American Exception — Empire and the Deep State — Book Review essay

July 27, 2022 — Jim Loving, Book Review

American Exception — Empire and the Deep State, Aaron Good, Skyhorse Publishing, June, 2022.

While reading this book, my wife sent me a video from Don Caron’s Parody Project (on YouTube) titled Battle Hymn of the Republic, Modified for Relevance.” If you want to skip this long essay/book review, watch the video instead, it describes the result of the American System that this book describes in detail, and you will be entertained.

As an undergraduate in college in the early 1970s, earning my BA in Political Science while minoring in Computer Science, I briefly studied C. Wright Mills and other scholars such as Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Orwell. I chose a profession in Information Technology and spent my entire career selling products and services to the US Federal Government. I saw how our federal government worked and learned much about it as well, the myriad industries that are supported and regulated by it, as well as how these industries all worked to influence and control it. While I worked for a very large multi-national corporation (IBM), it was dwarfed when compared to the size, complexity, and power of the US federal government. I saw and engaged in the workings of all three levels of the ”tripartite state” discussed in Aaron Good’s just published book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State.

In this book, political scientist Aaron Good provides a scholarly look at the US system of governance, as practiced since WWII, what this is, along with how and why it developed prior to, and at the beginning of the post WWII “American Century.” With this analysis, Good takes a tour of recent history through this lens and comes up with an alternative view of historical and recent events from the commonly accepted narratives of the mainstream writings and historical teachings. As Good notes, “A central concern of this book is the relationship between expansive foreign policy and democratic decline.” The focus of his research and this book is “upon the forces that drive the pursuit of (US) dominance.”

Good develops the theory of the tripartite state and the utility of this theory is “an attempt at sense-making using social science theory and empirical evidence — under conditions in which important political and historical events are intentionally obscured by powerful actors. The tripartite theory of the state and the concept of exceptionism have been developed herein to offer a means of understanding and explaining important historical and political realities. These matters include unadjudicated elite criminality, the ceaseless US pursuit of global dominance, and the prevailing regime’s inability to address major crises — namely economic inequality, ecological destruction, and the threat of nuclear omnicide.”

Good shows how the “tripartite state” has been unable to “hermetically seal state-sanctioned lawlessness and thereby maintain the rule of law domestically, even while this exceptionism prevails in foreign relations.” He demonstrates how there are “enough documented and suspected state crimes against democracy to assert that at best public sovereignty has been compromised.“ Good shows that “the post-World War II US decision to pursue global dominance began an historical era in which state lawlessness became standard (if denied) and meaningful democracy (such as it was) gave way to ‘managed democracy’ or a top-down state.”

Had I chosen a career in political science, I would have aspired to write a book like this one that Aaron Good has written. While I read C. Wright Mills in college, and have read Peter Dale Scott, Hannah Arendt, Mike Lofgren, and others, this book ties together all their work with the benefit of a 60 year historical analysis since Mills died, along with a scholarly research perspective that is the most comprehensive of any of the previous efforts and brings new scholarship and insights to the topic.

Good’s book is an expansion of his PhD dissertation of 2015 on the same topic. In it, he reviews the political science literature looking at hegemony, empire, international relations, and the various schools of political and economic thought, and notes how there has not been a more comprehensive and expansive analysis of how the America of the “American Century,” and how this overarching system has actually worked, and why, and for whose primary benefit. Good of course is not the first author to cover this ground, many have, and he references many of them in his book. One he did not reference and is worth mentioning is non-scholar John Perkins, a former foot soldier in this system, who has written three versions of his book New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and continues to speak on the topic.

Good, building on the work of C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite), Michael J. Glennon (National Security and Double Government), Peter Dale Scott, Lance DeHaven-Smith, John Mearsheimer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Samuel Huntington, Plato, Hans Morgenthau, Charles A. Beard, Dana Priest and William Arkin, Mike Lofgren, Jurgen Habermas , Leo Strauss, John Locke, Mark Neocleous, Carl Schmitt, Ola Tunander, and many others, discusses this “Power Elite” as key architects and operators of the “Tripartite State”.

The tripartite state consists of the “big three” of 1- big business, 2- the military (including Intelligence agencies and Industrial Complex), and 3- the political directorate, or the 1- public state (democratic state and businesses within the economy), 2- the security state, and 3- the deep state.

