The Rise of the American Deep State
Investigating the essence of the deep state as a concept presents a serious methodological challenge: the classical language of modern political science, cultivated on the principles of Weberian sociology, is clearly unsuited to describing such a subject. This language allows for a perfectly relevant description of declarative, visible reality and its institutional structures — that is, explicit rules of political interaction and publicly declared values, a particular case of which is ideology and the imperatives of public rhetoric it defines. However, with such a focus on research, extra-institutional structures remain outside its scope—that is, entirely legal networks of influence, which by definition may have their own ontology and values, defining political imperatives distinct from those publicly declared. Moreover, it is precisely this alternative worldview and its corresponding values that often determine the goals and directions of the political system. Examples of such extra-institutional organization of real public administration are quite easy to find in contemporary political reality, particularly in the American one.
Thus, the Council on Foreign Relations plays an undeniable role in defining the imperatives of US foreign policy. This private organization, originally founded under the name "The Inquiry" to prepare Woodrow Wilson's position at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919-1920, has consistently supported American foreign policy ever since. However, it is far from the only private organization; one need only recall the RAND Corporation, which is influential in shaping US foreign policy, and several others. Today, the US has over 70 different think tanks, all involved in foreign policy analysis and the development of recommendations. Essentially, these are all networks of influence that are not covered by institutional analysis at all. When acting on this basis, we must assume that these organizations have zero influence on US policy, but this is clearly not the case. In particular, a striking example of the influence of networks on global politics is the acronym BRIC: it was originally "invented" and introduced into public circulation by Goldman Sachs, but, as we can see, it has grown into a part of modern political reality.
Equally unhelpful is the usual analysis of publicly declared values: they can differ significantly from the values a political actor actually espouses. It's enough to cite the example of billionaire Peter Thiel, a key member of the "PayPal mafia" who played a key role in the political career of current Vice President J.D. Vance, a staunch conservative and supporter of traditional family values. Thiel himself is a libertarian and an outspoken non-traditionalist. For him, J.D. Vance was primarily a promising investment project, whose public agenda perfectly aligned with the expectations of the electorate—but nothing more. The obligatory nature of a political actor's attire is by no means the same for the elites associated with him, who find themselves in the role of director—indeed, these elites live and feel comfortable within their own alternative value system. In this context, it's difficult to assess the relevance of an analysis of Vance's declared values to the decisions that Trump's second administration will make. This is far from the only example of a discrepancy between publicly stated values and actual ones. For example, Steve Ross, the head of Warner Communications, who played a key role in promoting MTV as a global music television network, has admitted that he personally detests the music culture it promotes, but views it as a highly profitable business.
In other words, traditional analytical tools will inevitably resemble the Buddhist parable of the blind men examining an elephant, each of whom conscientiously described the part of the elephant they could touch, calling it "elephant." Clearly, analyzing the actions of the "elephant's right foot" will not lead to a complete view of the elephant, but will only multiply the number of entities, as it will generate a number of mutually conflicting interpretations. It seems that the analysis of networks of influence—which is essentially what the "deep state" metaphor describes—should be based on a fundamentally different methodology. The hypothesis of this study is that it is networks, not the institutional superstructure and the values it proclaims, that are the key factor in determining the current imperatives of a political system.
The key object of analysis here is the ontology of the object under study. This is not the ontology of an institution, but the ontology of a network, which unites extra-institutional and institutional structures, as exemplified by the aforementioned symbiosis of a vast number of network analytical structures specializing in foreign policy and the formal institutions implementing it in the United States. In terms of the potential of a methodology for studying network ontology, a fairly robust toolkit has been developed by the cognitive approach to political science over the past five decades. First, there is the method of cognitive mapping (proposed by Robert Axelrod and developed by Matthew Bonham, which has proven quite effective in identifying the cognitive foundations of cooperation), as well as the cognitive analysis of international negotiations. An equally effective method is the deconstruction of political metaphor, which essentially contains, in a condensed form, ontology, the current evaluation system, and teleology. In domestic practice, these methods were successfully applied to the analysis of the Obama administration's decision-making network and to the analysis of the development of the BRIC metaphor in the four countries of the association at that time, demonstrating not only analytical but also predictive significance.
The use of these methods in relation to the analysis of the process of formation of the modern American political system allows us to fully identify and demythologize, introducing into full-fledged scientific circulation, the concept of the US deep state, including influential social networks that fall outside the usual focus of research attention in the objects of analysis, and thereby reveal the structure of the American political system as a whole, as it is.
The American Deep State as a Reproduction of the British One?
