The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 10:
The Deep State Is Not Quite House of Cards
One of the surprises of recent years has been the immense popularity of a television drama set in Washington called House of Cards. The series is an American knockoffof a British drama of the same name from two decades ago. Both series vividly depict the swinish behavior and Machiavellian scheming that film directors now consider mandatory for depicting politicians, albeit in an oddly decontextualized political and social environment. The principal characters, Francis Urquhart in the British version and Frank Underwood in the American, are central casting’s up-to- date representations of the conniving politician on the make: coldly cynical, sociopathically amoral, not even blanching at the cold-blooded murder of an inconvenient witness. President Obama himself is a fan of the show. He has even told the producers, “I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient . . . this guy’s getting a lot of things done.” 1 So a TV show about politics has channeled Walter Mitty fantasies even in the president of these United States. Such depictions understate the social ecology in which these characters function.
House of Cards presents the arcane rigmarole of Washington politics through a prism that people who have been conditioned by decades of TV crime dramas can readily understand: the lone psychopath, the Hillside Strangler of a hundred cop shows, from Dragnet to CSI. The establishing shot has now gone upscale, to Capitol Hill, and the references are to cloture motions in the Senate rather than drug busts in the tenderloin district, but the machinery of the plot is familiar and comprehensible. It is digestible in a way that the less telegenic reality of Washington is not.
Would similar numbers of viewers sit still for a straightforward documentary on the skullduggery that went into the introduction and passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, or Wall Street’s efforts to buy off politicians so as to blunt the force and effect of financial reform? Would they generate the same buzz of social media chitchat? Let’s unpack the contrasts. During the decades of my tenure on the Hill, I was aware of no elected official skulking in the corridors of Capitol Hill or the adjacent Metro system looking for ambitious reporters to murder. But these same politicians rubber-stamped legislation that led to the needless deaths of 4,500 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The narrative arc of financial deregulation over the last thirty years would be far too tedious to explain in a TV miniseries to a public used to dramatized bank heists and ordinary embezzlements.
Art is not always truth. Elected officials are not the kind of people who would commit a murder with their bare hands. As dim a view as I hold of a lot of them, I do not believe most of them are cynical in the way Frank Underwood is cynical. Through conditioning and assimilation, they come to believe what they say, at least most of the time, and vote accordingly. 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. The man becomes the mask. That metamorphosis, combined with peer pressure, groupthink, and confirmation bias, makes them what they are. The mixture of such traits in otherwise “good” persons discharging what they hold to be their public or corporate duties can sometimes result in a far more subtle but consequential evil than the obvious amorality of a lone criminal.
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