[D66] Washington Post columnist calls for intervention of the “deep state”

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/21/deep-j21.html

Washington Post columnist calls for intervention of the “deep state”
By Andre Damon
21 July 2018

The media hysteria surrounding US President Donald Trump’s meeting with
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki has become the occasion for
a radical shift to the right in the US ruling elite and media apparatus.
Thinly-veiled calls for police state measures and the intervention of
intelligence agencies into state affairs that would have been considered
beyond the pale just a week ago, are now rife within the editorial pages
of US newspapers.

On Friday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson published a column
entitled “God Bless the Deep State,” in which he presents the “public
servants derided by Trumpists as the supposed ‘deep state’” as an
antidote to a treasonous president and an ineffectual Congress.

Robinson never defines precisely what he means by the “deep state,” but
he cites Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coates as among those
high-ranking officials who have countered Trump’s assertion that Russia
did not “meddle” in the 2016 elections. It is to such intelligence and
military officials that the Post columnist is appealing.

The “knowledgeable and experienced” professionals that make up the state
and intelligence bureaucracy “are not participants in any kind of dark
conspiracy,” he writes. Rather “they have spent years—often
decades—mastering the details of foreign and domestic policy.”

“God bless them. With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is
assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the
abyss.”

He concludes, “Democrats in Congress are powerless; the Republican
leadership, spineless. Experienced government officials know that their
job is to serve the president. But what if the president does not serve
the best interests of the nation? In this emergency, the loyal and
honorable deep state has a higher duty. It’s called patriotism.”

The term ‘deep state’ has traditionally been reserved for countries such
as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey to denote the military/intelligence
apparatus that has been the source of countless coups and attacks on
fundamental democratic rights. Their “deep states” have presided over
murder, torture, and the mass jailing of political opponents. But these
countries are now, Robinson implies, to serve as a model for political
rule in the United States.

Under other circumstances, Robinson’s article would read as a satire.
Instead, it is a frightening testament to the types of reactionary
attitudes prevalent within the ruling class critics of Trump. For this
layers, Trump can do anything he wants on domestic policy—including a
massive increase in military funding and his own efforts to increase the
role of the military in domestic affairs. However, there is an
overwhelming consensus in the military-intelligence apparatus, and its
spokesmen in the media, that the anti-Russia policy must be maintained.

Dictatorship, war, domestic repression—all are being promoted in the
furious, right-wing hysteria that is gripping the ruling elite.

Throughout the 20th century, those who have advocated dictatorial forms
of rule have begun with Robinson’s premise: that elected government is
“ineffectual,” and that unelected officials would do a better job
defending the country from its enemies, foreign and domestic.

Robinson’s panegyric to the state intelligence bureaucracy is entirely
outside and alien to the American democratic tradition, which is notably
distrustful not only of all concentrated power, but of unelected power
in particular.

Robinson’s open embrace of the “deep state” is particularly ironic given
that, until recently, newspapers aligned with the Democratic Party, such
as the New York Times and Washington Post, denied that it even existed
in the United States. Just four months ago, Times columnist Max Fisher
wrote a column entitled “What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That
Doesn’t Exist.”

Fisher declared, “American institutions do not resemble the powerful
deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do
individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump’s own
team, amount to a conspiracy. The diagnosis of a ‘deep state,’ those
experts say, has the problem backward.”

But now, Robinson, a Pulitzer-prize winner and supporter of President
Obama, has proclaimed to the readers of the Post that not only does this
“deep state” exist, but that it should run the country.

Following the theft of the 2000 presidential election, the World
Socialist Web Site warned that there no longer exists a constituency for
democracy in the American ruling elite, as growth of social inequality
had made democratic forms increasingly impossible within the United States.

Eighteen years later, all of these processes have only intensified.
Social inequality has risen to unprecedented levels, expressed most
directly in the person of online retail oligarch Jeff Bezos, who owns
the Washington Post and has a net worth of some $150 billion.

With the campaign launched in the wake of Trump’s meeting with Putin in
Helsinki, the charge that Trump has “betrayed” the United States to
Russia is associated with the most flagrant demands for military
rearmament against Russia and for a police-state build-up in the United
States.

The declaration by the intelligence agencies that Russia “meddled” in
the 2016 US election has been treated as gospel truth, and anyone who
questions the record of the US intelligence agencies, despite their role
in coups, sweeping attacks on democratic rights, and flagrant lies about
‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the United States, has been branded a
traitor.

The fact that such statements are being made in the American press is a
warning of the direction in which the US government is headed. Whether
or not sections of the US ruling elite, together with the state
intelligence forces, move to oust or impeach Trump, this campaign
portends a massive intensification of the policies, supported by both
the Democrats and Republicans, of censorship, domestic repression, and
militarism.