Three Cheers for the Deep State

The deep state, according to Trump and Netanyahu, consists of the unelected bureaucrats, judges, military and security personnel and other government officials whose employment does not depend on their political affiliation. These mandarins,  Trump and now Bibi contend, often block or disrupt the programs and plans of elected officials. They are thus, so is the claim, the enemies of democracy –the very opposite of democracy

Yet without the deep state, governance itself would be well nigh impossible. If everything changed every time a new president or prime minister was elected, governments could accomplish nothing. Long term planning, the justice system, the health system, social security, support for scientific research, for environmental protection and for infrastructure,–all of these require stability. They need institutional integrity. In short, they require the deep state. 

The organization I founded and direct works in Zambia, and the Zambian government is interested in promoting our model for transforming livelihood and food security in impoverished rural villages, where 75% of the population lives. They want us to replicate our program and are now offering us serious help to do so. But there are elections in Zambia in another year and a half, so I felt I had to ask: What if the President loses and a new administration takes charge? Will the help being offered disappear? No, I was reassured, it won’t. Because although the heads of the various ministries are from the ruling coalition, the bureaucrats and planners are not. The plans they make and the agreements they sign won’t suddenly be reversed because another party took power.

Examples such as this one are only the beginning. What if the judges, the army and the police, the hard core power of the state–its monopoly on violence–became tools of particular political factions (which, at least in the case of the police, seems to be in danger of occurring right before our eyes in Israel)? Having spent some time in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Mengistu’s Ethiopia, and the military junta’s Myanmar, I can tell you what happens. And I can assure you that the difference between an authoritarian government and an imperfect democracy is night and day. When there is no deep state, no institutions formed and protected through the rule of law, the police may well knock on your door in the middle of the night and you or a loved one will never be seen again. 

Netanyahu knows this. In 2010 he famously said, and I quote, “the existence of a strong and independent justice system is what allows for all the other institutions in a democracy to exist. Show me one dictatorship, one single non-democratic society, in which there is a strong and independent justice system.” 

In their classic book, “Why Nations Fail”, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson convincingly argue that the difference between failed states and thriving democracies is in the integrity of their institutions –exactly what Bibi and Trump call “the deep state.” Even beyond rule of law, the institutions of a nation, built layer upon layer over the course of generations, define the national culture. I’ve often been critical of the United States, in particular of its corporate based global economic policies. I don’t often go around waving the American flag. But in Mengistu’s Ethiopia, in 1990 to 91, my heart swelled with pride at being an American when I witnessed the dignity and caring, the fairness and integrity of the United States charge d’affaires, (the equivalent of an ambassador when relations between countries are not fully established) