On 25 March 2023, Donald Trump told a campaign rally in Texas that the next presidential election would be a final battle with “demonic forces”. Voters had a choice: “The deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.” Since Trump won the 2024 election, Elon Musk and his youthful minions have been given free rein to fire up their chainsaws and chase “deep state” phantoms through the corridors of power, tearing down the real-life administrative state as they go. But whether the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) can defeat the demonic forces seems doubtful: on 24 February, Musk tweeted, “The deep state is everywhere.” This is a way of thinking about government that owes more to The Matrix than it does to reasonable complaints about overreach, overspending or overly dominant orthodoxy.
So what are the roots of this strange, amorphous idea? What’s happening in Washington is extreme, but it’s not simply an aberration. The crusade against the deep state draws not only on Americans’ ever-increasing distrust of government but on enduring images of hidden, nefarious state power.
Fear of tyranny is embedded in America’s origin story. The Declaration of Independence justified revolution by accusing George III of a plot to impose “absolute despotism” on the colonists. But when the British left, the spectre lingered, at least on the extremes. John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, shouting that the Great Emancipator was a tyrant. In the early 20th century, Henry Ford did much to promote the fake claim that a secret Jewish cabal was plotting a world dictatorship.
Meanwhile, as the federal government expanded in response to global conflict, large numbers of dissenting Americans began to spy incipient state oppression – with rather more justification than Booth or Ford. During the First World War, dissidents found themselves menaced by what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation under, first, the 1917 Espionage Act, then the 1918 Sedition Act, which made criticising the government illegal. But it was after the Second World War that what we now think of as the “deep state” really began to take shape in the imagination, on the left and right alike.
During the New Deal of the 1930s, many on the left had cheered the growth of government. But when the Cold War sparked the McCarthyite hunt for crypto-communists, the state began to seem an implacable, sinister force. In 1947, the National Security Act created both the CIA – America’s first peacetime foreign espionage organisation – and the National Security Agency: a small, secretive group, entrenched deep inside the executive branch. In his 1956 study The Power Elite, the left-wing sociologist C Wright Mills scorned the dominant notion that American politics was an elegant balance of interests. Rather, he argued, corporations, the military and politicians were working in cahoots to concentrate power in unseen rooms, sucking the life out of democracy.
At the same time, elements on the right that had once seen tyranny in the New Deal now cast attempts at racially integrating schools as the merciless advance of liberal dictatorship. In The Invisible Government (1962), a far-right proto-shock jock called Dan Smoot wrote ominously of the terrifying power of the Council on Foreign Relations, and its “amazing web” of allied bodies and supportive corporations. The book went on to become one of the canonical texts of the John Birch Society, the most visible of the radical-right groups that sprang up in post-war America, with perhaps 100,000 members. Its paranoias went well beyond simple anti-communism: its founder preached that “the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal”. Previously, the term “the invisible government” had been used by progressives to call out corrupt corporate influence over politics. But Smoot repurposed it to denounce a conspiracy of globalist schemers, plotting to absorb the US into a “one-world socialist system”.
Smoot and Mills – who were once classmates in Texas – shared a suspicion of the power of the centralised state, but where Smoot’s work was conspiracist, Mills relied on scholarly research. He stressed he was attacking a mindset rather than a plot. For the moment, this was the more mainstream critique of overly centralised power. Mills’ ideas influenced President Eisenhower’s speechwriter, a political scientist called Malcolm Moos – and so helped to shape Ike’s warning about the power of the “military-industrial complex”. This, too, was a reasoned analysis, querying the defence industry’s cosy relationship with the Pentagon. And for the moment, a majority of Americans still broadly trusted government. Polling in 1964 suggested that less than a third of them thought government was “run for the benefit of a few big interests”.
