How America Escapes Its Conspiracy-Theory Crisis

On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield arrived at Washington, D.C.,’s Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station to depart for summer vacation. An Ohio Republican, Garfield was considered one of his era’s most promising Presidents; at forty-nine years old, he was the third-youngest man ever elected to the office. As he walked arm-in-arm across the station with his friend, Secretary of State James G. Blaine, a forty-year-old lawyer turned bill collector turned preacher named Charles Guiteau walked up behind him and pulled out a revolver. Guiteau fired two shots into the President’s back. One missed, grazing Garfield’s arm; the other struck dead center. Before being taken away by the police, Guiteau bizarrely declared his loyalty to Chester A. Arthur, Garfield’s Vice-President: “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is President now,” he shouted. News of the shooting spread instantly, via telegraph, across the country. For the next seventy-nine days, Garfield lingered, his health improving and declining, in part due to botched medical care. On September 19th, he died.

The public raged at Guiteau, a delusional political wannabe who believed he deserved an appointment as a U.S. official in Europe. While Guiteau considered himself an important Garfield supporter, he was actually just one of thousands of hangers-on who hoped to obtain a post in the federal government under what was then known as the “spoils system,” in which each new President appointed thousands of supporters to federal jobs, prioritizing loyalty over merit. (“To the victor belong the spoils,” as one senator put it.) Under such a system corruption was rampant, but a country still divided after the Civil War lacked the political will to address it. Garfield’s death proved a turning point. Sixteen months later, on January 16, 1883, Congress passed and Arthur signed the Pendleton Act, a historic government reform mandating that almost all federal employees had to be hired on the basis of skills, training, and education, rather than political patronage. The act would give Americans the benefit of an independent, professional civil service—one which was answerable to elected officials without being beholden to them.

Last week, President Trump signed Executive Order 13957. Although its title, “On Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” is almost aggressively banal, it is an unprecedented election-eve power grab that could undo much of the Pendleton Act. The order could strip hundreds of thousands of federal officials of their civil-service protections, allowing them to be quickly dismissed, like political appointees. It has the potential to expand the number of people appointed by each President from about four thousand to hundreds of thousands. “It’s an attempt to redefine the civil service as a political arm of the Presidency rather than public servants who work for the American people,” Don Beyer, a Democratic representative from Virginia, told the Washington Post. Democrats have decried the order as a return to Civil-War-era cronyism. Some conservatives, however, have praised it as a brave attempt to tame the “deep state.”

The imaginary “deep state”—a permanent, unelected shadow government which is said to have relentlessly gathered power to itself—has long served as a foil for Trump. According to the President and his allies, the deep state might include not just power-mad F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents but military leaders, journalists, tech executives, and F.D.A. regulators; some have extended it to include infectious-disease experts fighting the pandemic, such as Anthony Fauci. The idea of the deep state saturates Trump’s rhetoric and worldview. His Presidency is predicated on the idea that the United States government is itself an enemy of the people. “Somebody said, President, what’s the toughest country to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea?” Trump told attendees, at a recent fund-raiser. “No, the toughest country by far is dealing with the United States. It’s true. These people are sick.” On the day that he signed the civil-service executive order, the President tweeted, “I am not just running against Biden, I am running against the Corrupt Media, the Big Tech Giants, and the Washington Swamp.”

Since entering politics, Trump has trafficked in conspiracy theories for political gain. Where other conspiracy theorists might demonize racial or religious groups, however, he focusses on the government he leads. Through social media and the bully pulpit, he has persuaded many Americans to take the same view. Belief in a “deep state” has become pervasive in the United States. In 2018, a poll administered by Monmouth University found that three out of four respondents agreed that “a group of unelected government and military officials” either definitely or probably “manipulate or direct” national policy in secret. Eight in ten people said that the federal government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens. Views about the nature of the deep state increasingly diverge along party lines: a 2019 YouGov poll found that, among people who have heard the term, eighty-three per cent of Republicans thought that the deep state was trying to undermine Trump, while only ten per cent of Democrats did. But the theory is by no means confined to the right. Belief in the deep state is high not just among conservative members of the National Rifle Association but among centrist and left-leaning members of racial minorities, who associate it with the persistence of prejudice against them.

