The transformation of the United States from a quasi–social democracy to a political oligarchy maintaining the outward form, but not the spirit, of constitutional government. The governing structure has evolved that made possible both the rapacity of Wall Street and the culture of permanent war and constant surveillance. As the political scientist Harold Lasswell observed more than half a century ago, a society’s leadership class consists of people whose “private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest.”
As Mike Lofgren correctly stated, The Deep State is a wasteful and incompetent method of governance. But it persists because its perverse incentive structure frequently rewards failure and dresses it up as success. Its pervasive, largely commonplace corruption and creation of synthetic bogeymen and foreign scapegoats anesthetize the public into a state of mind variously composed of apathy, cynicism, and fear—the very antithesis of responsible citizenship.
As such, historical events shaped the emergence and predominance of the Deep State which today, reflects and contributes to all foreign and domestic policies and decisions. This would become an ever pervasive element of US culture. As a result, the concept of a permanent, peacetime national security apparatus became gradually institutionalized with the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council. NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document, sketched out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. This was also reiterated in Sherman Kent's works which acknowledged Strategic Intelligence to be all encompassing and include all elements of human collective existence.
These policy measures represented the congealing of an idea unprecedented in American history: that the United States should, and would, maintain a large, capable military and a comprehensive intelligence establishment regardless of whether it was in a formal state of war. President Eisenhower already recognized the danger of the permanent war mentality, and in his January 1961 farewell address he presciently warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a new “military-industrial complex” on American soil. Unfortunately, those words left unheeded by elected officials and the unwashed masses, who still ascribe to partisan politics a leadership which mistakenly has their idiotic interests in mind. This is where we are today. The emergent Russian threat is a testimony to the rise and perpetuation of Eisenhower's warning.