Is the American deep state, i.e., the symbiosis of key networks of influence and institutional structure, a reproduction of the fundamental British construct? The first obvious answer is, of course, no, since the US political system was formed in its time by rejecting the British model of governance, and the Founding Fathers, drawing on the British experience, in theory aimed to overcome it, not replicate it. However, a closer look at what exactly in the British experience they sought to overcome prompts us to abandon categorical judgments and more closely examine the institutional construct it generated. Let us recall that the British deep state, i.e., the network of influence created by the English aristocracy and controlled by it, primarily by the king's officials, emerged as a result of Henry VIII's reforms, when he added legislative authority to royal power, i.e., the right to produce and interpret norms. Having discovered the impossibility of controlling the "what," i.e., Beyond the monarch's actual decisions, the aristocracy was able to hedge risks by creating mechanisms to control the "how"—that is, how these decisions would (or would not) be implemented. The symbiosis of two networks, the hereditary aristocratic one and the meritocratic one under its control, was based on the control of the latter through the use of a combined toolkit of "carrots and sticks." The "carrot" was corruption, which guaranteed network members career advancement, while the "stick" was "ritual incriminating evidence," i.e., a documented crime involving the violation of generally accepted norms and rules, at that time Christian, by those joining the network. If the latter were made public, any potential apostate would not only lose their reputation but also face prosecution under existing legislation.
This symbiosis proved to be inherently conflictual: the expansion of the network "below" increases the number of those whose career expectations are not met, while the most capable members who have advanced upwards find an insurmountable "barrier" to growth in the form of the hereditary aristocracy. The accumulation of dissatisfied individuals—both "below" and "above"—naturally triggers a process of "normalization of compromising material," when it becomes a new value system and is simply no longer considered as such. In the English case, this took the form of the expansion of Calvinism. By rejecting church rituals, Calvinism "nullified" and decriminalized compromising material, thereby facilitating the emancipation of the subordinate meritocratic network. This process turned out to be protracted, lasting approximately seventy years—assuming its starting point is the English victory over the Spanish Great Armada in 1588, which, apparently, marked the beginning of the systemic construction of an English "deep state" based on compromising evidence. This also applies if we consider the end of the conflict to be the Cromwellian Revolution, which expelled the aristocrats and adopted the Westminster Confession, which abolished the concept of sin altogether.
As is well known, the Puritans failed to maintain power in their homeland: in 1660, the monarchy was restored, the exiled aristocracy returned home, the Westminster Confession was abolished, and their final defeat came with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which began a mass migration of Puritans to the New World. Of course, these were dissidents who brought with them dreams of a "city upon a hill," but above all, they bore the experience of defeat, the failure of their own state-building after Cromwell's victorious revolution. This latter fact explains why dissident sentiments did not become a significant factor in raising the question of independence: for almost a hundred years after the mass migration of dissatisfied people began, the British monarchy quite successfully maintained its rule over the North American colonies.
It seems far more significant in the history of the emergence of the idea of US independence that Britain, in principle, could not have any other system of governance than that of the "deep state." All political institutions, including the governance of the colonies, remained under the control of the monarch, and the existence of its own shadow governance network overseeing the implementation of decisions was absolutely critical for the aristocracy to maintain its position. Clearly, the same system of "dual subordination" was built in the future United States, and by definition, it contained the same internal conflicts that had previously led to the revolution of 1649 in England. Accordingly, by the time of the "Boston Tea Party" of 1773, the American deep state not only existed as a shadow decision-making system—i.e., a meritocratic network controlled by a hereditary aristocratic network—but had also clearly reached the end of another cycle of accumulating a critical reserve of discontent toward the aristocracy. In this paradigm, the War of Independence of the future United States completed the cycle of emancipation of local "governors" from the British aristocracy, essentially becoming a second edition of the "Cromwellian Revolution." However, since the British system of governance in the North American colonies clearly began to be built not simultaneously with the onset of mass migration, but only after a sufficient number of migrants had settled and become accustomed to the colonies, it can be assumed that in the United States, this cycle took approximately the same 70 years that it took for the Calvinist Revolution to mature in England. Interestingly, we find the same seventy-year cycle in the story of the 1789 Revolution in France: there, a "branch" of the English deep state, which launched similar processes of reformatting Christian values, emerged in the early 1720s.
Two factors—the existence of a functioning deep state, or rather, its meritocratic component, which had once again overthrown the aristocratic "superstructure"—and the historical baggage of the negative experience of Puritan rule in England—explain the emergence of the "Founding Fathers." In the new reality, someone had to take on the mission of reflecting on previous historical mistakes so as to ensure that the failure of the Cromwellian revolution would not be repeated. And in this context, it is no coincidence that they turned to the Roman Republic as a model to be embodied in the new historical conditions: Rome during the republic was interesting to them precisely because it had created its aristocracy from scratch and, no less importantly, because it relied on a down-to-earth, entirely pragmatic, legitimacy of power. A part always strives to regain its lost integrity: it can be assumed that the task of the American meritocratic network, the solutions of which can be traced in the works of the Founding Fathers, was to create its own "superstructure" to replace the rejected English one, i.e., to construct mechanisms for generating its own aristocracy.
