This is
why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the
evidence.
As this
chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased
dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm
to the mainstream. I've been writing about the Deep State, and specifically,
the fractures in the Deep State, for years. (Link to website for chart)
Amusingly,
now that "Progressives" have prostituted themselves to the Security
Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State
exists. For example, There
is No Deep State (The New Yorker).
In
this risible view, there is no Deep State "conspiracy" (the media's
favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of "good German"
bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire's essential work of undermining democracies
that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering
various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting
bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions
the dominant narratives as "fake news," arranging sweetheart deals
with dictators and corporations, and so on.
The New
Yorker is right about one thing--the Deep State is not a
"conspiracy:" it is a vast machine of control that is largely
impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American
people. The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to
grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of
everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.
The typical
politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and
Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the "concerns" of important
corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with
lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.
Senior
administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but
adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings
with senior managers and working groups.
Both senior
elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives,
expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and
experience to do original research and assessment.
Narratives create
an instant context that "makes sense" of various data points and
events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an
implicit teleology--because of this and that, the future
will be thus and so.
For
example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises
the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of
poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated
by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This teleology leads to the inescapable
need to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary,
and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq's leader from power.
Politicos
and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as
the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional
specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and
their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their
conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative. The experts'
conclusion doesn't just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by
senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of
institutional authority.
So
when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing
includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive,
who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what
technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the
institution?
We can now
define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State
is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and
curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these
narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to
the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication
channels.
By
gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node
concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the
dominant narrative is the source of power, for
once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.
For
example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being
declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical)
views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is
remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable
mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.
Curation
is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of
control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the
chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets
the agenda and the end-game.
The
senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a
Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture--his
image was erased from photos.
This is
how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus
the accusation that "the Russians hacked our election" has been
tabled because it simply doesn't align with any plausible evidence. That
narrative has been replaced with variants, such as "the Russians hacked
the Democratic National Committee." Now that this claim has also been
shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor
alignment with evidence.
The
primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority
cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be
questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the
institutional node cannot be questioned.
This is
why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are
delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence. If
various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that "Russia hacked
our election" (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd
imprecision of the "hacking"--hacking into what? Voting machines?
Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e.
false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate
question.
Once the
legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the
narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is
control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game--in other words,
everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it
loses its hold on power.
This is
why the Deep State is in turmoil--its narratives no longer make sense, or
are in direct conflict with other nodes' narratives or have been delegitimized
by widening gaps between "definitive" claims and actual evidence.
There is
indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its
source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between
the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of
collapse.
If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
Check out
both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of
Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is
Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print). For more, please
visit the OTM essentials website.