The concept of a deep state is popular, in part, because it is flexible. Conservatives who look askance at QAnon—a lurid theory positing that Trump is combatting a Satanic child-sex-trafficking ring run by Democrats—might use the term to refer to what they see as an overzealous, regulation-loving “administrative state.” Many on the left are less likely to use the term “deep state,” but they fear the military-industrial complex, a “cabal” of generals and defense contractors which they worry pushes the country into endless wars. Many voters in both parties see the politicians, lobbyists, and journalists associated with politics as members of an unaccountable élite focussed primarily on their own interests, not the public’s.

Skepticism about government can be a sign of health in a democracy. Concentrations of power and secrecy have always struck Americans as unjust; since the country’s founding, politicians have been elected on promises to tame and change Washington. Past eras of government misconduct and duplicity have validated these anti-government attitudes. In 1958, seventy-three per cent of respondents told the National Election Study that they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. By 1974—toward the end of the Vietnam War, and after Watergate—only thirty-six per cent of Americans felt that way. Since then, no President has been able to restore trust for a sustained period. During Obama’s second term and into the Trump Administration, the percentage of Americans who say that they trust the government has hovered around eighteen per cent.

When distrust of government reaches saturation levels and stays there, it begins to corrode the society it might otherwise help protect. Today, widespread skepticism about public life, fuelled by political polarization, racial discrimination, economic inequality, and the culture war, is being heightened by an online information crisis. Social-media platforms amplify the most provocative voices, and are filled with alternative facts about our government, our institutions, and the functioning of society. This spring and summer, as the pandemic unfolded alongside protests against racial injustice, the effects of such a system were impossible to miss. A video falsely claiming that Fauci and other élites were responsible for the pandemic and had been using it for their own ends received more than eight million views. Thousands of Twitter and Facebook posts claimed that Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd, was an actor hired by the deep state. A candidate who believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory is set to win a seat in Congress. Two-thirds of Trump supporters surveyed said that they didn’t believe that absentee or mail-in ballots would be counted as voters intended. Convinced that government officials and experts are conspiring against them, large numbers of Americans plan to vote for a President who wants the power to hire and fire more of them himself.

The term “deep state” predates social media. It was first used in the nineteen-nineties, by political scientists, to describe the political power wielded by the Turkish military, which opposed democratic reforms. In 2007, Peter Dale Scott, a retired English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, applied the term to the United States government in a book called “The Road to 9/11.” In the book, Scott accused American political leaders and the U.S. military of intentionally fuelling conflict at home and abroad in order to secure funding and status. After its publication, Scott became an occasional guest on Alex Jones’s far-right, conspiracy-minded radio program; Jones and his audience seized upon the concept of the deep state, expanding its scope and falsely claiming that the U.S. government had carried out the Oklahoma City, 9/11, and Sandy Hook attacks.

For years, the phrase and concept remained on the fringes of American politics. But five weeks after Donald Trump won the Presidency, Breitbart News—whose former chairman, Steve Bannon, had become Trump’s chief strategist—introduced the idea to a broader conservative audience. In a tendentious, four-thousand-word article titled “The Deep State vs. Donald Trump,” an anonymous author, writing under the pseudonym “Virgil,” argued that federal, state, and local government employees, policy experts, contractors, and journalists together constituted a “deep state” stretching “across the whole of the federal government—indeed, the entirety of the country.” A “great power struggle,” Virgil theorized, was currently underway between Trump and this deep state. The following June, Trump retweeted to his followers a post from the Fox News host Sean Hannity, in which Hannity promoted an upcoming segment of his show dedicated to “the Deep State’s allies in the media.” The term “deep state” soon became part of the Trumpian lexicon, along with “witch hunt” and “fake news.” The concept has proved potent enough to change core tenets of the Republican Party. Today, in a reversal, slightly more Democrats than Republicans say that they view the C.I.A. positively.

Americans have long used many terms, derogatory and complimentary, to describe government workers. An official with the Environmental Protection Agency may be a “watchdog” to a Democrat but a “job-killer” to a Republican; Democrats hail the experience of “public servants” while Trump derides the Washington “eliteswamp.” One might begin to describe this workforce objectively by saying that roughly nine million Americans hold positions with the federal government, as health-care workers, soldiers, park rangers, C.I.A. operatives, accountants, soldiers, and so on. The vast majority of them are unelected, but they are required, by statute, to implement the lawful policies of the elected officials for whom they work. (Like members of the military, American civil servants take an oath of office, swearing to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”) About two million Americans work as civil servants in various federal departments—a figure that has remained largely unchanged since the nineteen-fifties.

