Deep State
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Thoughts on Inauguration Day
So it's done. The clown prince sits in his throne and delusion now reigns supreme. But this is not an aberration; it's a dark apotheosis, the culmination of trends in America that go back to WWII and then accelerated after Nixon. It's a culmination in the sense that it brings to its absurd telos the delusional logic of the
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Trump v. Deep State
For years now I've argued here that in several important respects it doesn't matter whom we elect president. Politicians come and go and with them their appointees, but the Deep State bureaucrats remain entrenched. And while there's something scary and undemocratic about that, it's also stabilizing and perhaps a cause for optimism in destabilizing times like these. Now that Trump
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The Torture Report (Updated)
From an interview with Glen Greenwald: The more you look at just how many people and institutions were involved (either actively or by looking the other way) — the doctors, the psychiatrists, the media, members of Congress — the more it starts to sound like a society-wide failure. It reminds me of what Arendt wrote
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Deep State 2
The concept of the deep state has a variety of overlapping meanings, and a long heritage within historical and political analyses of famously top-heavy states like Turkey and Egypt, where powerful entrenched bureaucracies have subverted democracy or ignored it altogether. In the current American context, journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady have used it to designate the
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The Deep State
I've said in a recent post that the Tea Party is right to be angry but wrong because it channels that anger in unconstructive ways. Last night on Moyers and Company, Moyers interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer, who explains why. He's coined the term the "Deep State", and describes more precisely and
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The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part II
"To dare is to temporarily lose one's footing; Not to dare is to lose one's self." "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." –Soren Kierkegaard