Institutional Design: The Pragmatics of Checks and Balances
Let's analyze which institutional mechanisms and structures the American Founding Fathers borrowed from the Roman Republic. The hereditary Senate was the center of aristocratic development in Rome, its legitimacy secured by consistent, successful military expansion and a relatively equitable distribution of spoils. Justice was crucially ensured by the institution of citizenship: every citizen had the right to his share of the spoils, but was also obliged to participate in campaigns to the best of his ability. The principle of "every citizen is a soldier, and every soldier is first and foremost a citizen" was strictly observed. The stability of power in Rome was also ensured by the principle of divide et impera, "divide and rule": the Senate appointed consuls, essentially hired military managers who ensured the flow of spoils. Each senator had a term of office of one year and had military forces equal to those of the other, so that a rebellion by one, should it arise, could be suppressed by the other with the support of the citizens of Rome.
In fact, these principles form the foundation of the American political system. The logic of its construction confirms that it was not a matter of constructing something from scratch, but of creating an institutional structure around a pre-existing "core"—that is, a network with its own worldview, meanings, and goals, and which viewed the institutions it generated as instruments for achieving its objectives. Thus, taking the Roman model as a model, the American Founding Fathers somewhat reconceptualized it, replacing military expansion with economic expansion and creating a structure oriented exclusively toward it. The goal-setting remained the same, directly stemming from the Puritan worldview: the concept of property became the key cognitive integrator of the political system. It was legitimized by Calvinist ontology, within which the possession of property was equated with the possession of proof of one's own salvation: the freedom to acquire it was considered the foundation and cause of all other freedoms. Madison significantly expands Hobbes's understanding of property: for him, property is presented as a total and uniquely conceivable ontological operator. Absolutely everything can be property, not just "land, goods, or money," but also "religious convictions and the profession and tactics dictated by them... personal security and liberty, the free use of his faculties, and the free choice of the objects to which he applies them." Of course, power must also be property, and the rights to it must belong to those who own the country. In the famous formulation of Hamilton, who was "an ardent supporter of an oligarchic republic," this principle sounded like "republican government, liberty, and property."
As in the Roman Republic, the Senate became the primary institutional owner of power—and its center. It was charged with preserving the entire political structure and its ontology: it became the source of meaning and the principle governing the entire system of checks and balances. Moreover, an analysis of the meanings embedded in the pragmatics of the institutional structure once again leads us to the conclusion that the latter was built precisely as servile to the non-institutionalized network. The latter was supposed to manage the system of institutions through financial instruments, i.e., the "invisible hand of the market," which, according to Adam Smith, the author of this metaphor, "is external to the system, and like God, capable of maintaining its stability." To use financial instruments, money is needed—and the primary pragmatics of the political system is to ensure the imperative of free enrichment. It immediately becomes clear that for this to happen, the United States needed no internal borders that hindered trade. This, according to the Founding Fathers, would avoid a repeat of the negative European experience, where merchant freedom was "universally crushed by standing armies on the one hand, and by constant exactions and taxes on the other." Otherwise, "the fate of a disunited America will be even more disastrous than that of Europe, where the sources of evil are confined within its own borders." Consequently, the United States must have a single government—if America "has one government for all the States, then the bulk of our commerce will only need to be protected on one side—the Atlantic coast. Ships with valuable cargoes, coming direct from foreign countries, will rarely choose to expose themselves to the many and serious dangers attendant on attempts to unload their cargo before entering ports." In other words, the United States was conceived as a trading empire. George Washington, having formed the "no-man's land" District of Columbia on the border between the North and the South and founded there the city that would later receive his name, saw it as "the metropolis of an American empire extending far west to the Mississippi, including the regions which he hoped to develop with the help of the Potomac Shipping Company, in which... he was a shareholder."
The second obvious objective is to maintain the network's control over the institutional structure, preventing the emergence of a new Julius Caesar, where a "hired political manager" could seize control of the system. And the secondary pragmatics of the Founding Fathers' meticulous construction of the institutional system itself once again confirms that it was conceived precisely as a legal superstructure around an already existing deep state, i.e., a fully formed network: the desire to control everything and everyone at its core cannot be explained in any other way. Thus, the executive branch is controlled: it had to be strong enough to ensure external security, since protection "from external threat is the most powerful incentive in the conduct of national policy," before which "in time... even the most ardent love of liberty will fade." But at the same time, it had to be weak enough not to dare challenge the merchant's freedom and to extend the "great and essential right to regulate foreign trade" to other spheres of life. The Founding Fathers found a solution to this dilemma in the Roman principle of divide et impera: government "is made good not by the consolidation or concentration of power, but by its distribution." Moreover, there must be only one president, into whom the Roman consul had been transformed, since executive power "is more easily restrained when in the hands of a single person... the multiplication of executive men is rather dangerous than beneficial to liberty," since "the combined reputations and influence of several individuals is a greater menace to liberty than the reputation and influence of any one of them separately." Being alone, he cannot collude with the legislative branch due to the latter's biennial renewal cycle. In fact, for him to display the ambitions of Julius Caesar, "the Senate... must first disintegrate itself, then the state legislatures, then the House of Representatives, and finally the whole people."
