Finding the Right Bums to Throw Out

Many Americans know who Bill Moyers is. If he seems to be eternal, it’s only that the man has been a liberal in the public eye since he was Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary in the 1960s. Yeah, he really is that old and he has been around that long. After politics, he became a fixture on the Public Broadcasting Service.

With so much talk about the deep state being bandied about, I went looking for an explanation that did not originate on the Right. An argument from the Left is much more persuasive since it can’t be dismissed by those in the MSM who enable and profit from the Deep State; when it comes from the Left it is much harder to dismiss as “fake news”. Thus, we needed someone with a modulated voice who was already part of the MSM club. Coming from an éminence grise on the Left, his concerns couldn’t be dismissed as RightWingExtremist conspiracy thinking. Moyers is gravitas personified.

In truth, I would have preferred to find someone known to have integrity who would be able to say it was a bunch of malarkey. Well, I got half my wish: Billy Don Moyers, Baptist minister and long-time purveyor of all good liberal causes is a man of integrity. It was he who provided the most information on this subject. Or at least as much as you can get in a brief video. And he says the deep state is not made up; it’s quite real.

This interview is from 2014. I’m sure both gentlemen voted for Obama, but their criticisms of him are judicious and concerned. Just wait for what he says about the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement.

So if this phenomenon is not a symptom of swamp fever, why are we only beginning to hear about it now, two years after the illustrious Mr. Moyers presented his evidence?

Here’s why: up until now, those elected to the Oval Office were just fine with those denizens of the Deep State. But Donald Trump?? No way. President Trump is a spanner (or three) in the wheels of this permanent bureaucracy and its revolving doors into Wall Street and ‘higher’ education — and also into Silicon Valley, as Rev. Dr. Moyers makes plain. Mr. Trump is definitely in the way and needs to be brought down, to fail:

The man being interviewed is Mike Lofgren, who wrote about the Deep State in 2013, in The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Then in 2016, he wrote about it again: The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

Used versions of both books are available. Or you could read a fruitful essay pointing toward this Thing: Theodore Dalrymple’s “The Persistence of Ideology”, in which he discusses “the treason of the clerks” (in this case, it’s ‘clerk’ in the British sense of civil service bureaucrats). Much of Western “democracy” — i.e., totalitarian democracy — has been founded on the treason of our permanent bureaucracy.

Sadder but wiser, now we know why “throwing the bums out” doesn’t work; we had the wrong bums in mind.

Hat Tip: The Blue Ridge Forum

11 thoughts on “Finding the Right Bums to Throw Out

  1. From 11 minutes in: “So I said to myself: ‘what’s going on here? Saddam Hussein didn’t bring down the Twin Towers.’ So the little light went on, and I began to sort of disenchant myself from the normal groupthink that tends to take over in any organisation.”

    Yes, I think millions of people were asking the same question.

    • I wasn’t looking for his bona fides re Trump. I took him because of the Leftist gravitas of Rev. Dr. Moyers.

      One thing Trump has done is to make me a pragmatist. Most of the people I used to admire have proved themselves rabidly anti-Trump.

  2. Around 25 years ago, if someone used the phrase “the Deep State”, that person would likely have been labeled a conspiracy nut. Nowadays, that phrase is used by people across the political spectrum.
    I define the Deep State as a body of people, who, though unelected, wield social, political and economic power in a country.
    The Deep State exists.

    • Perhaps before 9/11 you’d have been considered a conspiracy nut. But after the creation of the monster machine of DHS, it was hard to ignore.

      During the campaign, I kept questioning whether Trump could make any headway on reducing the permanent bureaucracy. I don’t know if you remembered that a poll was taken among federal workers and supposedly 25% of them were going to quit if Hillary lost. We should be so lucky.

      John Bolton used to say it would take a generation to clean out the State Department. But Tillerson is getting rid of great wads of them. If only the rest were as easy. Or had a Tillerson at the helm.

  3. One thing Lofgren leaves out of his analysis is the globalist nature of the corporations including Silicon Valley and also Wall Street, the industry funded ngos, etc. In effect, these globalist corportists are not looking out for the interests of the United States, but instead for their own power (e.g., control) and wealth.

    He mistakes the U.S. initiated foreign wars as indicating a belief in “American exceptionalism.” They do not, for the most part, aside from the thinking of such intellectual midgets as John McCain. They indicate the desire to obtain more power and wealth, usually at the expense of the United States and its people.

  4. The 3 branches of government have been superseded by this deep state (super state). And the political class scramble by grasping for power. They use devices like the FISA courts (secret courts) to undermine and overthrow the U.S. constitution. Thus the average citixrn is tossed to an fro

  5. The guy might be somewhat left-wing, but he’s obviously not a liar.

    The Donald is affecting this layer of government, which is why it’s fighting back so far, obviously.

  6. There’s also Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald:
    The deep state, although there’s no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go…This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart from—in fact, in opposition to—the political officials to whom they’re supposed to be subordinate.

    See here:
    https://amgreatness.com/2017/03/02/the-left-right-alliance-against-self-government/

  7. I don’t often watch videos of this sort, but this one I did, until the end. It was worth every second. Succinctly put and distilled. This needed saying. Thank you Dymphna.

    • I also watched the entire video. Since I do believe (unlike many fellow leftists) that the US, with all its faults, remains the West’s strongest bulwark of democracy and free speech, it was depressing viewing, though the election of Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, confirms Mike Lofgren’s view that Americans are waking up to the jettisoning of the ideals on which their nation was founded.

      Last Saturday I joined my beloved in a march through central London, protesting the increasing outsourcing (=privatisation) of our cherished National Health Service, for which the current Conservative government has no mandate. (Actually it was more of a pleasant stroll, mostly through Bloomsbury, home to the British Museum, London University and other academic institutions, and blessed with many delightful Georgian streets and squares. We didn’t hang around for the speeches in Parliament Square.)

      This topic is, I believe, not irrelevant to the issue at hand. The private companies already running parts of the NHS, some of which have a poor record, have resisted Freedom of Information requests on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. I suspect that this may be part of the rationale behind the US government’s outsourcing of defence and intelligence functions.

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