But within four years, that figure had leapt to 40 per cent – and two years later, to 50 per cent. As Bill Bishop put it in his study of polarisation, The Big Sort, “people came to believe that government was run by the few”. One reason was surely the public’s creeping sense that it was being misled about what was happening in Vietnam. And by 1967, this distrust was fusing with that other great trauma of the day: the assassination of President Kennedy. The lone-gunman theory had always seemed too convenient: the invincible elite was surely not so vulnerable. Some element within the elite itself must have been behind it. Kennedy, the theory went, had been killed because he had wanted to stop the war. And so, as with “invisible government”, the label “military-industrial complex” was peeled away from the reasoned critique it originally denoted, and was used instead to signify an all-powerful, invisible, evil group somewhere in the heart of government capable of killing even the commander-in-chief if he stepped out of line.
Quite how compelling this imagery can be is illuminated by the story of a hoax, which appeared at exactly this moment. All that rising distrust was a gift to satirists keen to send up the administration’s dodgy logic. Specifically, a group of writers associated with a magazine called Monocle – a hyper-sophisticated New York quarterly that had helped to pioneer the “satire boom” a few years earlier.
To send up America’s addiction to military spending, the Monocle team, led by editor Victor Navasky, hired a writer called Leonard Lewin, who concocted what purported to be a leaked, top-secret government research paper. It would warn the government that if permanent global peace broke out, it would wreck the American economy, and even society as a whole. This was published in 1967 as though it were genuine, as the “Report from Iron Mountain”. The hoax “revealed” the real reason the state was perpetuating the war: to allow it to keep control over the population.
To ram home its satirical point, the report suggested that in the absence of conflict, Washington would have to find horrific, alternative ways to maintain its grip. Without military discipline controlling young men, there would need to be “blood games” and a “sophisticated form of slavery”. Without war to curb the population, the government might need to turn to eugenics. And without the fear of nuclear Armageddon, conformity would have to be enforced through another terrifying threat, perhaps “gross pollution of the environment” (although, as things stood, this was not yet severe enough to be tenable).
The report was convincing enough to cause a sensation. The New York Times broke the story on its front page; it soon appeared on the paper’s bestseller list. One newspaper called it “The hoax that shook the White House”. The report’s creators kept quiet; this was exactly the impact they’d dreamed of. If such a document was, just possibly, genuine, people asked, what did that say about how state power was being misused? Lewin did not publicly admit that he was the real author of the report until 1972.
The satirists picked their moment well. With the reforms of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programme, 1967 marked the last hurrah of the confident, optimistic era of big, high-spending government, turbocharged by the long postwar boom. But then it sputtered to a halt. Alongside defeat in Vietnam, the stagflation of the 1970s challenged the postwar dream that efficient government technocrats could run the economy and society to everyone’s benefit.
Yet somehow, even as the fortunes of the real state soured, the notion of the sinister power elite soared. The Watergate scandal broke President Nixon – but it also fostered the idea that large, nefarious forces were at work. Congressional inquiries exposed the illegal schemes of the secret state: the FBI’s attempts to destabilise the radical left, the CIA’s horrifying efforts to master “brainwashing”. These revelations humiliated the agencies involved, yet confirmed their sinister power. No wonder that in 1980, the proportion of Americans who told pollsters they thought government was “run for the benefit of a few big interests” hit 70 per cent. Or that so many Americans voted, that same year, for a president who declared that “government is the problem”.
In 1991, with the Cold War breathing its last, Oliver Stone’s movie JFK triumphantly resurrected the spectre of the “military-industrial complex” as a shadowy cabal plotting the murder of the president in a smoky backroom. In the movie’s central scene, a mysterious renegade insider known only as Mr X reveals that the assassination was organised to ensure the war in Vietnam continued, because the “authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers”. And the source for this horrifying revelation? “Report from Iron Mountain”, the satirical hoax of 24 years before. The real-life figure on whom Mr X was based, an ex-Pentagon official turned conspiracy theorist, was convinced the report was real.
At the same time, the report’s references to shadowy cabals were spreading through the far right, with its satirical exaggeration mistaken as reality. In 1990 it transpired that an extreme-right press had republished the report, on the basis that it was a real government document (and therefore not subject to copyright). Leonard Lewin was horrified and successfully sued to stop them. But in 1995, it emerged that it had become a bible of the emerging militia movement, for whom it revealed the sinister intent lurking in the Clinton administration. The publisher of an Arkansas newsletter called “Patriot Report” told the New York Times: “It shows that there is a conspiracy against the citizens.”
