The Deep State is Us

Occasionally a new term enters the public lexicon that is both apt and ominous – but whose implications are not yet fully fathomed. And so we have “The Deep State.”

Occasionally a new term enters the public lexicon that is both apt and ominous – but whose implications are not yet fully fathomed.

And so we have “The Deep State.”

The Deep State is a state within (behind) the political state – behind the political curtain. It has a secret bureaucratic mind of its own, an entrenched animal of such proportion and invisible power that it eats elected politicians for breakfast and then continues to grow in size and power – like The Forbidden Planet’s murderous psychological monster.

It is éminence grise en masse – millions of “gray” bureaucrats and minions behind the throne that not only (sometimes) execute the directives of the throne, but also execute the person on the throne, if its powerful appetite wishes.

[It’s] millions of “gray” bureaucrats and minions behind the throne that not only (sometimes) execute the directives of the throne, but also execute the person on the throne, if its powerful appetite wishes.

It is, effectively, a massive government guild that ensures its own preservation and aggrandizement, as well as the ends of its own political desires and its own private masters – in the media, in academia, in its political circles, in private groups, in its own branch of government, in its own hydra head.

The gray eminences will slow down or shelf directives. They will leak sensitive information. They will lie. They will create false documents. They’ll burn documents or electronic files. They’ll refuse to hand over files. They will slander. They’ll target opposition groups. They will refuse to testify. They will meet secretly on tarmacs. They’ll move at a snail’s pace. They’ll communicate clandestinely with foreign governments. They’ll ignore laws. They’ll hand out favors to their favored. They’ll vote for more laws and bigger government (more “workers”). The list is endless.

They are the shadow government, hatching malicious plans in the darkness of their own self-abasement – plans that ensure its own immoral survival and growth. Its plans are almost always fascistic, seeking control of speech, money, business – and power.

All of the above is nothing new. Two millennia ago, the Greeks and Romans had terms for “a state within the state,” for bureaucracy so enormously obese that its desires superseded or aggrandized those of the elected officials – that it became an entity unto itself.

In America, it is 22-million strong – government sinecures, making up a full 20% of the adult workforce and wielding the full power and threat of all national, state and local governments.

But The Deep State is much more than people behind the curtain of power. It is also the innumerable laws that violate individual rights – laws that give power to bureaucrats and politicians. It is Big Brother’s laws aimed at your money, your business, your property, your freedom, your health, your death, your movement, your actions, your productivity, your morality – laws that affect absolutely every movement that you make in a day’s time.

These laws were created by people elected by people – incredibly, by citizens seeking their own masters and controllers. There would be no Deep State if there were nobody to create it, pay for it, allow for it, and elect those to run it.

The Deep State is us.

It is created by individual citizens in pursuit of government strictures of their lives and others’ lives. It is born of mistrust of ourselves and other people. More on that later.

The Deep State in America has become ubiquitous – so pervasive and threatening that no person can own anything or take any action without implicitly or explicitly wondering what the state thinks about that ownership or action – including brushing one’s teeth (health insurance laws) or moving one’s mailbox (appropriated by government the minute you build it) or changing a light bulb (must be LED and must be “disposed of properly”) or changing traffic lanes without a turn signal even though there’s not another car in sight (traffic laws).

Our lives, even in America, have become lives of permission and oversight, instead of freedom.

We feel the strong arm of government every single day of our lives, and everything we “own” is actually “leased” by the government (property taxes) or regulated by the government (exhaust tests for cars). Nothing in our lives is free of government control or permission on some level. And while you are reading this sentence, you have no guarantee that the government is not watching you – or carefully reading any written comments you make about this article on Facebook and elsewhere.

The Deep State is Frankenstein’s monster, a fiend that mocks his maker, kills those close to the maker and eventually leads to the death of his maker, either literally or metaphorically via the suffocation of productivity and freedom.

The horror of the Deep State is not that it can and will unseat sitting presidents and other politicians. That simply reveals its extraordinary power and reach, bringing home tangibly its wretched existence to ordinary citizens.

The real horror is the ominous and omnipresent cloud of threatening restrictions and imprisonment, and the millions of immoral deeds it commits daily to those ordinary citizens.

The Deep State that we created feeds on us – almost literally. It keeps itself alive – 22-million strong – by harassing us in the name of “protection” (drug laws, alcohol purchases, speed-limit laws, “hate” crimes, sexual-harassment laws), in the name of necessity (taxation, jury “summons”, tariffs, fees, counterfeiting by Fed), in the name of the environment (light bulb laws, exhaust laws, water restrictions, toilet flushes, chemical usage, coal and oil laws), in the name of kids (property taxes, “vulgar” language, vaccinations, movie and music ratings, public “schools”, car seats), in the name of altruistic “welfare” (Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, minimum-wage laws, “free” housing, “free” food, disability programs, “handicap” laws).