But control over the executive branch is not enough: the Roman consul, transformed into a president in the new reality, is an elected figure. Consequently, the Founding Fathers placed no less emphasis on control over society, which is the formal source of the government's legitimacy. It seems that these considerations explain the Founding Fathers' extreme hostility to any majorities (strange in other interpretations): they posited the possibility of their emergence as an existential threat to the justice of the established order, which, naturally, was conceived as justice based on the criterion of property ownership. Thus, should such a majority emerge, it was imperative to immediately "break society into such a large number of distinct groups of citizens as would make any unjust unification unlikely and perhaps even impossible." In other words, the emergence of a majority was conceived as a threat to the president's ability to gain a foothold alternative to the Senate. If it were to emerge, "...society itself would be divided into so many parts, interests, and groups that the rights of individual citizens or minorities would hardly be threatened by a united, interested majority. Under a free government, civil rights must be as secure as religious rights. In the former case, their security is ensured by a plurality of interests; in the latter, by a plurality of sects. In both cases, the degree of security will depend on the number of different interests and the number of sects."
It seems that the key consideration is the Founding Fathers' understanding that the interests of a group of minorities are always mutually contradictory and conflicting. Solon, who established the Council of Four Hundred in Athens as an executive body, understood this well: the inclusion of the maximum number of interest groups in the decision-making process makes changing the current order impossible, and the only acceptable solution becomes its reproduction. This is precisely why the Founding Fathers placed such importance on institutionalizing the concept of minorities, as well as the representative nature of the electoral system, as cornerstones of the American political system: "Elective despotism is not the form of government for which we have striven," Madison proclaimed. "In a democracy... the popular multitude personally discharge the duties of the legislature" and "by their unfitness for serious deliberation and concerted resolutions are continually rendered the playthings of ambitious magistrates," while "in a representative republic, where... the number of representatives is sufficiently large to feel all the passions which govern the multitude, and yet not so large as to render them incapable of pursuing the ends which those passions suggest, by the means prescribed by reason," the people will be able "to employ their utmost zeal and foresight to secure themselves against the love of glory... of that branch of government." And since representation will be "of great service as a necessary safeguard against their own momentary errors or mistakes," "the total exclusion of the people, who represent themselves as a popular assembly, from any share in the government in America" must be considered its chief advantage.
Thus, the American institutional structure initially emerged as a format for realizing the interests of an already established network core, i.e., the American portion of the deep state. The political system largely echoed the characteristics of the Roman Republic. As there, the executive branch had very limited powers, being strong enough to act as a "bulwark against foreign threats, to preserve peace among us, and to guard our commerce and other common interests," and to "ensure liberties and the mutual and universal care for the welfare of all." Yet, it was also weak enough to challenge the existing order of things, i.e., the teleology and meanings established by the deep state, as well as to threaten its very functioning. Minorities became key "weaknesses" arising from electoral practices, along with the representative system. The ability to continually cultivate minorities was conceptualized as one of the basic governance tools of the "deep state." In fact, the subsequent history of the United States can well be described as a consistent deployment of this model in reality, which was carried out in several stages.
The First Stage of Network Expansion: Privatization of Property
The reproduction of the institutional structure of the Roman Republic in the United States proved quite effective: over the next hundred years, it enabled not only successful resolution of survival issues but also territorial expansion, adding new states to the original thirteen. As in the Roman Republic, which cultivated republican virtues during its phase of extensive expansion, a Protestant ethic flourished in the United States during this period, ensuring the necessary level of internal consolidation and, when necessary, mobilization. The deep state was not particularly noticeable during this extensive period, in part because the use of financial instruments during the formation of a political system was understandably limited. However, it immediately emerged at the end of this period, when, following the victory of the North over the South in the Civil War of 1861-1865, the resources of the wealthy South were brought into circulation. Their plunder, in fact, launched the stage of primary capital accumulation, which immediately breathed life into the deep state, which had remained largely latent. The Congress and the Senate became the main centers of capitalization, and the basis of the economic system became the model of the British East India Company in the 18th-19th centuries: costs were shifted to the state, and profits were privatized.
"In their all-consuming passion for the accumulation of wealth," says historian David Saville Muzzy, "men plundered the resources of the country like bandits robbing a palace." "In 1860, more than half the land in the country was held by the government in trust for the people, but by 1900, nine-tenths of the land had been bribed into the hands of railroad companies, mining syndicates, land speculators, and farmsteads… It is a striking fact that most of the natural resources now owned by the United States Steel Corporation, the Aluminum Corporation, the Standard Oil Company, the railroads, and, in fact, almost all private corporations, were in 1860 public property, under government control." Ferdinand Landberg, one of the most prominent scholars of the American oligarchy, notes that the foundation of virtually all fortunes formed by the end of the 19th century was the privatization of publicly funded social benefits and the acquisition of government contracts administered by Congress. Thus, the Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Harriman families arose through the private management of railroads built with tax money—at the height of their power, the Morgans controlled 55,000 miles of railroad. The Phelps and Dodge families arose through the import of metals, and the Rockefeller, Harkness, Whitney, Paine, Flagler, Rogers, Bedford, and Pratt families arose through oil exploration.