The research methodology used by Good “embraces the attitude and approach” of C. Wright Mills. “In practice, this means that this book’s methodology and theory are drawn eclectically from social science and history based on, first and foremost, their utility toward illuminating the nature of the problem. This is a challenging enterprise since many of the most significant issues and relevant episodes are those that are the most incomplete and obscured from historians and the public.”

The American Century is a term first coined in 1941 by media tycoon Henry Luce. This terminology and thinking has been adopted and written about numerous times since, and most recently by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Bessner, both writing in July of 2022 about the end of the American Century. Good covers the genesis of the American Century in Chapter 6 of his book. Another term for this period of American history is the time of American Empire through its global hegemony.

Good reviews the “theories pertaining to hegemony, imperialism, the dual state, and administrative prerogative. The concept of hegemony is crucial in the realm of international and US politics.” Simply stated, hegemony is a state’s use of power — financial, military, social, cultural, political, that is “amplified by virtue of the fact that it is perceived by relevant others as leading in a way that is beneficial for itself or others” “The US has striven for imperial hegemony — i.e. hegemony in the pursuit of empire — is a foundational assumption of this work. The forces that compel the US to pursue empire are of key significance.”

According to Good’s American Exception thesis, since WWII in particular, the American tripartite state has operated to navigate the “overworld” (traditional institutions, financial etc.) and “underworld” (organized crime), using the covert operational capacities with its inherent secrecy and opacity of the security state, to the primary benefit of its benefactors, the “Guardian Elite.” As noted by Good and many others, the initial creation in 1947 of the CIA, National Security Council, and National Security State, were driven by the writings of key elites within the Council on Foreign Relations from the Rockefeller Foundation funded War and Peace Studies Project. The CIA’s initial Director was Allen Dulles, and like he and his brother, Eisenhower Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan and others, the national security state was populated from the world of finance and law and many of the covert operations have been, and continue to be conducted on their behalf.

One of Good’s insights is the philosophy and value behind the thinking of justification for lawlessness, or “American Exceptionism” (vs mythical USA Exceptionalism). Exceptionism as Deep State policy means “public sovereignty is essentially an illusion because true sovereignty resides with whoever decides when a state of exception exists — and when it no longer exists.” Simply stated, a state of exception means taking exception to the law or accepted rules, including international organizations (UN), laws, treaties as well as the US Constitution.

In our system, the Madisonian Democracy, vs “Trumanian Democracy,” this should only be the role of the legislative branch — e.g., approving international treaties, declaring war, writing laws. Now, to the extent that the legitimate government makes Exceptionism decisions, Good extensively discusses Continuity of Government, its history, usage and evolution, including its suspension of the Constitution. This capability resides in the “unitary executive,” the President within the executive branch. But particularly since JFK was assassinated, the POTUS is guided, influenced, and coerced by the national security and deep state, the last two legs of the tripartite state.

As Good notes, the concept of a decider “Guardian Elite” goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic and his “The Laws,” with his notion of a “nocturnal council” elite making decisions made in the dark vs an open transparent democracy which through this framing is essentially really theater for the masses. This means that only a select few can “know the truth” and decide on a societal course of action.

Building on Plato’s “Noble Lies,” Leo Strauss later wrote that the truth is too dangerous for the uninitiated, so official obfuscation is used to maintain some semblance of social harmony and the strong will do what they will. They maintain control of both the narrative and the structural laws and decision making that matters. This is “necessary not just for international and public relations purposes, but because the means and ends of US foreign and domestic policy are so much at odds with America’s national myths.” A business colleague and friend of mine often quoted his lawyer — “It’s not about the truth, so stop telling it!”

Good reviews the different types of power to persuade a populace within the framework of any governance. Building on the work of Hannah Arendt, Thucydides, and Karl Popper, these are either “Open persuasive power” vs “dark coercive power.” “Every domestic and international order rests upon a mixture of coercion and consent. Democratic social orders owe their legitimacy to concepts of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The conflict between these two modes of power can be observed as far back as the work of Plato.”

Historically, the US colonists used open power among themselves in forming a nascent republican “Madisonian” union, but dark coercive power was later used by the US government with native peoples, African-US slaves, Mexicans, Japanese, and Hawaiians, and consistently during the American Century using “Trumanian” power. Good quotes Leo Strauss — “reflexive couching of hegemonic foreign policy in liberal terms is the signature affectation of the US empire.”