There is no venue of living in which government has not presumed itself over the last 100 years in the United States of America. The formerly “shallow” state of America’s auspicious beginning has grown so labyrinthine deep that it is incomprehensible to average private citizens trying to simply “get by” in life and be happy.

The Deep State is based on control, based on fascism, which is the control of private actions and property, as well as the control of businesses and their property. The clever thing about fascism is the ostensive control of these things by citizens, who do indeed believe they are in control. Fascism, at first, gives the appearance that there is freedom and ownership by private citizens. It’s clever that way.

We have nascent fascism. It’s the Deep State we have in America now. It isn’t yet full-blown Nazi fascism.

We have nascent fascism. It’s the Deep State we have in America now. It isn’t yet full-blown Nazi fascism, in which even the favored elements in a country begin to chafe at the horror of what kind of Frankenstein’s monster they’ve created (in Hitler and his Brownshirts). In fully-realized Fascism, the Deep State transitions to the explicit totalitarian state, with the people having fully surrendered their control and with the state no longer seeking delusion or permission.

(That is where America is headed. It’s an inevitability, unless the Deep State and its gross violation of individual rights is understood by millions of Americans and altered permanently via public speaking and writing and protest.)

Throughout history, there have always been those who favored big government, the deep government. The Greeks and Romans understood The Deep State. In each, there are always the favored elements – those who support, demand and implement The Deep State – who deny that individuals have rights.

In America, they are the so-called Progressives (Progs) – the “avant garde” Brownshirts in the Land of the Free.

They are 95% of the media, 90% of Hollywood, 90% of artists, a large portion of billionaires, 90% of academia, 70% or more of college students, 90% of government “workers,” 80% or more of Silicon Valley, 80% or more of minorities, all politicians (even “conservatives” and Libertarians to a smaller degree).

They are – ironically and unwittingly – the masters of their own destruction, just as the business owners and private citizens of Nazi Germany horrifyingly discovered. Once The Deep State transitions to the totalitarian state, the only “favored elements” are the absolute rulers and the military – but even these favored elements occasionally find themselves in the hangman’s noose, because in the final, full fascist state, all favors are ultimately determined by the despot at the top.

In modern America, The Deep State is the imperious clerk at the DMV or the angry rogue cop exceeding his authority or the tax drone at our doorstep or the rude regulator presiding over our business shop. They are in charge. Not us, though we still have some freedom.

But what happens if the Progs finally win their battle to have our guns confiscated? What happens if they finally get 90% of the money of the “wealthy” for the “general welfare,” which has already previously happened in America. What happens if they let in millions of sharia-loving savages who intimidate unarmed average citizens into obsequiousness, as is happening in Europe? What happens if they say we can’t commit “hate speech” or any speech that “offends,” as is already happening in semi-fascist Europe and is currently happening on America’s college campuses?

Like the frog in the warming water, people acclimate to the loss of freedom, to the loss of individual rights. Worse, they actually seek the loss “so we can have peace and everybody can get along and so the playing field can be level and fair.”

The Deep State is us because we seek it – the vast majority of us – and have sought it throughout history. People seek rulers. They seek favors from the rulers. They seek to be told what to do or not do by the rulers. They don’t trust themselves and they certainly don’t trust others. People think they need a Leviathan, a big government, to control fatal-flawed human beings. The Founders of America knew this propensity and attempted a Band-Aid approach to this fatal flaw by separating the branches of government “power” and diffusing the power.

It didn’t work. It’s not working. They didn’t (and couldn’t) fix the people. The people – and even the remarkable Founders – didn’t fully understand the greatness of the human mind and its necessity of freedom to execute its greatness. The Founders and the people didn’t understand fully what individual rights are. They considered it a given that human beings must always have a master, because human beings allegedly can’t master themselves in a fully free political environment.

To their credit, they wanted a “small” master, a small and limited government. But the Founders put the government in charge of commerce, of money, of taxes, of trade, of tariffs, of roads, of post, and other things. The principle behind these controls was that humans couldn’t be free – not completely free. Humans couldn’t be trusted to be completely free. The Founders violated the principle of individual rights, leaving a crack in freedom for Progs to eventually pry open and release the floodgates of fascism.

To their credit, they wanted a “small” master, a small and limited government. But the Founders put the government in charge of commerce, of money, of taxes, of trade, of tariffs, of roads, of post, and other things. The principle behind these controls was that humans couldn’t be free – not completely free. Humans couldn’t be trusted to be completely free. The Founders violated the principle of individual rights, leaving a crack in freedom for Progs to eventually pry open and release the floodgates of fascism.

