Yes, Virginia, There is an American "Deep State"

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The idea of an American “deep state,” comprising what some call the “ruling circles” or “power elite,” running things behind the scenes, for most people conjures up visions of conspirators lurking in the shadows, secretly controlling the country. 

It sounds like something out of a far-left or far-right fantasy. But actually, it hides in plain sight, if you know where to look. 

In The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, explains that the self-segregation of America’s elites result in what she calls “highly stratified hyper-educated affluent places” in parts of cosmopolitan cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York, or Seattle.

It’s not a closed caste system – the Clintons and Obamas are now part of it. But the result is “a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.”

As Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University, noted in the Spring 2017issue of the Claremont Review of Books, “Well-nigh the entire ruling class -- government bureaucracies, the judiciary, academia, media, associated client groups, Democratic officials, and Democrat-controlled jurisdictions --have joined in ‘Resistance’ to the 2016 elections,” in which, to their consternation, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

Their practical objective is to hamper and otherwise delegitimize 2016’s winners and “browbeat Trump voters into believing they should repent and yield to their betters. This campaign might break the Trump presidency.”

Codevilla’s is definitely a view from the far right. Yet it fits well with a commentary from the left by Serge Halimi, president and director of the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, in its September 2017 English edition.

Halimi noted that, after Trump won the election, he was after a good deal from Russia. Trump was personally eager to explore the possibility of a strategic accommodation with Russia, especially in Syria.

A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging their alliance against the Islamic State and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia’s security.

As we know, he has been completely stymied in his efforts, because there was a convergence in the objectives of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians, and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington.

The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared that a rapprochement between Trump and Vladimir Putin would deprive them of a presentable enemy once ISIS’s military power was destroyed, writes Halimi. 

The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow’s alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neoconservative foreign policy hawks hated Trump’s neo-isolationist instincts.

“The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture,” asserted Halimi. “So they were searching for any information or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation.”

British journalist Glenn Greenwald, in an article he published Jan. 11 on his Intercept site, also observed that there really is, at this point, “obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president on the other.”  

Greenwald, a longtime iconoclast, maintains that they preferred Clinton to Trump because she defended and intended to extend the decades-long international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s pre-eminence depends, while Trump posed a threat to it.

“Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework,” he concluded, “that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.”

But the nationalists who backed Trump’s agenda --hard-liners like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka --have been ousted. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Is it now drowning him?