The term “Deep State” is much maligned and is often dismissed as a conspiracy theory with the idea that the heads of the various bureaucracies that run the different functions of government exercising some controlling influence over the elected leaders of the nation being treated as preposterous. But, is it? Is it so wild or crazy to think that the unelected and largely unaccountable heads of the various departments of state within the Executive Branch have influence and power beyond the limits that the people suppose they have and have greater power over the functions of government and elected leaders than the public understands?

To figure this out I want to share with you an interview with Dr. Michael J Glennon about his book National Security and Double Government, one of the most important books on the function of government in the last 50 years. You can read the original essay version that became the book here for free. Dr. Glennon is a Professor of International Law for the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He was a former legal counsel to the US State Department, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is a respected intellectual, with decades of experience in academia, law, and the American political system. He is not an anarchist, a libertarian, a radical, a “bomb thrower,” a conspiracy theorist, or any other sort of dismissive sobriquet you can imagine. He is, by all definitions, an “insider” of the sort that most people who question the State would dismiss as another apologist for its actions.

All of which is to say that when he starts talking about how the dominance of the national security departments in the US government has established a verifiable “Double Government” that places the nation “on the path to autocracy” that will render its elected branches as mere functionaries and museum pieces if we don’t do something about it his is a respected and educated voice that we need to pay attention to before it becomes too late. The following interview, titled Shadow Government, lays out the thesis of his book and his basic argument for why we should be worried about the power of the burgeoning Nation Security State, which he calls Double Government and which most others call the Deep State, why it has the influence and power it does, the media’s role in furthering it, and what we should be doing to challenge it before it is too late. If you want to understand the reality and dangers of what people call the Deep State, not just in the USA but in a model that applies equally to all democratic and republican governments, here is the place to start.

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Shadow Government

Elected officials are no longer in charge of our national security—and that is undermining our democracy, says the Fletcher School’s Michael Glennon

Michael Glennon knew of the book, and had cited it in his classes many times, but he had never gotten around to reading the thing from cover to cover. Last year he did, jolted page after page with its illuminating message for our time.

The book was The English Constitution, an analysis by 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot that laid bare the dual nature of British governance. It suggested that one part of government was for popular consumption, and another more hidden part was for real, consumed with getting things done in the world. As he read, Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School, where he also teaches constitutional law, saw distinct parallels with the current American political scene.

He decided to explore the similarities in a 30-page paper that he sent around to a number of his friends, asking them to validate or refute his argument. As it happens, Glennon’s friends were an extraordinarily well-informed bunch, mostly seasoned operatives in the CIA, the U.S. State Department and the military. “Look,” he told them. “I’m thinking of writing a book. Tell me if this is wrong.” Every single one responded, “What you have here is exactly right.”

Expanded from that original brief paper, Glennon’s book National Security and Double Government (Oxford University Press) takes our political system to task, arguing that the people running our government are not our visible elected officials but high-level—and unaccountable—bureaucrats nestled atop government agencies.

Glennon’s informed critique of the American political system comes from a place of deep regard. Glennon says he can remember driving into Washington, D.C., in the late spring of 1973, at the time of the Senate Watergate hearings, straight from law school at the University of Minnesota, to take his first job as assistant legislative counsel to the U.S. Senate. Throughout his 20s, he worked in government, culminating in his position as legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Sen. Frank Church from 1977 to 1980. Since entering academic life in the early 1980s, Glennon has been a frequent consultant to government agencies of all stripes, as well as a regular commentator on media outlets such as NPR’s All Things Considered, the Today show and Nightline.

In his new book, an inescapable sadness underlies the narrative. “I feel a great sense of loss,” Glennon admits. “I devoted my life to these [democratic] institutions, and it’s not easy to see how to throw the current trends into reverse.” Tufts Now spoke with Glennon recently to learn more of his perspective.

Tufts Now: You’ve been both an insider and an outsider with regard to government affairs. What led you to write this book?

Michael Glennon: I was struck by the strange continuity in national security policy between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Obama, as a candidate, had been eloquent and forceful in criticizing many aspects of the Bush administration’s national security policies, from drone strikes to Guantanamo to surveillance by the National Security Agency—the NSA—to covert operations. Yet as president, it turned out that he made very, very few changes in these policies. So I thought it was useful to explain the reason for that.

Were you surprised by the continuity?

I was surprised by the extent of it. I knew fundamentally from my own experience that changing national policies is like trying to change the course of an aircraft carrier. These policies in many ways were set long ago, and the national security bureaucracy tends to favor the status quo. Still, I thought that a president like Obama would, with the political wind in his sails and with so much public and congressional support for what he was criticizing, be more successful in fulfilling his promises.

You use the phrase “double government,” coined by Walter Bagehot in the 1860s. What did he mean by that?

Walter Bagehot was one of the founders of the Economist magazine. He developed the theory of “double government,” which in a nutshell is this. He said Britain had developed two sets of institutions. First came “dignified” institutions, the monarchy and the House of Lords, which were for show and which the public believed ran the government. But in fact, he suggested, this was an illusion.

