The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 01:
"Imperial City on the Potomac Swamp Like ancient Rome, Washington, D.C., is an imperial city. The capital of the United States produces laws, Supreme Court decisions, regulations in the Federal Register, circulars from the Office of Management and Budget, a trillion dollars of contracts a year, gossip, scandal, and punditry. All of these products are not dung—well, not exactly—but their value has in recent years become increasingly questionable.
First, a point of clarification: the city is usually not called “Washington” except by out-of-towners. It is “D.C.” or “the District” to the locals. Despite this convention, some congressmen who have held office for decades still affect a folksy, fake-populist cant in their jeremiads against the city they have operated in most of their adult lives and perpetually run for reelection while deploring “those pointy- headed bureaucrats in Washington.”* A few years ago, there was a fad among Republican politicians to denounce any spending their constituents or K Street contributors didn’t like as “Washington spending.”
Sometime during the 1980s, the Beltway, the sixty-four-mile-long Interstate highway encircling the capital, came to be used as shorthand for the political culture of Washington. “Inside the Beltway” gradually became the description of an out-of- touch, undoubtedly liberal, elitist snob and the political philosophy he adhered to. Although the actual Beltway had been completed by the mid-1960s, the Reagan administration represented the first mass influx of political operatives who self- consciously viewed themselves as political outsiders and made their aversion to a supposed Beltway mind-set a proud talking point, despite the large number of them, like Michael Deaver and Kenneth Duberstein, who remained in Washington for
decades to cash in. It was during the Reagan years that a largely phony inside-the- Beltway/outside-the-Beltway distinction took hold in the minds of Washington’s political operatives. “Beltwayland” as a state of mind was born. It is significant that it was born in the hypocrisy of visceral opponents of Washington’s culture who made the nation’s capital their permanent headquarters."
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