The acquisition of the right to manage significant resources on behalf of the state, and to do so legitimately, within the framework of the laws they themselves passed, is formally conditioned by an election campaign. Since the latter requires substantial investment, participation becomes a separate qualification, passed by few. The votes of minorities unable to consolidate into a majority, as in Republican Rome, could always be acquired by the wealthy in sufficient numbers. Moreover, formalities could be ignored for quite a long time: until the early 20th century, the direct purchase of voters was not even considered a cost of the political system's functioning, but rather its de facto implicit institution—though not legalized, nor particularly condemned. Thus, as one of many examples, F. Landberg cites the case of Oliver H. Payne, the son of a senator, a protégé of the Rockefellers, who, "having taken a high post in the legislative institution in Ohio, like a croupier in a gambling house, gave away $65,000 for votes by which his father was sent to the Senate to act there for the glory of Standard Oil." Investments in politics paid off handsomely: thus, when Nelson Aldrich, the long-term leader of the Republicans in the Senate, who outlived seven presidents in this post, was first elected to the Senate in 1881, "his capital amounted to $50,000; when he died after thirty years of political activity, his fortune reached $12 million."
True, while the concept of property remained confined to the familiar confines of material assets, the formation of the American ruling class generated a huge number of dynastic marriages. These were primarily concluded with members of the European aristocracy. F. Landberg writes that by 1909, the number of such marriages was approximately five hundred. This was by no means a manifestation of a sense of superiority; rather, it reflected an awareness of a lack of legitimacy: the acquisition of an aristocratic title, especially if it involved entry into the British aristocracy, was often accompanied by the renunciation of American citizenship. The new American elite clearly recognized its position as unstable and fragile, and its acquired wealth as a trophy, and therefore sought guarantees of its legitimacy—that is, legitimization—"on the side," in traditional Europe.
Stage Two: Privatization of Public Policy
A sense of sustainable legitimacy truly emerges only with the expansion of the concept of ownership into the electoral process, which occurred only at the turn of the 20th century. F. Landberg identifies Marcus Alonzo Hanna, John D. Rockefeller's "extraordinary commissioner," as the author who institutionalized the close ties between business and government, and essentially legalized investment in politics. As a senator from Ohio and chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hanna succeeded in implementing a series of reforms to "normalize" the relationship between business and government, extending the metaphor of commodification to power and democratizing access to it. Both parties, Republican and Democratic, essentially became business ventures, now open not only to the established elite but also to emerging influence groups. If previously "the pressure exerted on the government by new groups with their specific interests had been episodic and unorganized, then under Hanna this influence became conscious, official, and systematic; now it was exercised with rigorous deliberation in the interests of the entire clique of large industrial magnates." "Under Hanna's leadership, industrialists and bankers came to power as a united group and occupied leading positions in both political parties. Before Hanna, the unconstitutional control of industrialists had been secret, mildly ashamed, and fiercely denied even in the face of damning evidence; under Hanna, control was for the first time brazenly acknowledged and cynically justified under the pretext that it was acting in the interests of the nation." "After Hanna, crude bribery by the rich ceased to be necessary to control the government: first, because the men who occupied the highest government posts, from McKinley to Hoover, were all political creatures of the rich; second, because the rich clique finally found the precious treasure it had been constantly pursuing through a tangled series of deceptions and tricks that lasted from the Civil War to the end of the century."
After Hanna's reforms, when "the magnates became convinced that control must be exercised openly, as the legitimate right of big capital, and not secretly; otherwise, isolated protests could grow into a powerful mass movement," dynastic marriages began to be concluded within their own circle and almost always entailed the delegation of a family representative to Congress and the Senate. In fact, it was at this stage that the political formation of the American aristocracy took place, when the construct laid out by the Founding Fathers was realized "in the flesh." The deep state acquired new levers of control over formal democratic institutions, in keeping with the spirit of the times, and began to control the agenda: from now on, any public struggle with capital was essentially imitative, turning essentially into a bargaining match between competing groups, and invariably leading to the victory of capital. Landberg notes that "in 1900 there were 149 trusts with a capital of $4 billion; when the 'trust bomber' Theodore Roosevelt left the White House, there were already 10,020 trusts in the country with a capital of $31 billion."