Victor Navasky revealed the full story of the hoax’s creation, both in the magazine he edited, the Nation, and in an introduction to a new, legitimate, edition of the report. But many simply refused to believe it. The report was even cited repeatedly as “evidence” that moves to promote environmentalism were a conspiracy to tyrannise Americans. The argument ran like this. In 1967, “Report from Iron Mountain” had suggested that in “a generation and a half”, it might be possible to replace the threat of nuclear war with “gross pollution”. And now, in the 1990s, the Cold War nuclear stand-off was over – and lo and behold, the global elite was promoting environmentalism. Could this really be a coincidence? With the help of a feature-length “documentary” put together in 1993 by a retired pilot, Iron Mountain: Blueprint for Tyranny, this theory, founded on a hoax, would continue to circulate for decades.
One reason such imaginings are so tenacious, of course, is that they have some basis in reality. Ever since Reagan’s “government is the problem” reforms of the 1980s, economic power has been pulled ever further away from ordinary Americans, into the hands of huge, monopolistic corporations. In the wake of the 2008 crash, with its foreclosures and state bailouts for the banks responsible, this has become a serious political issue. At the same time, the US national security state was expanding its reach, even as more mundane national infrastructure was allowed to rot.
In 2016 a book appeared that attempted to do what Mills had once done in The Power Elite, and chart this new concentration of power. The Deep State was written by Mike Lofgren, who had served as a staffer on Capitol Hill for 28 years, latterly as a senior analyst on the House and Senate budget committees. He had grown increasingly horrified by the “fantasy math” of the Iraq War and the “sausage making” of the post-crash Troubled Asset Relief Program. He’d been an Eisenhower-style Republican, but resigned from the party in despair.
Lofgren reportedly sourced the phrase “deep state” from the British spy novelist John le Carré, who used it in 2013 in A Delicate Truth to describe the way the privatisation of elements of the British security state had taken them beyond the reach of democratic scrutiny. The term had earlier roots in Turkey, where it had been used to describe the military’s influence over democratically elected governments. But Lofgren expanded its scope beyond the defence industry and the government, to encompass financial institutions and Silicon Valley; this hidden “hybrid entity” was “ruling the country… tethered to but only intermittently controlled by the visible state whose leaders we nominally choose”.
Like Mills, Lofgren insisted his analysis was “not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal”. But as a meme, “deep state” chimes all too well with that abiding image of an all-powerful, invisible, evil group, somewhere in the heart of government. Just like “invisible government”, “power elite” and “military-industrial complex”, it began as a reasonable attempt to challenge the concentration of power, but was soon co-opted to feed the perennial fear.
Trump seized on the idea of the “deep state” to attack those involved in the investigations of his conduct, or his connections with Russia, while his associates refocused the idea to target the civil servants running the US’s many federal agencies. And now here we are, with the drive to destroy the deep state threatening to break big parts of America’s actual state.
Yet even with the deep state’s professed nemeses finally in power, it seems unlikely that Americans will ever believe the phantom has been driven out. After all, fear of the deep state is as old as modern American government itself. It’s hard to see any way out of the vicious cycle that has shaped American politics for decades now – state failure provoking popular rage, and the election of leaders sworn to weaken government still further. The horrible irony is that this leaves significant sources of ordinary Americans’ feelings of disempowerment – from stagnant pay to healthcare corporations – largely untouched.
Perhaps there might finally come a point when the damage to real government services and jobs has hit those same Americans so hard that enough of them begin to consider that maybe government wasn’t their greatest problem after all. If that happens, the boiling rage that has coursed through US politics ever since the crash might be redirected. And Americans may come to conclude that the state has its uses – not least as a guardian against chainsaw-wielding billionaires.
Phil Tinline’s book “Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax that Duped America and its Sinister Legacy” is published by Head of Zeus
[See also: The godfather of the Maga right]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?