Like the Mafia, who US intelligence and military has partnered with since at least WWII, it makes offers to those it protects, “pay me and you will be protected,” or if not, they then “make an offer that cannot be refused.” In John Perkins framing of this coercive approach, the US tripartite system consisted of three elements, with the first using Open Persuasive techniques and the last two Dark Coercive ones. These are: — 1- Traditional International Development institutions offer financing (USAID, World Bank, IMF, etc.) to Global South/Asian countries in exchange for US firms extractively developing them, the role of Economic Hit Men like Perkins; — the cementing of the US-Saudi “special relationship” is perhaps the most notable example of this; 2- Operational Covert Operations to disrupt a foreign (or US) government — election interference, inciting riots, persistent surveillance, and or regime change operations through enabling coups; 3- and if the first two fail, resort to military power — e.g. US Iraqi invasion and war in Syria are two recent examples.

In the movie “Training Day” there is a key scene where crooked cop Denzel Washington must speak to his cutouts who have to confer with the “wise men” (financiers of the criminal enterprise) as to what should be done. They ultimately murder Washington’s character as he became a threat or problem for the wise men. That movie can act as a small example illustrating how the Deep State operates and effects Deep Events within Good’s US tripartite state during our American Century. Whether one is a “Wolf or a Sheep” (quoting Washington’s character), unless you are in the club of deciding wise men, one is ultimately a Sheep or pawn (mixing metaphors, and types) on the international chess board. Noted by Good, during the Peloponnesian war, an Athenian emissary said: “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” Greece’s former finance minister, Yanis Faroufakis wrote a book of the same name. Washington’s character thought he was a wolf, but alas, he was really just a sheep.

I have been fascinated with the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, his role in the American Century, his confrontation as POTUS with the Cold War Imperial consensus during his presidency, and what this confrontation and his resulting assassination because of it means about America’s century now and going forward. One of his many biographers, Frederik Logevall, recently wrote and published Part 1 of JFK’s biography, JFK — Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956. In that work, Logevall showed how JFK came of age and was heavily influenced at the beginning of the American Century’s launching, then came to power at the fulcrum point of this hegemonic power during the height of the Cold War (to be covered by Logevall .in his Part 2–1956–1963, to be published at a later date).

I came to my interest in the topic of Power Elite and Deep State through the lens of JFK’s assassination and my reading about it off and on for my entire adult life. I have been more interested in the Why and the Who of Dealey Plaza, and the “Why It Matters”, less so than on the How, although that too is important to understand to get to the “Who shot John” question. This question bothered President Nixon as evidenced by his obsession with the “whole Bay of Pigs” issue, his code words for the JFK assassination, which is covered well in chapters 7 and 9. Author and former Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley also discusses this in his just released book — Scorpions Dance, the President, the Spymaster, and Watergate. The Spymaster is CIA Director, the “Man Who Kept the Secrets,” Richard Helms. Good recently interviewed Morley on his podcast.

The Deep State got the attention of every POTUS that succeeded JFK with his public murder “most foul”, including Donald J. Trump, who it should be noted, as of this review, has not been completely taken down, notwithstanding conservative writer Bill Kristol’s imploring them to do so with his ”Go Deep State” tweet during the Trump presidency. My own opinion on this is that the Deep State is divided on Trump as some benefited from his policies, even though as POTUS and leader of the Madisonian state, he was and would be a major risk to the functioning of the system, and therefore the benefits that accrue to the ultimate Guardian Elite, which Trump is most definitely not part of, would have been, and likely would be less than the risks. But that story is still unfinished.

But the Why of JFK’s killing is the topic that relates most closely to the thinking behind the events of the American Century, which then leads us to the Who and the How of that particular historical deep event. Good briefly touches on the JFK assassination in Chapter 6, merely concluding what most researchers have, namely that his murder was a Deep State operation to arrest JFK’s “brief departure from the Imperial Consensus,” but then references back to that event and Kennedy’s policies as it impacted later “deep events” in American history, focusing on the state and media coverup of the assassination as state crime against democracy with his expert review of the 1970s Church, Pike and HSCA committee work. Many believe as I do that JFK’s assassination was the beginning of the end of the American Century, or, given Good’s entire thesis, it cemented the methods and practices of the tripartite, Deep State, demonstrating its absolute power as a modus operandi of the Deep State during the American Century.

