Mike Lofgren - The deep state: the fall of the constitution and the rise of a shadow government

F or twenty-eight years I was a congressional employee with an interesting and challenging but by no means remarkable career on Capitol Hill as a staff member and national defense analyst for the House and Senate budget committees. I began my tenure as a mainstream Republican in the early days of the Reagan presidency. By the end of my career I considered myself a resolute nonpartisan, and increasingly viewed all political ideologies as mental and emotional crutches, or substitute religions: for leaders, a means of manipulating attitudes and behaviors; for the rank and file, a lazy surrogate for problem solving and a way of fulfilling the craving to belong to something bigger than oneself.

My first perception of this ideological syndrome came in the mid-1990s, when Republicans had taken over the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. It was an exciting time, to be sure, but a tumultuous one. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Robespierre of the Republican revolution, employed chaos, polarization, and scapegoating as the means of carrying out a divide-and-rule strategy. It worked for a time, but I saw in retrospect that it was a technique that crippled the legislative branch so that it could no longer work effectively. It did not help that many Republican congressmen were too busy lasciviously ogling the sordid details of Kenneth Starrs report on the Monica Lewinsky affair to notice that an obscure extremist group called al-Qaeda had blown up two of our embassies in Africa.

The real wake-up call for me came during that surreal period between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. If there was any point in our postWorld War II history that called for careful analysis of the facts and rational responses that would serve the nations long-term security interests, this was surely it.

Instead, a clique of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside the George W. Bush administration, abetted at every step by the mainstream news media, acted as carnival barkers for the most destructive and self-defeating policies since Vietnam, and maybe since the eve of the Civil War. A majority of politicians on Capitol Hill, along with a sizable portion of the American people, ambled around like sleepwalkers on the edge of a precipice, unaware of the danger the ideologues were luring them into. When the House Administration Committee instructed the institutions cafeterias to rename French fries freedom fries because the government in Paris stubbornly remained unmesmerized by the Bush administrations arguments for war in the Middle East, I recognized that the Peoples House had hit intellectual rock bottom.

Still, I told whoever would listen that the slam dunk evidence of Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction was weak and that by invading Iraq the United States might be purchasing its very own West Bank on steroidsnot that my objections changed anyones mind. Later, when the invoices began to pile upthe total bill for Iraq summed up to a nice, round one trillion dollars, excluding debt serviceI attempted, from my position on the Budget Committee, to reconcile this extravagance, as much as the numbers would allow, with the rote statements of representatives and senators that deficit spending was a sign of an out-of-control government and a national moral blot that would impoverish our children.

Parallel to these developments, the American economy was mutating into a casino with a tilted wheel. Ably assisted by politicians, whom I began to see less and less as leaders and more and more as corporate errand boys, the titans of Wall Street constructed a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose economic system based on Ponzi schemes, asset stripping, and rent extraction. The inevitable result was the economic meltdown of 2008. The eventual solution to that catastrophe was not national reconstruction but a bailout of the financial institutions that had caused the disaster in the first place. They soon returned to record profitability and market dominance as the rest of the country experienced the slowest recovery since the Great Depression.

The twin shocks of 9/11 and the Great Recession seem mentally to have unhinged a portion of the American people and much of the political class. The following years were consumed by crazy arguments about the presidents birth certificate, death panels, and voters shouting that the government must get its hands off their government-provided Medicare. By 2011, when a new crop of Tea Party freshmen had taken their seats in Congress and announced that their first priority was to drive the country into a sovereign debt default, I decided Id had enough. The circus was being run from the monkey cage, and it was time to move on.

Back in private life, I wrote about the rightward lurch of the Republican Party and the intractable gridlock on the Hill in a book titled The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Perhaps I can claim a modest amount of credit for helping to launch the now-thriving cottage industry of political pundits noticing the nuttiness of the present-day Party of Lincoln with the mortified distaste of an Anglican bishop confronted by a tribe of cannibals. That said, I was hardly ready to launch myself into the arms of the Party of Jefferson and Jackson. That crowd had serious problems, too.