What ‘deep state’ really means
This seems a strange moment to be writing about “the deep state” with the US entering a new phase of open and obvious above-ground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that President Donald Trump is, in effect, under congressional indictment, just as we had settled into a more or less stable stalemate over when (and if) the Senate will hold an impeachment trial, the president shook things up again, by ordering the assassination of foreign military officials and threatening the destruction of Iran’s cultural sites. Nothing better than the promise of new war crimes to take the world’s attention away from a little thing like extorting a US ally to help oneself get re-elected.
On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the moment to think about the so-called deep state, if by that we mean the littlenoticed machinery of governance that keeps dependably churning on, whatever mayhem may be swirling around above it. Maybe this is even the moment to be grateful for those parts of the US government whose inertia keeps the ship of state moving in the same general direction, regardless of who’s on the bridge at any given time.
However, that sometimes benign inertia is not what the people who coined that term meant by “deep state.”
What is a ‘deep state’?
The expression is actually a translation of the Turkish phrase derin devlet. As historian Ryan Gingeras has explained, it arose as a way of describing “a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” In the Turkish case, those “unacknowledged persons” were, in fact, agents of organized criminal enterprises working within the government.
Gingeras, an expert on organized crime in Turkey, has described how alliances among generals, government officials, and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” allowed the creation and execution of “policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” In the Turkish case, the history of such alliances can be traced to struggles for power in the first decades of the previous century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The interpenetration of the drug cartels and government in Mexico is another example of a deep state at work. The presence of cartel collaborators in official positions and in the police hierarchy at all levels makes it almost impossible for any president, even the upright Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to defeat them.
The term “deep state” has also been used to characterize the role of the military in Egypt. As Sarah Chayes has written in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, Egypt’s military has long been a state-within-a-state with its own banking and business operations that constitute 25-40% of the Egyptian economy. It’s the country’s largest landowner and the ultimate maker and breaker of Egyptian presidents. In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising forced president Hosni Mubarak, who had run the country for 30 years, to resign. The military certainly had something to do with that resignation, since he handed over power to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
When, however, a nascent democracy brought their longtime opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to power with the election of Mohamed Morsi, that was too much for the generals. It helped that Morsi made his own missteps, including the repression of peaceful protesters. So there wasn’t much objection when, in 2012, his own minister of defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, led a military coup against Morsi. Sisi and the Egyptian military have run the country directly ever since, making the state and the deep state one and the same.
From his earliest days in the White House, Donald Trump and his officials have inveighed against what the president has regularly labeled the “deep state.” What he has meant by the term, though, is something different from its more traditional use. Rather than referring to a “shadow or parallel system of government” operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government – or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.
When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that’s the deep state at work as far as he’s concerned. Want to proclaim “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state. Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your national security adviser, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.