The transition of previously behind-the-scenes bargaining to the public sphere demanded control over the media landscape, within which the actions of government and business are interpreted and evaluated. Therefore, the expansion of the commodity metaphor to the press was logical – thus, all influential media outlets quickly became the property of the empires of the Rockefellers, Morgans, Fords, Whitneys, Harknesses, Mellons, Astors, DuPonts, McCormicks, Guggenheims, Lehmans, and a number of lesser oligarchs. Simultaneously, the commodity metaphor spread just as quickly to the educational system, ensuring control over the socialization of future elites. Landberg cites a list of 20 private universities that, by the mid-20th century, were the largest recipients of philanthropic donations; the list is predictably topped by the Ivy League universities – Harvard, Yale (Morgans and Rockefellers), and Columbia (Bakers and Dodges). Essentially, control over the education system means cognitive control over the reproduction of elites, since universities no longer generate an agenda, but a worldview. Landberg notes that investing in the education system has become a profitable venture because donations are tax-exempt, and three-quarters of educational institutions' endowments and boards of trustees are comprised of representatives of big business, who directly and very closely "exercise strategic oversight over science and research." This even led him to define elite private universities as "appendages or departments of large corporations and banks, whose management, more or less openly, corresponds to this situation."
This same period also saw the controlled integration of minorities into public politics, which became the mainstay of the Democratic Party. By the early 20th century, the most significant minority was Catholic, represented primarily by Italian and Irish immigrants: the latter lived in compact communities and, having received American citizenship, proved to be at least a significant electoral force. The Irish Catholic minority became the mainstay of the Kennedy clan: the clan's history began when its founder, entrepreneur Patrick-Joseph, originally a spirits merchant, managed to marry the daughter of a wealthy compatriot, entering the city's elite and then the political establishment. Boston was then undergoing something of an electoral revolution: an Irishman was elected mayor. The fact is that the Irish in Boston felt like a compact minority, facing hostility from the predominantly Protestant middle class, which, incidentally, was mutual – "Catholic priests encouraged alienation, blaming the Protestant church for all the city's ills, and especially for the immorality that reigned everywhere." But the demographic situation favored the Irish – by 1850, they constituted a fifth of the city's residents, and by the 1880s, a third, and the Democratic Party began to bank on them. In fact, this is where the tradition of Irishmen becoming Democrats and building their political profiles began. The subsequent history of the Kennedy clan's rise has been well documented.
The Italian Catholic minority entered politics somewhat differently, bringing with them the experience of the Mafia from southern Italy, which was essentially a shadow state there, successfully fulfilling all its functions. Millions of southern Italian emigrants, "who found work and relative prosperity in America, indifferent to the vicissitudes of the electoral struggle, at the very least represented an ideal field for the electoral maneuvers of parties," and the traditions of violent entrepreneurship they brought with them also contributed to the rapid development of Italian capital. However, the first Mafia organizations in the United States, espousing pure banditry, were successfully suppressed by the police by 1920.
The rise of the Mafia, so vividly depicted in the famous film, begins with its fusion with government and its entry into politics, when, having taken control of labor unions, it becomes part of the political machine. A later investigation by the Senate Estes Kefauver Committee revealed that many high-ranking Democratic Party officials found themselves in close ties with the Mafia, and the latter had become a "state within a state," "a real power exerting influence over the economy, politics, the judiciary, and even the police in the United States. The Mafia controlled over 70 different branches of trade and industry," where "crime, politics, and business merged into a kind of sinister trinity." Such a striking and, most importantly, widespread rise of the Mafia can only indicate that the shadow management technologies brought by the Italian Mafia, after a brief period of independent development, were clearly recognized as effective and integrated. As a result, they became another effective lever of control, allowing them to take control of both criminal and near-criminal businesses.
Stage Three: The Beginning of External Expansion
Finally, the final stage of the American deep state's internal expansion, legitimizing financial instruments of control over formal institutions of power, public policy, and the educational system, was the creation of the Federal Reserve, formalizing and legitimizing Wall Street's financial control over the political system, and the creation of "think tanks" that took control of foreign policy. Both events occurred during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who himself was already a model product of the system—a graduate of Princeton, where the offspring of two famous oligarchs, Dodge and McCormick, who would later become trustees of the university, became close friends. With their support, Wilson became a professor and then president of Princeton University. Wilson began his political career as Governor of New Jersey, which he won with the support of J.P. Morgan, who later played a key role in consolidating Wall Street resources for his 1912 presidential campaign, which was carried out under the anti-oligarchic slogans of the "new freedom."
In fact, as US President, Wilson secured America's entry into the premier league of international politics. During World War I, he authorized private loans to the Anglo-French allies, and when their situation became dire, he declared war on Germany, allowing him to nationalize European debts while compensating the Morgans, who headed a syndicate of major banks lending to Britain and France. The latter's loans were provided not in cash, but in the form of military supplies: "Europe did not receive a cent of the money provided by the Treasury; it received only war materials. The money went to the masters of American industry, who used most of it to expand the country's industry and increase their wealth and power." The US's entry into world politics as a key creditor definitively transformed the American political system into a major business project, and an international one at that. This, in turn, raised the question of the intellectual underpinning of foreign policy, which was becoming too serious a matter to be entrusted to institutions. It took the form of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was institutionally established in 1921 on the model of the British Royal Institute of International Affairs, but which had existed as an informal network of experts much earlier. Interestingly, the first headquarters of the CFR, designed by the renowned financier and one of the architects of the Federal Reserve System, Paul Warburg (the CFR included representatives of all major US corporations), was located in Geneva, in close proximity to the League of Nations.
