The Deep State: A Short History.
New York Daily News, Dec 5, 2019: Fears over the “deep state” have been chalked up to paranoia. And indeed the idea of a hidden counter-government has attracted the ranks of the paranoid. Conspiracies of a tentacled clique of career bureaucrats, wire diagrams of sinister assets and agents have piled up in the Trump era.
Still, to write off the mounting angst over the deep state as simply minds gone awry is far too dismissive. And to think of an abhorrence of the deep state as a Trump phenomenon is far too short-sighted. The fear of an unchecked counter-government working not for the people’s interest but for its own is not new. Fears over an encroaching, permanent bureaucracy are as old as the United States itself.
The Founding Fathers scrawled injunctions against a sprawling and crooked authority that might eat away at man’s liberty, and rebelled against an unchecked king and his imperial network of thieving viceroys and shifty ambassadors.
The Founders worried of a dangerously unshackled tyrant. But, too, they feared the tentacled Leviathan of the state. They, too, turned to government checked, powers balanced, control decentralized lest a faceless array of petty bureaucrats arise, lest a state as corrupt and ensconced as Britain’s rise up on the western side of the Atlantic…
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