The Deep State: Imaginary, or Something Real?

Above: Richard Nixon announces his resignation from the Presidency, August 8 1974.

2/16/26

(Intro: I hope to take up more active posting in the days ahead, now that the book is nearing final form and publishing. )

Enunciating the Hot Philosophy necessarily implies taking positions on public policy topics---often a fairly boring if necessary subject. But some fraught historical issues are interesting and worth comment.

Policy is the exercise of controlling-faction preference, but also the exercise of pure power; struggles over it reflect factional strife and contest. Those factions may be Washington-based players and insiders, feathering their nests, or trying to, or attempting to protect their turf and fiefs; or there may be grand-scale public-preference questions at play. In our form of democratic republic the dynamic is a dialogue, between the public's concerns, expressed through voting preferences and outcomes, and assorted power-players and intellectuals. Herein, my post reviewing an important article by author Chris Bray at thefederalist.com, on Nixon's putative paranoia---as presented at the Nixon library itself, which buys into dominant official interpretations of Nixon's presidency.

At the linked piece Bray reviews evidence that the Deep State (a term referring to invisible cabals shaping policy outcomes in Washington) not only remains real; Bray reminds us the Deep State has been real for decades, going back at least to the "Colonel's Revolt" under Ike---part of a larger, ongoing struggle for supremacy in defense planning and budget allocation during the early Cold War. Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders warned us against the threat of standing armies. War is big money, as General Butler warned us decades ago; it's now huge money even in (mostly) peacetime conditions in the USA; struggles for political power can mean access to advantage, policy control, and crucially: direct taxpayer dollars: by the millions, or billions.

Follow the money, advised Watergate's Deep Throat, an FBI spook named Mark Felt, whose rather complex motives for ratting out the White House included resentment at Nixon for being passed over for the top FBI job, after J. Edgar Hoover died in office. Behind policy fights may lie ideological tilt---or just the lure of power, and filthy lucre.

Bray reminds us to remember the congressional testimonies of Alexander Lindman and Fiona Hill in Trump's first term, wherein these bureaucrats chided the sitting President for contesting bureaucracy-approved policies---an agenda leading to the wholly-partisan first-impeachment move against Trump by Democrats in Congress. (I agree with the great Andrew McCarthy, one of our finest constitutional attorneys and analysts, that the extreme move of impeachment should be reserved only against true deeply compromised presidents, where bipartisan revulsion prevails---a condition completely absent in the Trump impeachment theater by the Democrats; of course one might observe this could be considered payback and tit-for-tat, for the GOP's largely un-bipartisan impeachment attempt vs Bill Clinton in late 1998.)

The Deep State remains real, and has been real for decades. Bray reviews a New York times article on subterfuge by Pentagon brass and agents against Nixon. This leads me to repeat a previous judgment I (and others, such as the great Conrad Black) have made, namely that the official media and historical narrative about Watergate needs revision. Nixon didn't even know about the Watergate break in. The coverup of the break in became a small burr-under-the-saddle that blew up into a national obsession thanks to the Kennedy-insider/quasi-sychophant and Nixon-hater Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post. Nixon's historical landslide win vs George McGovern in 1972 was irrelevant to the deep state and media faction that wanted him out.

It's a moment in American history where the power glove visibly changes hands, due primarily to media narrative control. The Deep State is really nothing more than identifiable and discrete power factions---which we were warned about already in 1787 by James Madison in the Federalist #10.

As Chapter 6 of The Ass of the Apes teaches: power lust, the lure of big power, can turn men (and women) into potentially murderous beasts.

Link to Bray's Federalist piece is here: https://thefederalist.com/2026/02/13/the-nixon-library-is-wrong-about-nixon-and-the-deep-state/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-nixon-library-is-wrong-about-nixon-and-the-deep-state&utm_term=2026-02-16