The League of Nations, formally the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, became the first major international project of the American deep state, dealing a serious blow to Pax Britannica. The United States, having found itself the Old World's primary creditor, creatively reimagined the foundations of British colonialism, managing not only to undermine them but also to turn their collapse to its own advantage. The principle of free trade, which had ensured open markets for British industry (at that time the most advanced in the world), was destroyed by Wilson's concept of nation-states. It was into these nations, by the will of the United States, which, as the "principal financier of the world," believed itself entitled to govern it "according to its knowledge and judgment," the former European empires were to be divided (following the First World War). The League of Nations became the political institutionalization of this concept, and the protectionism that became the norm immediately closed markets to British goods. Britain lost, and the United States, having adopted a strategy of industrialism, i.e., Enterprise exports have benefited enormously. Market size matters; it sets the technological limit for development—for example, the idea of a subway, let alone the corresponding technologies, could not have arisen in a village, and we find arguments about the fatality of borders for economic development as early as Alexander Hamilton. The fragmentation of European empires into national entities (an experience replicated in the Middle East after World War II) automatically transformed their successors into non-self-sufficient economies dependent on US technology exports. Nationalism became the ideological underpinning of American dominance: nationalism seeks support in archaism, by definition does not incorporate experience in managing an industrial economy, and is primarily concerned with countering the nationalisms of neighboring states. In fact, this know-how enabled the United States to establish itself as a global dominant power in the interwar period, and especially after World War II.
Remarkably, Protestantism remains at the core of the Anglo-Saxon worldview, albeit formally transformed beyond recognition and taking on a secular form of the primacy of human rights. This transformation is entirely logical: it is conditioned, firstly, by the cyclical process of "normalizing compromising material," initiated by the early Puritans. Within the framework of the discourse that dominated until recently, which completely abolished the concept of carnal sin, we have apparently witnessed the completion of yet another cycle of its decriminalization. Secondly, this was reinforced by the specific use of financial instruments as a basic instrument, applied to the individual as the primary consumer unit. The power of money, functioning as a commodity, is unique: it gravitates toward maximum profit in minimal time, and the most rapid profit is always destructive, as, for example, in the drug trade. The main constraints on the possibility of extracting it are laws and moral and ethical norms. As a result, the inevitable modification of such norms has long been a means of maximizing profits, and in this context, minorities in the United States have acquired a new function: their marketization has become a key source of income. This process actually began with the suffragette movement in the early 20th century, whose victory resulted in the fragmentation of the household as a consumer unit into individuals. Over the course of a long period, this process has led to the dominance of non-traditional minorities and transgender people: the latter, as lifelong consumers of pharmaceuticals, by definition create an impressive market for pharmaceutical corporations, perhaps even more profitable than the drug trade, yet still completely legal. And, since American capital is global, experiments carried out within the United States were then extrapolated as an economic model worldwide. This fully explains why traditional values and customs, and the faiths that support them, have become the main enemy of American capital in our time: they stand in the way of the further marketization of humanity.
The latter, incidentally, allows us to classify the current standoff between the West, on the one hand, and the rest of the world, currently centered on Russia and China, on the other, as a civilizational standoff. Within this framework, Protestantism—in its modern form—no longer functions as an ideological, but as an ontological alternative to all other faiths, the ways of life they legitimize, and, most importantly, the meanings of life.
Some Conclusions
With Trump's second ascent to power, the question became pressing: does his victory represent a victory over the American deep state and will it usher in a paradigm shift? Judging by the impressive number of Silicon Valley investors who have joined his administration, the answer seems quite ambiguous. Trump's victory appears to be another iteration of the "Cromwellian revolution," in which a subservient meritocratic network succeeded in defeating an aristocratic one. However, since the worldviews of both networks are similar, it is more appropriate to speak of a change in tools rather than goals—as happened in Britain.
Yes, the deep states of Great Britain and the United States are ontologically quite similar: in both cases, Protestantism, with its imperative for personal enrichment, is dominant, and financial instruments serve as the basic tool of governance. However, their internal structures differ somewhat. Thus, until recently, the British aristocracy relied on the imperative of conservatism, which since the time of Hobbes had been perceived as a key factor in its own self-preservation: the ontology of the British merchant financier was constrained by the ontology of maintaining power. The value of conservatism was directly based on the experience of the Cromwellian Revolution, when the "managerial class" nearly seized the levers of power from the aristocracy. In this context, it is logical that the British aristocracy, closely tied to the banking industry, always tried to avoid the emergence of alternative non-financial "growth points" within its borders. Let us recall the de facto liquidation of the country's industrial sector, which was completed under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, and the absence of its own venture capital networks and a strong IT sector: any alternative grounds for vertical mobility were prudently suppressed at an early stage.
