is there a "deep state" in the u.s.?

so one of the many strange side effects of life under the trump administration is that ppl seem increasingly comfortable throwing around the term "deep state," referring either to the combined power of all agencies/bureaucracies in the federal government or to some sort of shadow government operating within those entities (or both). this term has been around for a while (it seems to have been coined to describe elements of turkish politics) but i can't remember any mainstream writer using it seriously until the past couple months. of course it's already popular among the breitbart/infowars types but now we're seeing serious discussions of the concept in the NYT, atlantic, WaPo, etc.

is this idea a useful one at all? i'm not really a fan, since i don't think that it adds anything useful to the old standby "military-industrial complex," a neutral term which didn't imply any sweeping conspiracy but simply pointed to the inherent power of those institutions. "deep state" also seems to imply that there aren't any significant differences between the various agencies in the intelligence community, which seems pretty off to me. i'm also a bit put off by the fact that every single definition of "deep state" i've read seems slightly different, which suggests to me that it's kind of a uselessly broad and ambiguous concept.

it's a monolith and they all pray to the Dulles brothers every morning.

who said anything about a sweeping conspiracy? they don't gotta.

i think david talbot (founder of salon and author of the great recent allen dulles bio "the devil's chessboard") was the first non-fringe person i remember seeing use the term:

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/every_president_has_been_manipulated_national_security_officials_david_talbot_investigates_americas_deep_state/

is the "deep state" like the new world order?

no, Poppy Bush was spook enough not to use the DS as a campaign meme

That Talbot book is marvelous, yeah. So is Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

LGM pointed to a decent piece at Jacobin on why this shorthand is bad

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/02/enough-with-the-deep-state

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/deep-state-michael-flynn-leaks-federal-bureaucracy-trump/

I think it's fun to play pretend but I, as always and repeatedly in this forum, much prefer Lapham's old bit about the permanent government and its war of attrition against the provisional government, which is true in basically every administration.

\not sure i understand the premise ?
jd where are you from

it seems obvious that there is an inertial force populated by career bureaucrats, elite law enforcement, and military, more or less unappreciated by everyday people, that wields some significant influence on our elected officials and ultimately our foreign policy. i guess the extent to which they "control" these things is what's debatable

I think it's fun to play pretend but I, as always and repeatedly in this forum, much prefer Lapham's old bit about the permanent government and its war of attrition against the provisional government, which is true in basically every administration.

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, February 21, 2017 8:28 PM

he stole it from mentor Gore Vidal, who every eight months for thirty years wrote an essay whose premise was the president's getting a large international playground supervised by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Chase Manhattan.

I did not know that!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-deep-state-how-egypts-shadow-state-won-out/

pretty sure i saw it earlier than egypt too but egypt coup was the first time i remember seeing it a lot

do Deep State satraps sit in curtained rooms gurgling scotch like Larry Hagman and the Texas oilmen in Nixon?

no deep states but plenty of jeep states

No Love Deep State

http://i.imgur.com/zSe42o7.jpg

Man if I had a nickel for every time I saw that on the little 16-page glossy HBO viewing guide.

how deep is your state

how's the FISA board doing 'under' Yam anyway? biz as usual?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RF5PQcymhw

kind of annoyed this is emerging more in the mainstream now as a result of reaction TO Trump by the intelligence community. but then again that kind of Rumplestiltskin-straw spinning is how Breitbart makes its bread so

is Chuck Schumer toeing the Breitbart line? He's the one who said in December "It's really dumb of him to do this," the IC has a hundred ways of getting to you, etc.

Are there a lot of unappointed high officials that provide continuity in agencies (including public-private ones like the Federal Reserve)? Yes. Do they have their own agendas, sometimes in conflict with elected government? Yes. Are they by an large a meritocracy that knows a *lot* more than elected representatives? Yes. Which would I trust more to share my interests, an experienced civil servant, or somebody who could get the Tea Party nod in a gerrymandered district. The former.

So, there is something of a Deep State, and while parts are unaccountable to voters, its also potentially an extra-constitutional check on autocrats.

xps, the classic example, and possibly where the term originated, is Turkey with the derin devlet .

The documentary "Yes, Minister" may provide a useful framework.

Well I dint wanna say but if sanpaku's inference as to what is meant by "deep state" is correct then yeah that's just the profession of public administration. you don't want presidents in charge of then plumbing.

Thread here on how it's basically offensive to use Deep State to effectively mean "permanent officials who disagree with me" when it started as a term for "murderous bastards trying to undermine the state" in Turkey: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/832600506019229696

it sounds sexier & more sinister than bureaucratic inertia tho

bureaucratic inertia is a good way to think of it. every president who takes office and gets the briefing on all the internal workings of federal agencies, state intelligence, closed-door diplomacy with other nations, and the internal shape of the military has two realities to reconcile -- the policy agenda that they campaigned on, and being the head of this machine that has moving parts no one on the outside has a clear picture of

there's no real way to just hit the emergency brake on everything in any responsible manner

Fuckin right there's not

Trump getting a couple briefings and reacting by deciding that's not what the president does, cancelling his intel briefings... kind of kills the legitimacy of both the president and the intelligence infrastucture, explains why they're so angry at him

it sounds sexier & more sinister than bureaucratic inertia tho

yeah, you guys don't get it, zurprize

examining the DS operation in the context of Flynn

America's intelligence agencies aren’t operating outside the law – they’re using the vast power they’ve acquired within it.

We know now that the FBI and the NSA, under their Executive Order 12333 authority and using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as statutory cover, were actively monitoring the phone calls and reading text messages sent to and from the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.

Although the monitoring of any specific individual is classified TOP SECRET, and cannot be released to foreigners, the existence of this monitoring in general is something of an open secret, and Kislyak probably suspected he was under surveillance.

But a welter of laws, many of them tweaked after the Snowden revelations, govern the distribution of any information that is acquired by such surveillance. And this is where it’s highly relevant that this scandal was started by the public leaking of information about Mike Flynn’s involvement in the monitoring of Kisylak.

The way it’s supposed to work is that any time a “U.S. person” — government speak for a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, even a U.S. company, located here or abroad — finds his or her communications caught up in Kislyak’s, the entire surveillance empire, which was designed for speed and efficiency, and which, we now know, is hard to manage, grinds to a halt. That’s a good thing. Even before Snowden, of course, the FBI would “minimize” the U.S. end of a conversation if analysts determined that the calls had no relevance to a legitimate intelligence gathering purpose. A late night call to order pizza would fall into this category.

But if the analyst listening to Kislyak’s call hears someone identify himself as an agent of the U.S. government — “Hi! It’s Mike Flynn” certainly qualifies — a number of things have to happen, according to the government’s own rules...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/15/trump-is-showing-how-the-deep-state-really-works/

References to the workings of the above-ground government departments, such as Agriculture, Interior, or HUD as components of a "deep state" are nonsensical. Using "deep state" as if it were a synonym for the intelligence agencies is also pretty weird, but at least it refers to a part of the government that is deliberately buried from public view. But most people only just met the phrase "deep state" some time in the past couple of weeks, and it is getting used as if it meant everything from hidden anti-Trump conspiracies inside the government to individual bureaucrats choosing quietly not to enforce new directives or to enforce them slowly or selectively. iow, no one understands what it really means atm.

derp state

uh hello the ag department AKA the "chemtrails department"

interesting piece by jeff morley (former wapo reporter and biographer of james angleton) here:

https://newrepublic.com/article/155629/deep-state-political-party