According to ChatGPT the “Deep State” would be an elite or a set of officials, intelligence agencies, military, businessmen or power groups that exercise significant influence over political, economic and social decisions, independently of the administration or elected government in power.
In March 2018, during the first year of the presidency of Donald TrumpMonmouth University (New Jersey) conducted a telephone survey of 800 people. The results found that 6 in 10 Americans (60%) believed that unelected or appointed government officials had too much influence in determining federal policy. Only 26% said there was an adequate balance of power between elected and unelected officials in determining policy.
The study coordinated by the director of the University Survey Institute, Patrick Murrayfurther revealed that Americans of Black, Latino, and Asian descent (35%) are more likely than non-Hispanic whites (23%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists. Non-whites (60%) are also somewhat more likely than whites (50%) to worry about government monitoring.
Peter Dale Scott is a Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Berkeley. He wrote a dozen books about the influence of federal security and intelligence agencies on American politics. In his essay The American Deep Statethe 95-year-old academic maintains that the Deep State “is not a structure, but a system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful as a weather system.”
Rebecca IngberPhD in Law from Harvard University and former legal advisor to the State Department, is skeptical about the real existence of the Deep Statewhich he ironically characterizes as “an organized network of nefarious, all-powerful and faceless bureaucrats” that controls the power of the United States from Washington.
At the beginning of Trump’s first presidency, the senior researcher at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, stated that the Republican president-elect “had distanced himself from the bureaucracy, and had also failed to achieve putting your own people in all the positions, either because you don’t understand the importance of filling those positions or because you can’t find people willing to fill them, or both.”
According to a study by the Brookings Institutionduring the presidential administration of John F. Kennedy In 1961 there were about 1.8 million full-time federal civilian employees or bureaucrats. At the time of the presidency of Ronald Reagan this figure had risen to 2.2 million, approximately the same level as it remains at today.
In 1956 when he was only 40 years old, Charles Wright Millsa PhD sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, published the essay titled “The power elite”. For the academic who was born in New York and died in 1962, the real power of the United States resided in the armed forces concentrated in the upper echelons of the Pentagon, the industrial and financial corporations and in the public bureaucracy that accompanies the executive branch in Washington. Mills noted that members of these three groups actively interact outside the reach of public opinion, and are also notable for rotating from one group to another regardless of which party is in charge of the government.
In his last speech as President of the Nation in January 1961, General Dwight Eisenhower warned that Americans should guard against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” “The potential for the disastrous rise of misallocated power exists and will persist.”
In 1964, a year after the assassination of Democratic President John F. Kennedy in the city of Dallas, journalists David Wise y Thomas Ross wrote an extensive article that began by arguing that “today in the United States there are two governments. One is visible and the other is invisible.” At that time, American intervention in Vietnam within the framework of the Cold war from the confrontation between North American ships and ships sent by Ho Chi Minhthe leader of the communist regime of North Vietnam.
The prominent historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) PhD at Columbia University, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for his book The Age of Reform in which he compared the populist, progressive and New Deal movements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and eight years later he would win it again for the essay Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
A sympathizer of communist ideas in his university youth, Hofstadter wrote that “one of the main tests of the mood of a society at a given time is whether its well-off inhabitants tend to identify themselves psychologically with the power and achievements of the most successful, or with the needs and sufferings of the disadvantaged.”
The similarity of this diagnosis with the photo of Trump’s electoral victory is not a mere coincidence. Nor is the difficulty that is evident today for all those politicians who try to rebuild the damaged downtown avenue.
During a campaign event held last September Trump He stated that if he returned to the White House he would expel “warmongers from our National Security State and carry out a much-needed cleanup of the military-industrial complex to stop war profiteering and always put America first.”
few days ago Donald Trump Jr. criticized the president Joe Biden for the sending of Army Tactical Missiles (ATACMS) to the government of Ukraine. The president-elect’s son stated that “the Military Industrial Complex seems to want to ensure that World War III begins before my father has the opportunity to create peace and save lives.”
To dismantle the structure of the Deep State, his intimate enemy, Donald Trump will have to establish a delicate balance between Elon Musk (red social X, Tesla y SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon y Washington Post) y Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp).
Three of the most powerful businessmen in the world who maintain contracts with the deepest machinery of the Security, Defense and Intelligence agencies of the federal government that the elected Republican president swore to combat.
On the day of the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the call Waco massacre (Texas) that caused the death of 76 members of a Davidian sect, the elected Republican president had sentenced: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”
The British historian Paul Johnson (1928-2023) expressed about the American novelist Ernest Hemingway: “Despite the central importance of truth in his fictional ethics he had the characteristic intellectual belief that, in his own case, truth must be the willing servant of his ego.”.