As noted by Eric Ambler, in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.” Yet, JFK’s assassination, once done, opened up for the Deep State an entire expansion into the criminality and extra-Constitutional governance efforts and domestic possibilities, and set the stage for the many domestic “deep events” that happened after it during the American Century.

Good discusses at length how this system has contributed to the decay of Democracy in the USA during the American Century, and the three largest realms of this decay are represented in: 1- the diminishment for the rule of law, 2- a drastic rise in inequality, and 3- the decline of American nationalism, by which Good means “the pursuit of policies which strengthen and enrich the country’s collective economy and population.”

Qui bono in our American system? Good’s thesis essentially takes a Materialist perspective, with the result and problem being the creation, control, maintenance and distribution of wealth and resulting economic inequality. This of course gets into the required analysis of the relationship of a Democratic form of government vis a vis a Capitalist form of economic system, and the relationship between them.

Our American system consists of the political — Madisonian Democracy, and the economic, Capitalism. Capitalism has been around in its present form for several hundred years, and thousands of years before in Athens, Greece, and has been critiqued endlessly and evolved in its operation until today. But, as Good says his analysis is focusing on “the problem,” and that problem would include how Capitalism, our global economic system led by the hegemon the US, is doing. Many have noted the obvious and said, not well at all.

From Harvard professor Rebecca Henderson, with her Reimagining Capitalism In a World On Fire, to “Big Thinkers” Anand Giridharadas, Timothy Snyder, John Fullerton, Alissa Quart, and Eric Weinstein discussing this together, to Gar Alperovitz and his Next System project, to Donut Economics economist Kate Raworth, or Thomas Piketty, with his Capital in the Twenty-First Century and many others, there is general broad agreement that Capitalism as practiced is failing.

There are many reasons for this, but Good’s book shows why — the actual political system is rigged and unlawfully designed to benefit the few within the economic system, not the many. Good references Jurgen Habermas writings in the 1970s which noted “the realities of advanced capitalism and the norms of democratic societies led to legitimation crises in which political and economic institutions suffered from diminishing public respect.” I think we can safely conclude that today’s America, with Trumpism and insurrection, is way beyond loss of public respect, and that loss of respect is what brought us Trump in the first place.

In his December, 2015 Ted Talk, Yanis Varoufakis, PhD Economist, politician, and former Finance Minister for Greece, notes that Democracy is not required for Capitalism, and the systems in Singapore and China are examples of this. In Greece, “Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority control government. What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state.”

He continues, “indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone.

As Good has demonstrated in this book, it is this separation of the political from the economic, but with the political having been captured, “securitized, and controlled by the economic sector for the benefit of the few, is why anti-democratic practices have been implemented. Or, as Varoufakis says, “it is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate. Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.”

His answer concludes, “Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants.

But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism’s doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including — soon, I believe — in places like China.

So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we’d better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary. At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company — whichever one you happen to work at at that time — is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks.”

The good news is that the reuniting of Capitalism with greater worker ownership and democratic participation is happening in Spain, the UK, and the US in the forms of Worker-owned cooperatives, Employee Stock Ownership Plans, and a growing non-profit sector such as the Democracy Collaborative working in support of this vision to make it happen. Clearly, this approach is inconsistent with the design of the tripartite system as it exists today, and would not be in the interest of the Power Elite to become broadly accepted and implemented. There have been minor efforts within the US Congress and with a few politicians to initiate programs to support the move to greater worker ownership, control and participation with their companies.

Instead of a Democracy with an open accountable government of and by the people, with the creation of a covert, secret, “plausibly denied” operational national security state, all in service to the economic elite of certain industries, this has given rise to Parapolitics, a term developed by Peter Dale Scott, which is defined as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.”

Prior to Good’s book, much has been and is being written about the decline of Democracy in America and the west, but a recent quote at an “Unfinished Salon” discussion, by Digital Democracy advocate Pia Mancini, reflected on our aging (Madisonian) democratic institutions: “Thriving democracy is perpetually a work in progress. It needs constant adaptation… If it’s not changing, then it’s no longer a democracy… We have a set of democratic institutions that were designed for a different era. It’s a type of democracy where a few decide in the name of many… Society has changed radically, and we haven’t adapted these institutions to the society we have today.” My late cousin liked to refer to this as “1776 Democracy.”