All nations have permanent governments—workforces that stay on no matter who’s elected. Countries supervise them to different extents. After taking office, a British Prime Minister installs several hundred appointees; an American President, by contrast, appoints about four thousand. American Presidential appointees work not just at the tops of federal agencies but throughout them; in Britain, although the Prime Minister appoints the head of each government ministry, virtually all ministry employees are members of the permanent government. (Two popular BBC comedies, “Yes Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister,” have centered on the power struggles between a newly appointed minister and the “permanent secretary,” or career civil servant, who runs an agency day to day; usually, the permanent secretary is concerned mainly with defending the agency’s reputation, turf, and budget.) American civil servants are also constrained by law. In addition to the Pendleton Act, the Hatch Act, passed in 1939, bars them from engaging in political activity on the job. France, Germany, and many other countries work on something like the British system. In general, American elected officials have more power over permanent government workers than their counterparts in other liberal democracies. Comparatively, our state is shallow.

And yet the question of how closely government bureaucrats are supervised is not what animates the most committed deep-state conspiracy theorists. They are more concerned with the misdeeds of a secretive inner circle of agents and spies. On April 29, 1976, a select investigative committee of the U.S. Senate, led by Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, and John Tower, a Republican from Texas, released a twenty-seven-hundred-page report detailing decades of illegal F.B.I. and C.I.A. spying on Americans. The report showed that the F.B.I. had compiled more than half a million domestic-intelligence files on individuals or groups who were engaged in constitutionally-protected political activities. The misconduct spanned the tenures of six Presidents, from both parties.

The report emerged as the country was reeling from a decade of war, assassination, protest, and Presidential corruption. Its revelations confirmed many Americans’ worst fears about their own government. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had opened and photographed nearly half a million letters mailed between private citizens, snooping on the personal correspondence of John Steinbeck, Ted Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. The Justice Department had gathered information on hundreds of anti-Vietnam War activists and shared it with the C.I.A., which maintained files on at least four members of Congress and John Lennon. F.B.I. agents had illegally investigated five hundred thousand Americans whom they deemed “subversive,” and infiltrated political groups spanning the ideological spectrum. J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, had created a list of twenty-six thousand Americans to be rounded up in the case of a “national emergency”; it included doctors, scientists, and the writer Norman Mailer. Under Hoover, agents conducted a secret campaign to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., who he believed was a Communist sympathizer. F.B.I. agents planted negative stories about King in the press and bugged his hotel rooms. In 1964, shortly before King travelled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, agents sent him and his wife a tape recording which they claimed contained evidence of King conducting extramarital affairs and an anonymous letter suggesting that he commit suicide.

Church and Tower, and other Democrats and Republicans, declared these practices abhorrent, immoral, and criminal. The committee issued ninety-six bipartisan recommendations to prevent future abuses. An activist Congress, with the support of Presidents Ford and Carter, spent years enacting a historic wave of reforms. New Senate and House intelligence committees were created to monitor the work of America’s spies. Ford issued an executive order limiting C.I.A. operations inside the United States. Congress set a ten-year term limit for F.B.I. directors. Jimmy Carter signed laws that empowered special prosecutors to investigate potentially illegal acts by the President and White House aides, created a dozen independent inspectors general to investigate whistle-blower complaints, and established a new federal court to approve national security-related eavesdropping inside the United States.

The oversight system ushered in by Church and Tower reset how elected leaders controlled the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and workers across the federal government. But the system wasn’t without its opponents. After leaving office, Ford began to argue that the increased congressional oversight had perilously weakened the President’s ability to protect and lead the country. In the nineteen-eighties, after the Iran-Contra affair—in which White House aides and the C.I.A. secretly provided military aid abroad without notifying Congress—Dick Cheney, then a congressman, argued that nothing improper had occurred, since, in his view, foreign policy and national security should be controlled solely by the President. Over time, Cheney’s view gained ground among conservatives. After losing the 1992 Presidential election, George H. W. Bush, with the support of his then Attorney General, William Barr, pardoned several of the men who’d been convicted of lying to Congress and other offenses during Iran-Contra.

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