These dignified institutions generate legitimacy, but it was a second set of institutions, which he called Britain’s “efficient” institutions, that actually ran the government behind the scenes. These institutions were the House of Commons, the Cabinet and the prime minister. This split allowed Britain to move quietly from a monarchy to what Bagehot called a “concealed republic.”

The thesis of my book is that the United States has also drifted into a form of double government, and that we have our own set of “dignified” institutions—Congress, the presidency and the courts. But when it comes to national security policy, these entities have become largely for show. National security policy is now formulated primarily by a second group of officials, namely the several hundred individuals who manage the agencies of the military, intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy responsible for protecting the nation’s security.

What are some components of this arrangement?

The NSA, the FBI, the Pentagon and elements of the State Department, certainly; generally speaking, law enforcement, intelligence and the military entities of the government. It’s a diverse group, an amorphous group, with no leader and no formal structure, that has come to dominate the formation of American national security policy to the point that Congress, the presidency and the courts all defer to it.

You call this group the “Trumanite network” in your book. What’s the link to Harry Truman?

It was in Truman’s administration that the National Security Act of 1947 was enacted. This established the CIA and the National Security Council and centralized the command of the U.S. military. It was during the Truman administration as well that the National Security Agency [NSA] was set up, in 1952, although that was a secret and didn’t come to light for many years thereafter.

In contrast to the Trumanites you set the “Madisonians.” How would you describe them?

The Madisonian institutions are the three constitutionally established branches of the federal government: Congress, the judiciary and the president. They are perceived by the public as the entities responsible for the formulation of national security policy, but that belief is largely mistaken.

The idea is driven by regular exceptions. You can always point to specific instances in which, say, the president personally ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden or Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. But these are exceptions. The norm is that as a general matter, these three branches defer to the Trumanite network, and that’s truer all the time.

So the trend is toward increased power on the Trumanite side of the ledger.

Correct.

If that’s true, why has there not been a greater outcry from the public, the media—all the observers we have?

I think the principal reason is that even sophisticated students of government operate under a very serious misunderstanding. They believe that the political system is self-correcting. They believe the framers set up a system of government setting power against power, and ambition against ambition, and that an equilibrium would be reached, and that any abuse of power would be checked, and arbitrary power would be prevented.

That is correct as far as it goes, but the reality is that’s only half the picture. The other half is that Madison and his colleagues believed that for equilibrium to occur, we would have an informed and engaged citizenry. Lacking that, the entire system corrupts, because individuals are elected to office who do not resist encroachments on the power of their branches of government, and the whole equilibrium breaks down.

What role, if any, have the media played?

The media have pretty much been enablers. Although there are a handful of investigative journalists who have done a heroic job of uncovering many of the abuses, they are the exception, for a number of reasons. Number one, the media are a business and have a bottom line. It takes a huge amount of money to fund an investigative journalist who goes about finding sources over a period of years. Very few newspapers or television concerns have those sorts of deep pockets.

Second, access for the press is everything. There is huge incentive to pull punches, and you don’t get interviews with top-ranking officials at the NSA or CIA if you’re going to offer hard-hitting questions. Look, for example, at the infamous 60 Minutes puff piece on the NSA, a really tragic example of how an otherwise respectable institution can sell its soul and act like an annex of the NSA in order to get some people it wants on the TV screen.

What is the role of terror in this environment?

The whole transfer of power from the Madisonian institutions to the Trumanite network has been fueled by a sense of emergency deriving from crisis, deriving from fear. It’s fear of terrorism more than anything else that causes the American people to increasingly be willing to dispense with constitutional safeguards to ensure their safety.

Madison believed that government has two great objects. One object of a constitution is to enable the government to protect the people, specifically from external attacks. The other great object of a constitution is to protect the people from the government. The better able the government is to protect the people from external threats, the greater the threat posed by the government to the people.

You’ve been involved with the U.S. government for 40 years. How has your view of government changed?

Double government was certainly a factor in the 1970s, but it was challenged for the first time thanks to the activism stemming from the civil rights movement, Vietnam and Watergate. As a result, there were individuals in Congress—Democrats and Republicans like William Fulbright, Frank Church, Jacob Javits, Charles Mathias and many others—who were willing to stand up and insist upon adherence to constitutionally ordained principles. That led to a wave of activism and to the enactment of a number of pieces of reform legislation.

But there is no final victory in Washington. Those reforms have gradually been eaten away and turned aside. I think today we are in many ways right back where we were in the early 1970s. NSA surveillance is an example of that. The Church Committee uncovered something called Operation Shamrock, in which the NSA had assembled a watch list of antiwar and civil rights activists based upon domestic surveillance. Church warned at the time that NSA capabilities were so awesome that if they were ever turned inward on the American people, this nation would cross an abyss from which there is no return. The question is whether we have recently crossed that abyss.

To what degree are we still a functioning democracy? I’m sure you know that President Jimmy Carter told a German reporter last year that he thought we no longer qualified as a democracy because of our domestic surveillance.

We are clearly on the path to autocracy, and you can argue about how far we are down that path. But there’s no question that if we continue on that path, America’s constitutionally established institutions—Congress, the courts and the presidency—will ultimately end up like Britain’s House of Lords and monarchy, namely as institutional museum pieces.