The digital economy and digital society, particularly in the last 15 years with the rise of social media, has dramatically changed western democracies and societies, and many have argued, for the worse. The question of whether or how the “Deep State” sees or drives this, is something that Good only briefly touches on in the last chapter of the book. There was the identification and discussion of major “deep events” — JFK Assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11, but it was in the 21st century, after 9/11 and the advent of the Global War On Terror (something I saw up close with DHS my major client from 2003–2008), that the move to “total information awareness” as a means of “fighting” this threat, that a shift in power occurred.

Coupled with the major advances in technology, we are beginning to possibly see a shift in the industry titans of the deep state. “Silicon Valley monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter operate on the basis of opaque and constantly revised algorithms that can determine what kind of content users are exposed to, what content they can effectively share, and who they share it with.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post. The advertising model of the Internet has the user and her data as the product, and this has given rise to Surveillance Capitalism, in which a Public-Private Surveillance Partnership between tech and government has now emerged, much like the partnership of finance, oil and gas, and military industrial industries. China is all-in with exploiting this, and so is the US, particularly the military and national security and law enforcement agencies. The authoritarian model is ideal for exploiting this capability. The question remains as to how Madisonian democracy can keep up with this, and it has no doubt kept the Deep State busy figuring out how to do so, while maintaining the illusion of freedom, privacy and democracy, and continue to profit from it.

The first amendment of the US Constitution expressly mentions the press (1776 media) and free speech. It was a fundamental right the founders envisioned as a means to inform the public citizen and have them participate in representative democracy. Over time, as Mills and Good note, the media became more of an instrument of the (deep) state, rather than one that investigated and monitored it objectively, and informed and educated the citizenry. Instead, the media came to move America to “mass society” thinking, and “are more than just a cause of America’s transformation into a mass society; they are among the most significant means of increasingly expansive elite power.”

As it relates to JFK’s assassination, Mal Hyman, former professor and SC Congressional candidate, covered the media’s role well in his 2017 book Burying the Lead — The Media and the JFK Assassination. Hyman does a great job of showing the relationships among the three arms of the tripartite state, and how the media becomes a key communication and messaging tool of this tripartite state.

The media, then and now, informs and frames the epistemic understanding of our world and our place in it. Social Media has broken this understanding, and that is another problem for Democracy today. Henry Luce, initial writer for the “American Century” meme, who was himself a media magnate, also shows up in Hyman’s story too, and briefly makes an appearance in Part 1 of Logevall’s JFK biography (with his wife Claire’s affair with Joe Kennedy Sr).

In his discussion of Watergate, Good notes it was a “media-driven scandal.” The Washington Post, a paper that I have read regularly for 50 years, was the key media organ to break and report on this story. Good notes Bob Woodward and publisher Phil Graham’s connections to US Intelligence, and how the Watergate reporting was unique and an “aberration” as prior major events were under reported and under investigated, and that the post-Watergate coverage tended to “re-legitimize the US government after Nixon’s resignation. This can be seen in the US media’s unfavorable coverage of the post-Watergate congressional investigations of the intelligence community — the Pike Committee, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.” Good briefly mentions the CIA’s extensive penetration of the US media, citing, ironically, Carl Bernstein’s reporting on the CIA and the media, and Frank Wisner’s operations and his referring to it as “the Mighty Wurlitzer.” Bernstein notes Graham was Wisner’s closest friend.

Good’s entire thesis is structural, and he does not attempt to address the cultural drivers for Elite Power. That of course is an entire book in itself, but evolutionary psychology, neuropsychology, and theories on Cultural Evolution could perhaps help in this area. Others have attempted to do this, a few examples are Robert Wright, Peter Whybrow, Claire Graves and his Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber and other Integral Thinkers such as the Institute of Cultural Evolution, and its Developmental Politics initiative.

