Thoughts On The Deep State

     Quoth Victor Davis Hanson:

     All great empires of the past created deep states....The so-called deep state is often weaponized to reflect current orthodoxies.

     Well, yes. The political dynamic dictates that that will occur according to a Hayekian process:

1. A government forms over a previously ungoverned region.
2. Persons who want to render “public service” contend with persons avid for power over the control of the government.
3. Those whose highest priority is power get control of the government. (They want it more; therefore they’ll eventually get it.)
4. The masters of the government implement measures to perpetuate their tenure in power. One of the most successful and enduring measures, historically, has been a large, embedded bureaucracy: a “permanent government.”
5. Because the bureaucracy and the power-lusters have mutually supporting agendas, they work together, such that over time it becomes ever more difficult to displace either group.
6. The ultimate consequences are totalitarianism, decay, and collapse back into anarchism.

     The most important of all “current orthodoxies” is quite predictable:

The State is always right.
The needs of the State come first.
The State, no one else, shall define its needs.
Do not oppose the State.

     It has always been this way. It always will be.

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     The alignment of the Deep State with contemporary “progressivism” is equally predictable. “Progressivism,” my favorite Orwellian term in our time, makes a marvelous rationale for ever-widening, ever-increasing government power. The only thing one could add to it is a state of total warfare against an indefeasible enemy. (While we’ve had a couple of candidates for that position over the century behind us, they’ve let the Deep State down by collapsing of their own weight.)

     Any notion, however absurd, that can be used to rationalize increased government intrusion into private affairs will serve the Deep State. Government’s defining privilege and characteristic is the use of coercion – force, fraud, and intimidation – to achieve its aims. To the Deep State, the method is more important than the putative mission. The case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, which appears to have fizzled, is an excellent example:

     First they were targeted by gay activists who insisted the shop bake them a gay wedding cake, despite many other bakeries in the immediate area willing to do so without the need for state compulsion.

     After the Supreme Court ended that persecution, a trans activist insisted that this same shop-owner bake xer a cake celebrating transexualism.

     And Colorado rushed to put them through more years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal persecution.

     Colorado has finally given up -- and some call this "victory."

     Six years. Six years.

     Any more victories like this, and we're done for. Who would actually exercise one's rights and refuse to bake a cake, given that the state, with its unlimited resources, will sue you for six years for daring to assert your rights?

     Anyone who's been subject to a malicious prosecution like this understands that the process is the punishment.

     “Gay rights?” “Transsexualism?” One would not normally associate these “causes” with the bureaucracy’s gray flannel suits. One must look deeper. One must ask the question the ruling elite and the Deep State ask: “Can I use this to acquire more and wider powers?”

     Only that one answer is sought. Nothing else matters.

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     The above has always struck me as “obvious.” Yet terrifyingly few grasp it, even in outline.

     Of course, to speak of the Deep State as if it were a single mind is to anthropomorphize a “hive entity.” Some – a paltry few, mostly limited to the “over the counter” government – of its components are conscious of their aims as I’ve delineated them. Most are actuated by the sort of communication that takes place among colony ants and worker bees: the vibrations and pheromones that send signals and induce conformity among the relatively mindless members of the hive. That’s irrelevant to the function of the Deep State. What matters is that it provide the ruling elite with an instrument of coercion that is essentially anonymous and de facto unopposable.

     The question for Americans of the Twenty-First Century is whether, once a Deep State has formed, it can be expunged by any means short of violent revolution. So far no method has emerged, which bodes ill for the remnants of freedom in these United States of America.