The Deep State (3 page)

McLean is also desirable real estate for executive-level contractor personnel, whose work is ostensibly the technocratic administration of national security programs, but who in practice constitute part of a distinctive American political class. All of these people—politicians, their handlers, lobbyists, contractors—are much the same as the political “new class” that Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Djilas wrote about in 1957 when he described the rising Communist Party bureaucracy as a clique of self-interested strivers who had become a privileged bureaucracy that enjoyed great material benefits from their positions. The pillars of Beltwayland's establishment, the squirearchy of McLean, often make their living denouncing the evil ways of Washington. So it is that former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan periodically issues jeremiads bemoaning the fate of Western civilization and the white working class from his manse in McLean.

A bit further north and back across the Potomac River from McLean lies the similarly well heeled commuter dormitory of Potomac, Maryland. It is politically more evenly divided than McLean, with roughly equal parts Democrats and Republicans, but the social dynamic remains much the same. Both suburbs are the residential headquarters of the nouveau riche class of political operatives, lobbyists, and contractors who do well by doing good—for their clients and shareholders, if not the country.

Across Beltwayland, similar communities of political interest have managed to coalesce, from deep blue Takoma Park in the Maryland suburbs, which still declares itself a nuclear-free zone, to the deep scarlet developments of McMansions in Loudoun County, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Loudoun is now the richest county per capita in the country. To the east of Washington lies Prince George's County, the
richest county per capita in the country with a majority black population. It is usually considered impolitic to point this out, but Prince George's County might as well be Vladivostok as far as the prime operators of the Beltway rackets are concerned. It is too facile to ascribe this merely to racism, as Washington's political classes tend to be oblivious to anything that dwells outside the template of their own careerism. Muncie, Indiana, is not much on their radar screen, either.

The McMansion as Symbol of the Deep State

My own neighborhood lies near the Potomac River five miles south of Alexandria, Virginia, and it is symptomatic both of the economics of Greater Washington and of its association with the military. Its eponym is Fort Hunt, a former military facility that played a key cameo role in World War II and the early cold war. During the war it served as the secret interrogation center for captured U-boat officers (and was known only as Post Office Box 1142), and during a brief period immediately after the war it was a holding pen for important German military and civilian personnel who preferred to give themselves up to the U.S. Army rather than submit to the tender mercies of the Soviets. Wernher von Braun, the father of the all-American space program,
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and General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence whose hyperbolic estimates of Soviet forces helped mentor his American counterparts in the art of threat inflation, were both guests of the facility.

Fort Hunt is one of the innumerable current and former bases, forts, and other military properties that dot the D.C. metro area. I do hate to
sound flippantly critical of my neighborhood—it is actually idyllic in the old-fashioned manner. There are ice cream trucks in the summer, local parades on the Fourth of July, and so forth. It's almost like the anachronistic town in the
Twilight Zone
episode in which the harried executive imagines going back to the warm, friendly community of his youth. But looks can be deceiving. These days you can hardly throw a brick in the Fort Hunt neighborhood without hitting a retired army colonel or navy captain. It is so dependent on government spending that if the Treasury collapsed tomorrow, grass would be growing in the streets within a few weeks. There is also a high percentage of intact, two-parent households in Fort Hunt, which is undeniably a good thing. Those who bray about “family values” and “traditional mores” fail to consider that the modern American economy is increasingly unable to deliver the stable, well-paid jobs, medical insurance, and family leave that make such a way of life possible. Ironically, the despised federal government is one of the remaining employment sources supporting the family structures that conservatives claim to uphold. The neighborhood, with its 1950s split-levels, is as relentlessly middle class as
Leave It to Beaver
's fictional town of Mayfield, but a mile or so north, closer to the Potomac views, the better-heeled new class is taking root.

The properties there were allotted in the 1920s, and a surprising number of the houses are quite modest in scale. Or were, a few years ago: one by one, they are being razed. In their place have arisen the stereotypical McMansions that have irrupted across the country in eczematous patches ever since the savings and loan deregulation of the early 1980s. The structures resemble the architecture of the Loire Valley, Elizabethan England, or Renaissance Tuscany as imagined by Walt Disney. As with McMansions everywhere, the new owners could have gotten a much sounder design for the same price or less, but they prefer the turrets, portecochères, and ill-proportioned Palladian windows that they bought, and they accent the whole monstrous ensemble with the obligatory Range Rover in the driveway.

It tells one something about the raw, nouveau riche tastes of the
contractors, lobbyists, and corporate lawyers who make up the New Class that they seem to possess a demonic lust to make whole neighborhoods gauche and hideous. They are like Shelley's Ozymandias proclaiming “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The bloated, sprawling tastelessness of their dwellings is commensurate with the metastasizing growth in and around Washington of the Deep State's own facilities: elephantine structures, raw and uncompromising in their ugliness.

Within a week of my arrival in Washington back in 1983, the landlord of my basement apartment on Maryland Avenue told me, “Democrats live in Maryland, Republicans live in Virginia.” The reality at present is a bit more complex, but it remains broadly true. In his 2004 book
The Big Sort:
Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart,
Bill Bishop theorized that in the last thirty years or so, Americans have been sorting themselves into homogeneous communities: people will choose the neighborhood that best fits their beliefs and lifestyle politics.

A 2014 Pew poll concurred, finding both heightened levels of ideological polarization and increasingly different lifestyle choices based on political identification.
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Another survey found that even consumer brand preference has become ideological, whether the choice is cars or laundry detergents.
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Beltwayland, which makes its living from the care and feeding of contending political cultures in addition to housing the growing contingent of contractors and fixers that the Deep State produces, is Bishop's “big sort” in microcosm—but with increased ideological intensity and heightened stakes for our national future.