Robert Wright, the author of several books, continues to blog and write and his passion project is the Apocalypse Aversion project which includes his interest in US foreign policy, specifically as a proponent of progressive realism, with its proposed adherence to international laws and rules. He has a kinder gentler view of the Deep State, calling it the American “Blob” (“a pejorative, but useful name for American foreign policy makers,”) The thinking of the Blob has been called many things, but “postwar liberal consensus” is perhaps the most common. Good’s book dives deeper into this, of course, and exceptionism is the sine qua non of American Empire policy — foreign and domestic. It is the big dirty elephant in the historical room.

The term “Deep State” has recently come into use during the Trump Presidency and has been used by the former President and his supporters. He has defined it as an entity that is out to get him and his movement, and the elements of it are specifically government bureaucrats, supported by the “enemy of the people” mainstream media, but also includes all political opponents, Democrats and other liberal institutions like K-12 and higher education, and larger urban centers, people of color, and any/all immigrants. Other names for Deep State that Trump has used includes “swamp,” as in he was going to “drain the swamp.”

The Trump political movement, among other things, is a big F-you to our entire system and its elites, and his victory because of this sentiment was accurately predicted by Michael Moore in 2016 and its impact, most recently discussed, by Bret Stephens in the NY Times. But Trumpism and its aftermath, perhaps represents a Deep State that is at war with itself. Good’s book, if nothing else, describes American tripartite system as a fascist, authoritarian undertaking by the Power Elite and the rise of Trump is the rise of the “great man” populist nationalist fascist savior to take it all down. So, it appears that we get to choose between two forms of authoritarian fascism.

And he and this movement have not gone away. They have gone to school on the mistakes it made in his first administration in attempting to drain the swamp, and his plan to fix those mistakes is covered with the in depth reporting by Axios’ Jonathan Swann in his July, 2022 article, “Trump’s Radical Plans for 2025”. This after twice being impeached and not convicted, and as he plotted to enable an administrative coup to annul the 2020 election, which has yet to be litigated and may not be.

His radical 2025 plan includes snippets from “Sources close to the former president said that he will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the ‘woke generals’ at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.” If you are not a fan of the system Good has so thoroughly described, which I most certainly am not, this sounds pretty good, necessary and needed, right?

What Trump and his supporters get wrong is calling his targets the Deep State. Using Good’s tripartite framing, the elements that Trump intends to purge, replacing them with vetted, MAGA-loyalists and true believers, are actually elements of only a portion of two components of the tripartite state. Trumps 2025 plan attacks the administrative components of the political and national security state, but not the Power Elite of the Deep state that directs them, which includes key business leaders and organizations and former government leaders within influencer organizations and key industries. Good covers many of them active in the 20th century, but not so much in the 21st century and that analysis would be useful.

Trump is an authoritarian, narcissistic egomaniac that would like to become THE King or sole Power Elite decider directing the public and national security state and having the entire business community and other major institutions all fall in line with his dictatorial, manic directives. He would like to do this as he attempted to do in his first administration and his business life, benefiting him personally and his business enterprise, first and foremost. He is our 21st century music man, and yes, it can happen here.

If you think about it and understand the drivers of the Power Elite Deep State as Good outlines them in this book, Trump’s motivations are no different than those of the Deep State — absolute power and control. He wants to build a system that benefits him and his interests alone and bring along enabling sycophants that have kissed and are kissing his ring. The difference is that Trump actually speaks directly to the populace and convinces (some of) them that he is working for them. Also, Trump and Trumpism, and the current Republican party, are attempting to “rig the system” to ensure both fealty to Trump and his Republican supporters, but eliminating the liberal movement and Democratic party from all realms of governmental and institutional power through anti-democratic means. The actual Deep State uses other types of myth making and propaganda messaging to assuage the mass public.

Trump has convinced his cult-like followers that he is the King Cyrus that will set them free from the grasp of the all-controlling Deep State. If Trump were to be re-elected, and pull off his 2025 purge plan, he would indeed send a major shot across the bow of the Deep State and the resulting conflict would be much much greater than what he encountered in his first administration, or what Good describes was the conflict and fallout for the Watergate scandals. As conservative writer Bill Kristol tweeted in Trump’s first administration, “Go Deep State” (in stopping him).

