The Deep State Quotes

“A politician is a hog grateful to whoever is rattling the stick inside the swill bucket. It is time to take the swill bucket away. p 270”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn’t even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC), with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or so he claimed—which,”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The Greater Washington area is now home to over sixteen hundred foundations of different kinds; the hordes of gunslinging grantsmen who try to maintain a façade of scholarly disinterest are functionally as much a part of the ecosystem of the town as the lobbyists on K Street. A new threshold of sorts was crossed in 2013 when Jim DeMint (R-SC) with four years still remaining in his Senate term, resigned from office to become president of the Heritage Foundation, not only because he could exert more influence there than as a sitting senator (or he claimed — which, if true, is a sad commentary on the status of most elected officials), but also because he would no longer be limited to a senator's $174,000 statuatory annual salary. ¶ By the 1980s, the present Washington model of 'Beltwayland' was largely established. Contrary to widespread belief, Ronald Reagan did not revolutionize Washington; he merely consolidated and extended pre-existing trends. By the first term of his presidency, the place even had its first openly partisan daily newspaper, the Washington Times, whose every news item, feature, and op-ed was single-mindedly devoted to harping on some conservative bugaboo or other. The Times was the first shot in a later barrage of openly partisan media. Some old practices lingered on, to be sure: Congress retained at least an intermittent bipartisanship until Newt Gingrich's speakership ended it for all time.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“There was a time when Congress used to engage in serious debate and occasionally take tough stands opposing the alleged imperatives of national security. Over the last three decades, however, and particularly since 9/11, it has increasingly abdicated its powers and transferred them to to the executive branch.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The George W. Bush administration trotted out all manner of excuses for its invasion of Iraq, but it was clearly mindful of the fact that Saddam Hussein's decision in 2000 to denominate the country's oil sales in euros rather than dollars could hardly set a good precedent. Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill revealed in his 'as told to' memoir that finding a way to forcibly get rid of Saddam was topic A at the Bush administration's very first National Security Council meeting, a mere ten days after Bush's inauguration.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The contemporary populist Right is a bastard child of corporate America, which has subsidized the Tea Party via front groups like American for Prosperity and the Club for Growth ever since the movement's beginning on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Its real, as opposed to stated, purpose was to distract and channel the inchoate popular longing for a change in the status quo... p 234”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Ever since it formed, the Tea Party has struck me as a kind of weird generational echo, forty years on, of the young leftists of the late 1960s. The 1960s leftists, like the Tea Party now, had unrealistic goals and were hostile to compromise. Both saw themselves as cultural forces up against a shadowy establishment. Both treated politics as street theater and had a curious fondness for using violent rhetoric and making apocalyptic pronouncements. Generationally speaking, the 1960s Left and the Right of today are the same group... p. 232”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State...a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Both sanctions and bombing give the illusion of precision, calibration, and the capacity to ratchet up coercion in a gradual escalation. And both have the capacity to cause tremendous suffering among innocent third parties while having far less strategic effect than their advocates claim.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“In effect, sanctions take another country’s civilian population hostage in order to get its leaders to acquiesce.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The twin shocks of 9/11 and the Great Recession seem mentally to have unhinged a portion of the American people and much of the political class. The following years were consumed by crazy arguments about the president’s birth certificate, death panels, and voters shouting that the government must get its hands off their government-provided Medicare.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“your house is worth $300,000 and you like it fine and don’t want to leave, beware of the developer who can match that price and use campaign contributions to persuade a city council to declare eminent domain on your residence! According to the law and economics movement, the land on which your house sits will always find a higher and better use in the hands of someone with more money,”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“One might think that the exposure of unsanitary conditions and animal cruelty in the corporate farming and food-processing industries would provoke lawmakers to punish the perpetrators and tighten laws protecting the safety of our food supply. But no, in several states they have instead directed their fury against the citizen-activists who exposed the wrongdoing by levying heavy penalties against the surreptitious photographing of inhumane outrages. 6 Republican legislators in North Carolina introduced a bill to make it a felony to disclose the chemicals (some of which are toxic to humans and animals) employed in fracking for natural gas. The bill also authorized drilling companies to oblige emergency responders cleaning up chemical spills to sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to disclose the names of the chemicals in their proprietary stew to the public—or their toxicity.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance and driven voters to embrace Trump.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Voters in the Republican primary in South Carolina who handed Trump a walkover victory declared terrorism to be their foremost concern, one that eclipsed a low-wage economy; deteriorating living standards that have led to an actual increase in the death rate of the GOP’s core demographic of late-middle aged, non-college educated whites; and the most expensive and least available health care in the “developed” world. So while Trump—a Vietnam-era draft avoider who appeared not even to know what the nuclear triad was—could hardly be considered a product of the national security sector of the Deep State, his demagogic skills and authoritarian demeanor placed him in a far better position than his rivals to exploit the national neurosis created by the war on terror.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Government officials and the corporate media whipped up a mood in the country that approached hysteria; Trump deftly exploited that mood to his advantage. By being the only politician brazen enough to openly advocate torture—not merely to gain information, but to inflict pain for its own sake—he tapped into the revenge fantasies of millions of Americans who have been fed a steady diet of fear since 9/11.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“With appropriate adjustments, the unelected officials of the shadow government, be they cabinet secretaries, generals, or corporate senior executives, respond to the same stimuli in roughly the same way ... Rumsfeld is an egregious example of a character type that seems to be magnetically drawn to the upper levels of the governmental corporate world. Actual competence is often less important than boundless self-confidence and a startling lack of reflectiveness about what one is actually doing. It is not corruption so much as bias confused with principle.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“...More to the point, do their representatives and senators in Washington deliberately prioritize the stated requirement of the Pentagon and CIA above the most basic need of their constituents? Yes, if those legislators have developed the unfortunate tendency to go into a trance every time someone utter the magic phrase "national security." In truth, it happen often enough, and many times of the course of my career I saw Congress respond to that occult incantation like iron filing drawn to a magnet. p 64”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government