Empires Don't Run on Autopilot

Beltwayland contains other peculiarities as a result of being the capital of the sole remaining superpower. Many novels and insider exposés of Washington feature, as a kind of isn't-this-decadent-and-aren't-you-envious bit of authorial conceit, the lavish soirees of Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and points in between as an ironic counterpoint to the rest of America sinking into postindustrial squalor. According to this trope, Alan
Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Colin Powell, Sally Quinn, and all the other players of the game seem to exist on truffles, smoked salmon, and Dom Pérignon; that is, when they're not forming a conga line in the back garden of some stately Georgetown mansion. There may be some truth to that picture, but not a lot.

One will notice that most of the characters in these sybaritic sagas of Washington are either elderly, turfed out of their former positions of power, or in the fortunate position of having subordinates do the actual work. A global empire does not run itself. Imperial administrators are too busy to dance in conga lines; that is a job for aging administrators emeriti, or for appointed figureheads who are the mouthpieces of the administrative bureaucracy. With respect to socializing, Washington is actually a dead boring town—there is just too much work to do (granted, some of it is make-work). I have called some of the D.C. suburbs commuter dormitories, for that is what they truly are. With the possible exception of Zürich, I have never seen any “international” city where people go to bed so early. In many of the quieter suburbs, you could fire an artillery piece down the street after sunset and not hit anyone. Why?

In many agencies, the mania for the 7
A
.
M
. or 8
A
.
M.
staff meeting prevails; this practice may derive by osmosis from the heavy presence in Washington of the armed forces and their early-morning work routines. And while the House and Senate have much more relaxed starting times for their official sessions (which can, however, stretch far into the night), before the session, members of Congress are usually attending working breakfasts (which may be fund-raisers) or giving speeches. Who on earth wants to go see a politician speak at 8
A
.
M
.? You do, if you are a lobbyist who needs to be seen there. It is quite the opposite of the atmosphere in imperial Britain described by author Len Deighton: even in 1940, at a time of the greatest peril in the country's history, it was difficult to find anybody at the Foreign Office before eleven in the morning. The contrast between the two cultures is the difference between the languid self-confidence of aristocracy and the anxiety and elbows-out eager-beaverism of the rising careerist class.

It is perhaps these work schedules, combined with the self-important workaholic's sense that anything other than his career is a waste of time, that account for Beltwayland's having a social tenor that combines Puritan Salem with Moscow during the Stakhanovite era of the Soviet Union. All the great intellectual capitals of the past had their playful, bohemian side requiring more or less frivolous socializing: the salons of Paris, the cafés of Vienna, Bloomsbury London. While FDR's Brain Trust and Kennedy's New Frontiersmen were reputed to have kept up a semblance of this attitude, those days are long gone and whatever extracurricular socializing I encountered at the beginning of my career was pretty much extinguished by the time of its conclusion.

The reasons for this may have something to do with the triumph of the ideologue and his killjoy spirit, but are almost certainly related to the rise of more or less obligatory “events”—fund-raisers and receptions in honor of this or that bogus person, program, or cause. These affairs, which mingle the tedium of work with the unease and frozen embarrassment of awkward social engagements, have, by sucking up the time that would otherwise be devoted to informal mingling with friends and colleagues, effectively killed private socializing.

Hollywood for Ugly People

Other than possibly Manhattan, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, there is no other large concentration of people in the United States with as high a quotient of careerist strivers as in Beltwayland. It is said that “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people,” and Beltwayland has its own peculiar celebrity culture in a kind of parody of Hollywood. The inside-the-Beltway newspaper
Politico
is the town's version of TMZ, and it reports on the area's political sham celebrities with the same kind of guileless gush and gossipy dishing that would have given Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons a run for their money in the old days of the Hollywood studio system.
Politico
has always been good at the small stuff: If Harry Reid said something snarky about Ted Cruz, or vice versa, it is certain to be the
day's headline. But in dealing with major legislation or matters of war and peace, not so much.

The higher purpose of
Politico
is to help Beltway denizens maintain the illusion that the bubble they live in is the only reality. And just as a visitor to the Los Angeles Basin will notice that he is in a kind of city-state, cut off from the rest of the country and possessing no geographic center, an alert observer will detect the same dynamic in Beltwayland: a diffuse megalopolis no longer centered on an urban core, possessing rhythms separate and distinct from ordinary national life, and obsessed with the presentation of image.

For different types of celebrity, there are different accoutrements. The social movers and shakers of Hollywood and New York have their own styles, but these do not translate well to their counterparts within the Beltway. However gauche and gaudy they may be at home (and as we have seen, their private homes often exhibit what H. L. Mencken called “a libido for the ugly”), the personnel of the Beltway have to tone it down at work. An Armani suit would never do; it is important that one look the part of a sober servant of the people, or humble petitioner of a servant of the people,
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even if the only people one is serving are plutocrats. Therefore, Brooks Brothers or Nordstrom will do just fine: they are as much a civilian uniform as the Class A Service Dress that generals and admirals wear when they testify on Capitol Hill.

One does occasionally see a lobbyist in an ostentatiously expensive suit and decked out with a Rolex or other such vulgar finery. This is, however, the exception, because those he is lobbying, with their high-status and objectively quite powerful but (relatively) low-paying jobs do not like to be reminded of their comparative penury; a gross difference in material status objectifies the bottom line a little too explicitly and hints uncomfortably at the quid pro quo between the lobbyist and the lobbied. It
likewise raises the question as to whether the lobbyist's clients are receiving the best return on their investment.