As the saying goes, “he ain’t seen nuthin yet” when it comes to Deep State power. But, historically speaking, Trump is in fact the greatest threat to Deep State power since Nixon and John F. Kennedy, both of whom were removed from power by the Deep State. This is part of his appeal, he is a “fighter”. “If not him, then who?” I am often asked. What am I defending in my opposition to Trump? I am asked.

Trump should get partial credit for this — he is willing to take it all on, at least performatively and most theatrically, burning down the entire system to defeat all enemies of… him! His cure is much much worse than the disease, is the answer that most thinking Americans have arrived at. But, like in 1860, it seems that the American project is just going to have to agree to disagree and get it on. Whether Trump runs again or wins, the energy and passion and hatred of the system and its elites will remain, and this passion is likely to be exploited by a smarter and more dangerous version of Trump because the system has not magically changed.

As happened during the Nixon Administration culminating in the Watergate scandal, Good’s “Prussians” and “Traders” of the Deep State are quite split and at war on Trump and Trumpism, and this split shows up in the major political polarization in the US population and business community, along with the implosion of the current Republican Party, which Trump has taken control of.

Some of them would benefit by Trump returning to power and some would lose. What they do not want, however, as most Americans do not want, is having an ego-maniac dictator and his sycophant red-hats replacing them as the decider for the direction of the public and national security state of the American Empire. This would be American Nazism redux, 21st century style. The irony of course is how the early American Deep State, at its beginnings at the end of WWII, did all it could do to incorporate the actual German Nazis into the national security state and incorporated their methods into our very own operations (including the Valkyrie plans to overthrow Hitler, which the CIA studied and likely used at Dealey Plaza (redirected domestically, instead of aimed at Castro and Cuba) but conveniently could never reproduce any documents of this analysis).

Has the Deep State run its course? Is it still as cohesive and active now as during the 20th century and early 21st century? Is the American Century over? What is the 2022 role of the Deep State in affecting and dealing with Trumpism and the ongoing societal fracturing and crack-up in the US as well as the international challenges to American hegemony?

Some political science and economic historians such as Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century — Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times) as well as billionaire investment advisors such as Ray Dalio (The Changing World Order — Why Nations Succeed and Fail), or even Integral philosophy leader Robb Smith with his (The Great Release) have studied history and written that Empires come and go in cycles, and that these cycles have leading structural and social indicators that can be monitored and measured and are predictable over time. Namely, they argue that the end of the American Century and Empire is both predictable and measurable and is already well underway.

Whether or not the “American Century” gets extended, and in what form, will depend on the very personal decisions that will be made by Americans at all levels of our society. Good closes his book with a haunting quote from Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, which is not optimistic, then lists a few of the what-can-we-do prescriptions which include:

- Use the state’s justice system to “uphold the law and prosecute the perpetrators of state crimes against democracy”

- Implement the Nader-Phillips book and appeal to the Rich to save us

- Reform the policy of state secrecy

- Encourage whistleblowers to come forward, under the umbrella of a Truth and Reconciliation project (where to begin?!) — e.g. Wikileaks, Ed Snowden

- Peter Dale Scott’s “visionary realism” — strengthen civil society, organize to address income inequality, reform the US electoral process, reform drug laws.

- Change will occur and be a forcing action for the US state when other nations (Russia, China, India?) leave or “escape the orbit of US Imperialism.”

I would add implement system wide reforms. Make changes in the governing environment that remove the altered incentives that have contributed to the economic power elite capturing the governing political class. In 2015, former MD governor and presidential candidate Martin O’Malley said it was either reform or pitchforks. We now have the pitchforks. There is still time for reform, only the political will and courage is missing.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has/had an extensive plan for reform. There is broad consensus that the corruption of our system is the result of the incentives for the allocation of money, which of course the conservative Supreme Court has ruled that money is political speech and corruption is only a quid quo pro transaction, and not systemic. This thinking has evolved for the worse, and is at odds with our founders conception of corruption, as documented by Zephyr Teachout. There are many NGOs focused in this area, a particularly good one that has made some progress at the local level is Represent Us.

It is our choice to make. We must make it personal. Understanding Aaron Good’s American Exception, speaking the historical truths contained within it to ourselves then each other, would be a good start. With truth AND reconciliation, we may then begin to speak truth to power and then and only then bring about the changes benefiting “We the People” vs only the Deep State, Guardian Elite.

I recommend this book to all students of history, political science and leaders in business and government.