The Deep State (9 page)

The decade's creeping militarized authoritarianism coexisted with an extreme libertarian individualism that bordered on anarchy. While the two cultures superficially appeared far apart in their internal dynamics and values, the seemingly clueless George W. Bush intuitively grasped their symbiotic nature as he unleashed the war on terrorism at the same time he told Americans to go shopping.

Far from being an exceptional country that lives outside the history of the rest of world, the United States has for the last thirty years been merely the
primus inter pares
of a community of nations which has little by little forgotten the lessons of a wrenching depression and a cataclysmic war. Ronald Reagan was not really the trailblazer that many believe him to be—Margaret Thatcher preceded him by two years. For their parts, Thatcher, Reagan, and their successors completed the foundation that had been dug by a handful of practically unknown European intellectuals, as modified by free-market academics from the University of Chicago and a few generously endowed think tanks.
Ideas Have Consequences
is an abiding truth as well as the title of a book by conservative political philosopher Richard M. Weaver, published in 1948 by the University of Chicago Press. It is an even more profound statement than it appears on first sight.

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

—Samuel L. Clemens,
Sketches, New and Old
(vol. 19 of the
Writings of Mark Twain
, 1875)

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. . . . I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I'd entered public life to serve.

—President Barack Obama,
The Audacity of Hope
, 2006

Politics, from West Virginia to Afghanistan

In January 2014, toxic chemicals spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia, contaminating the drinking water of a nine-county area surrounding the state capital and forcing residents to drink bottled water for two months. It was found that the leaking storage tanks had not been inspected by a government agency for fifteen years, and, as it turned out, the law did not require them to be inspected, even though they lay near the river, upstream of the intakes of a drinking water filtration plant.
1

Do the citizens of the world's oldest constitutional republic
consciously decide with their votes that the safety of their drinking water is a lesser priority than delivering suitcases of off-the-books cash, reportedly totaling tens of millions of dollars, to a corrupt satrap running Afghanistan named Hamid Karzai—an extraordinary act of philanthropy that failed to make him any easier to work with?
2
More to the point, do their representatives and senators in Washington deliberately prioritize the stated requirements of the Pentagon and CIA above the most basic needs of their constituents? Yes, if those legislators have developed the unfortunate tendency to go into a trance every time someone utters the magic phrase “national security.” In truth, it happens often enough, and many times over the course of my career I saw Congress respond to that occult incantation like iron filings drawn to a magnet. But the problem is not quite so simple.

Congress has abdicated a lot of control over foreign policy to the executive branch, but it still retains the constitutional power of the purse. So why do congressmen keep funding extravagances like a $7 billion sewer system in Baghdad and not take care of matters closer to home? And what does the public at large think of this behavior?

Public trust in government has with temporary fluctuation steadily declined from a high of around 75 percent in the mid-1960s to a level of distrust near 80 percent in 2010.
3
One 2013 survey result from Public Policy Polling ranked Congress below head lice or cockroaches in public esteem, although it did manage to pull in ahead of the Kardashians and North Korea.
4
The American people clearly believe that something is wrong, and something plainly is. Adjusted for inflation, median household income peaked in 1973, and has been stagnant or falling ever since. The 2008 financial crash merely exacerbated already existing long-term trends and resulted in a further drop in the American standard of living.
5
The public knows from its own material condition that governmental decision making is defective, yet the same decision makers keep getting elected. Why?

“Ordinary Citizens Have No Influence Over Their Government”

In practice, the American political system allows only two political parties, which are wholly dependent on corporations and wealthy individuals to fund the most expensive campaigns in the world. Political campaign spending totaled $6 billion in 2012, which works out to $18 per voter. In a well-established democracy like the United Kingdom, spending, by contrast, comes to only about 80 cents per voter.
6
The operatives of these two American parties engineer state electoral laws and gerrymander voting districts so that third-party alternatives are in practice impossible. It is a system that would have felt comfortably familiar to the Whig oligarchs of eighteenth-century England, who ensured that popular participation was a purely formal process.

Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University examined almost two thousand surveys of American opinion on public policy matters between 1981 and 2002, and discovered how those preferences correlated with policy outcomes. “[T]he preferences of economic elites,” Gilens concludes, “have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do. . . . I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe,
ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States
. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups—of economic elites and of organized interests.”
7
Our president concurs: during the 2012 election campaign, Obama informed a group of wealthy donors that included Microsoft moguls Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, “You now have the potential of two hundred people deciding who ends up being elected president every single time.”
8

Let's look at an example of how the preferences of economic elites prevail over the wishes of constituents. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement that is wildly popular among the corporate classes and wildly unpopular in the rest of the country. The progressive Left and
unions hate it like poison, as might be expected, but so does the conservative base, believing it cedes national sovereignty. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) claimed that a Republican colleague “confided in me that his calls and emails were running 100-to-1 against” a vote to fast-track, or expedite, consideration of the trade agreement.
9
Yet the vast majority of Republicans (190 out of 246), along with just enough Democrats, ended up voting for fast track and ensured the bill's passage, much to the delight of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. H. L. Mencken once said that a campaigning politician would cheerfully pronounce himself in favor of cannibalism if he thought it would gain votes. With all due respect to the Sage of Baltimore, his aphorism is now in need of revision. Today, the only way cannibalism could gain support would be if the cannibals hired a lobbyist, formed a political action committee, and began writing checks.