Moreover, the existence of a national ethical system, and the absence of one for activities abroad, presupposes double standards as the only possible norm: as Oscar Wilde defined it, hypocrisy is an essential part of good breeding. This determined the British specificity, i.e., the emergence of the intelligence services as one of the main instruments of political support. The latter became a highly professional institution no later than the mid-19th century, along with the Opium Wars, facilitating transactions considered dubious from the standpoint of maintaining the legitimacy of power. Their symbol became the image of James Bond, created by former British intelligence officer Ian Fleming. Along with the intelligence services, financial expansion also became an instrument of foreign policy, where money acts as a "hot" means of communication, allowing the undermining of any social order by creating alternative, shadowy foundations for upward mobility. And following the Opium Wars, drug trafficking also became such an instrument.
But that was until recently. The lack of financial instruments, which became apparent after World War II, forced Britain to accept its status as a junior partner to the United States—a concession that has led to a noticeable erosion of conservatism in recent decades. For example, Britain succumbed to pressure from pharmaceutical corporations and, in recent decades, became a champion of the transgender agenda. This, in turn, led to a change in immigration policy. Migration regulation came to be seen as a tool for replacing the electoral base with one more loyal to the dominant power.
The American aristocracy lacks a conservatism instinct. This, among other things, presupposes a lesser degree of political sophistication: the same double standards were openly declared as the norm within the "city on a hill" concept; privatized state institutions were perceived as fully controllable and manageable, and financial instruments as necessary and sufficient. As a result, in the United States, the structure of interests related to foreign policy has been and remains highly fluid: the foundation of the political system is large-scale banking, which views the entire world as an investment target. The absence of ethical constraints, in a context where constant shifting of the value system becomes a basic marketing tool, transforms the entire world into a space for experimentation by the American deep state.
Before Trump's victory, the "upper floor" demonstrated enviable stability and was represented by networks of large banking capital and political dynasties, primarily entrenched in the Senate. One can recall the well-known clans of the Bushes, Kennedys, Rodham-Clintons, and McCains, but also many others. Virtually every senator is connected to one or another hereditary network. The "lower floor," composed of small banking, venture capital, and IT businesses, by contrast, was highly competitive and quickly rotated as a result of periodic crises. However, with the advent of Trump, "new IT money" appears to have overthrown the old: banking capital has clearly given way to network corporations with global scale and the potential to generate their own cryptocurrencies. In effect, a coup d'etat has occurred, quite comparable to the Cromwellian revolution, when the "digital managerial class" overthrew the old aristocracy and seized state institutions. These processes still require further understanding, but for now, let's note that this is not so much a change in the ruling class's worldview as a shift in the tools considered relevant to achieving the same goals. Instead of an ideological agenda, which has clearly exhausted itself, the emphasis will be on IT technologies, which can ensure control not only over minds—though this need remains and is implied by the concept of algocognitive culture (hypernetwork)—but also over the "smart" things that surround people. In other words, Trump has brought technocrats to power in the United States, intending to seize the levers of global governance from the old elite and use them as they see fit.
Joseph Nye once wrote of Trump that the problem of his first term was the classic "Jeffersonian" understanding of the "city on a hill" concept: Back then, there was no talk of external expansion, and American power was seen as "the power of attraction, not the power of action." Trump stated this in his 2017 inaugural address, promising that "we will not impose our way of life on anyone, but rather shine as a shining example." Applied to the deep state, this means that the struggle is not with the deep state as such, but between two concepts that describe it: the Jeffersonian and the modern globalist. According to the first, the United States is the center of the world and therefore must, like Britain, restore an "ethical stabilizer" in domestic politics. According to the second, the United States is nothing more than a part of the global world, living by the same constantly shifting ethical norms that are imposed on the rest of the world. The objective perception of the external world, however, is the same in both cases.
To summarize, we can assume that the United States under Trump (and perhaps later under J.D. Vance) will focus not on soft power, but on technological solutions. That is, not on pursuing US interests through international organizations, among whose conduits Joseph Nye lists, along with Hollywood, Harvard, and Microsoft, the IMF, WTO, and UN. Consequently, the United States will likely retreat from the concept of a "rules-based order," which would shift sovereignty from states to international organizations. It may even abandon it: American IT businesses today are guided by the idea that the resources relevant to global governance are sufficiently concentrated to be used centrally and not shared with other actors. Trump's actions during his first term, in the spirit of Hobbesian realism, were perceived by the American establishment at the time as an unacceptable narrowing of American interests: he "promised to make America great again through a narrow approach and destructive diplomacy." However, the IT technocrats and the establishment behind them, who came to power with Trump, think differently.
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