to the next person and the next and the next.

Everyone knows that frustration with not knowing who’s accountable, and I do think tech can help modernise governments by bringing people closer to those that govern. Reading this book – Recoding America, by Jennifer Palkha, and talking to anyone about the systems the NHS relies on in the UK will make you think twice about criticising drives for government efficiency entirely. Governments are usually slow, outdated, stuck in the past.

That is, except Estonia

They’ve entirely digitised the state, apparently saving over 3000 years of civil servants hours. You can do everything online – pay your taxes or incorporate a company in minutes. They have e-ID’s on decentralised blockchain to ensure security and transparency. You can vote, get your bus pass, driving licence, medical records, prescriptions – all online.

X-road is a decentralised platform that both public and private sectors can plug into. The Estonian government claims it has added 2% to GDP, and since the 90s Estonia has seen impressive growth rates. The system South Korea implement to increase transparency in contracting procedures is another example of this kind of success.

The state and it’s parallel institutions have grown with the demands of modern life. Big institutions are, in many ways, necessary. But they can always – and always should be – the subject for radical revision and innovation. History moves.

I think the kinds of protections against the things we’ve looked at happen between the gaps of the nodes – there are lots of policies that are quite easy to implement – open contracting procedures made public online, a better process for Freedom of Information laws, again available and streamlined in online databases, clear demarcations of accountability backed up by law, legal protections for whistleblowers, more independent media, Patreon supported Youtube media with different incesntives, not close to the state, and, again, money out of politics.

A deep state might be inevitable, but we can bring it out of the deep and into clearer waters