While today's politicians engage in sonorous generalities about jobs, faith, family, and so forth, once the issues move from the ethereal realm of sloganeering into specific policies, they do
not
seek to identify with the desires of the majority, except insofar as those desires happen to overlap with the preferences of those who are footing the bill. Single-payer health care, tax breaks for hedge fund managers, minimum wage policy—on these and a host of other issues, the American public lines up on one side and wealthy elites on the other. And every time, the position favored by those elites prevails. Most of the art and science of politics these days consist of camouflaging a politician's real stance on an issue.

The Dumbing Down of Congress

Over the course of the nearly three decades I spent in Congress, the institution dumbed itself down, reducing the size and professional qualifications of analytical staff and downsizing essential support agencies like the Congressional Budget Office.
10
The chief instigator of this process was Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999. His intent was to centralize control of legislation in the Speaker's office, but the effect has been a self-administered lobotomy that has made Congress
less effective. Since 2011, the House of Representatives under the influence of the Tea Party has reduced the number of committee staff members by almost 20 percent; at the same time, press office personnel within those same House committees has grown by about 15 percent.
11
Why bother to have legislative experts on staff when bills can be written by lobbyists, or the Heritage Foundation, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, the legislative drafting arm of corporate America?

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. Accompanying this deliberate dumbing down is the circumstantial dumbing down resulting from the need for constant fund-raising, which requires members of Congress to spend up to 40 percent of their work week going on bended knee to their contributors, either in person or by telephone (both parties maintain offices just beyond the perimeter of the Capitol grounds where members can go to “dial for dollars” and avoid violating the law against fund-raising in a government building). Committee chairmen are rarely chosen for their seniority or subject matter expertise anymore. These days, the congressional leadership selects chairmen on the basis of their willingness and ability to use their chairmanship as a platform to raise funds for the party.

The Cash Nexus

One of the staples of American political science research has been a curious inability to demonstrate that money buys votes. At most, the studies will find that money buys physical access to politicians, a conclusion that elected officials concede is true, possibly because “access” isn't against the law.
12
Even if a politician's votes on issues can be found to correlate strongly with contributions from donors with financial interests, he will say his votes align because he agrees with them on the issues. And yet a prevalence of corrupting influences is likely to lead to corrupt elected officials.

When Las Vegas megadonor Sheldon Adelson began throwing
around tens of millions of dollars to push legislation to ban Internet gambling in order to protect his billion-dollar casino interests, it wasn't long before Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced a bill to ban Internet gambling. When asked about the curious coincidence of timing, Graham said his Southern Baptist constituents in South Carolina shared Adelson's aversion to Internet gambling, so there was no quid pro quo. That may be so, but Graham has held federal elective office since 1995, and yet he felt no driving urge to introduce such legislation until 2014, precisely when Adelson began showering him with money. Graham's transaction with his sugar daddy apparently does not meet Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts's narrow definition of an illegal quid pro quo as expressed in the court's 2010
Citizens United
decision.

These financial arrangements between donor and legislator do not affect only our domestic politics. Their impact on the conduct of national security policy occasionally belies the normal assessment that Congress is a doormat for the executive branch. U.S. policy toward Iran is a prime example of this. It is long past time for us to wind down the decades-long hostility between our country and Iran, and Obama took the opportunity not only to improve relations, but to try to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons through negotiations rather than war.

Obama ran headlong into a Republican-controlled Congress that invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make an address explicitly designed to derail the U.S.-led effort by six major nations to curtail Iran's nuclear capabilities. This incident, in breach of diplomatic protocol, was followed by forty-seven Republican senators sending the Iranian government a letter informing it that any agreement it signs with the United States could be nullified by the legislative branch (ironically, Israel's own general staff and intelligence services have concluded that the six-power nuclear agreement with Iran may lessen, not increase, Iran's threat to Israel).
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Some of this behavior can be explained by the sheer rancorousness of political polarization in Washington. Had the agreement with Iran somehow been negotiated by a Republican president, GOP lawmakers would
have lined up to hail it as a “Nixon goes to China” diplomatic masterstroke. As it was, Obama was president, so the deal had to be fought tooth and nail. It must be understood, though, that this dynamic does not operate all the time, and especially not in regard to national security policy. When the policy is assassination by drone, intervention in Libya, military strikes inside Iraq and Syria, or arming Ukraine, Republican opposition to executive initiatives is usually quite muted. Or rather, objection from Republicans arises only in the claim that Obama is not militarily aggressive enough. It is mainly when the president avoids military confrontation, as with Iran, that he faces flat rejection. So it has been with the Iranian nuclear deal: when, for once, Obama sought a negotiated solution to a problem in the Middle East rather than unilaterally employing force, Republicans presented a nearly united wall of opposition that even included Rand Paul, perhaps eager to placate his donor base now that he was himself eyeing the presidency.

The other factor is that domestic political considerations involving money increasingly determine foreign policy. A visitor from outer space would find it peculiar that Netanyahu, a foreign head of government, has been called the leader of the Republican Party—the same party that habitually flaunts its xenophobic “America First” patriotism.
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Senator Graham has gone so far as to say he would follow whatever policies the Israeli prime minister might propose, an arresting statement in light of the senator's oath to the Constitution and the voters he represents.
15
It is all the more strange if one considers that well within living memory the Israeli prime minister and his coreligionists would have been barred from entering many of the social establishments run by the people who were once called “country-club Republicans.” What caused this sea change in the GOP?