The crack was small at first and the state shallow, but parasites (politicians) have need of feeding, and they were starving in early America. So they stoked the envy and other irrationalities of the populace toward businesses and the wealthy. Federal and state governments greatly increased regulations of business and, by the end of the 19^th century, began to break up “monopoly” businesses and support union thugs. The state grew deeper.

This wasn’t nearly deep enough, however. The U.S. Constitution was entirely too restricting for a true Deep State. So they and their Progs convinced citizens that Amendments were necessary to effectively put down businesses, stabilize money and markets, and gain enough taxes to run a deeper state. This happened in early 20^th century America.

This merely wetted the appetite of the Progs. It didn’t yet create a Deep State. They needed a tragedy, something horrific (of their own fascist making) to deepen the state. The Great Depression was that tragedy. Average citizens were told it was free business that caused the Depression, though the real causes of course were the Amendment creating the Federal Reserve, suffocating taxes, union thuggery, stifling business regulations, and monstrous trading tariffs.

But all of this begs the question. Why would average citizens buy into any argument against freedom – of civilians or businesses? If individual rights is an absolute principle, then any argument for a Fed or pro-union legislation or regulations or taxes or tariffs would be absolutely unacceptable.

Quite obviously, because nobody (citizens or officials) understood the principle of individual rights. It was the author and thinker Ayn Rand who discovered the nature of rights in the 1960s. Rand was the first to understand fully that humans have an unimpeachable right to run their lives completely free of the initiation of force by other humans, whether private or government. She was the first to understand how to prevent or stop The Deep State.

Before Rand, the only conception of humans by all humans was that they are “fallen” – that humans are incapable of being fully rational and fully happy by being left alone. In philosophy, this is called skepticism. It is the skepticism of humans being fully efficacious, fully in charge of themselves, fully capable of not interfering with other humans without a government overseer.

This is the predominant ideology of the left, of Progs. With them, it’s not just that they don’t trust people and don’t think “average” people capable of goodness and self-governance. The Progs actually hate humans. Watch them on the college campuses. Watch the Hollywood-ites spewing vile threats and language on their podiums. Watch their schadenfreude smirks and grins and lurid comments when something terrible happens to someone they disagree with (like the death recently of former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes).

Though “conservatives” are Progressive Light, they don’t share this fundamental hatred of human beings – though they believe humans to be fallen. Their Tea Party rallies and protests and podium speeches were tame, respectful, and idea-oriented. Even the rallies for Donald Trump were simply enthusiastic, without the vitriol that always accompanies rallies of Progs.

But with the apathy, disinterest, cowardice, or laziness of a vast majority of conservatives, the Progs are winning in America – and have been winning for 40 years, since they took over the schools, which are a mandate of both conservatives and Progs. What is indoctrinated in “public schools” is almost pure Prog ideology – Deep State ideology.

According to this ideology, humans via their own private activity or business activity will be racist, sexist, “greedy,” selfish, “anti-Earth,” hateful, and much more.

The masked violent cowards on college campuses who need safe spaces for their fragile psychologies are simply the product of Prog planning – brilliant planning in line with Hitler’s youth planning.

Though The Deep State has been getting deeper quickly for the last 80 years, since Franklin Roosevelt, its labyrinthine depth has only recently reached the public consciousness, and now has terminology: The Deep State.

Perhaps – hopefully – this will wake good people up. But they will have to wake up to much, much more. They will have to wake up to a new idea of the nature of human beings – as rational animals who have the right to their own lives, a right to not live under the auspices of a Deep State. Not as “fallen” animals.

They will have to wake up to their own misguided ideas about altruism and the concomitant government enforcement of that altruism through “welfare,” regulations, taxation, “schooling,” intimidation, and harassment. Perhaps they will wake up to the Frankenstein’s monster they’ve created.

Yes, The Deep State is us.

But if enough people understand what Rand understood first about the greatness of humans and of individual rights, we can kill The Deep State forever – and live in harmonious, magnificent freedom and benevolence.

Related Posts:

1. Transcript: Ayn Rand and the Austrian Economists
2. After the Founding: The Demise of Laissez Faire in America
3. Doubt and Certainty

   

About the Author: David Elmore

David Elmore is currently the CEO of Freshana Organic Solutions. He has started four businesses since he was 12 years old, and he’s written three books. He wrote the unpublished novel Skyler: The World is Coming in 1997. He’s written and published two nonfiction books under pseudonym in the last two years: Children Have Rights and Just Say No to Your Parents. He was the editor and publisher of perhaps the first full magazine on Objectivism in 1992-3 called Reality. He’s written hundreds of posts for his online blog, My Playground, on philosophy, politics, ethics, children and much more for 12 years. He graduated with a BA in Journalism from UT Arlington, TX, in 1987 and worked for newspapers for 13 subsequent years as writer, editor and columnist. He’s led philosophy-group discussions in person and online for 25 years.