The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 12:
The Deep State and the Tea Party
While it seems to float above the constitutional state, the Deep State’s essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance: it thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills are passed on time, promotion lists are confirmed, secret budgets rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations approved without controversy, and too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But now that Congress increasingly reflects the ideology of the Tea Party, life for the ruling echelon has become more complicated.
That said, the gradual rightward journey of the Republican Party from a political group invested in orderly governance to a hyperpartisan cult with little interest in constructive solutions has on balance deepened the entrenchment of the Deep State. The core commitment of the present-day GOP, and particularly that of its extreme Tea Party wing, involves worship of individual wealth and rejection of civil government as a democratic mechanism for collective problem solving. This attitude generally suits the vested interests of the Deep State’s governing elite, who wish not only to keep their own fortunes intact, but to profit from the dismantling and privatization of government institutions, whether they are state highways, public schools, or Social Security.
The Republican Party has come to embrace a paradoxical worldview that can best be described as antidemocratic populism. The GOP’s rhetoric is stridently populist, and the party has perfected propaganda themes that set it on the side of “real Americans” (as it defines them) and against the so-called elites. The fact that Republicans identify their elite bogeymen as university professors (many of whom are now adjuncts making hamburger flipper wages), unionized public school teachers, or GS-9 government employees rather than hedge fund managers or oil company executives is quite satisfactory to the hedge fund managers and oil company executives who fund the party. “Real Americans,” a phrase popularized by 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, generally refers to a white, increasingly elderly, and ever-more-rural segment of the voting population. Real America is a diminishing proportion of the electorate, and that fact provides a vital clue to the seeming contradiction between the current GOP’s rabble-rousing populism and its antidemocratic instincts.
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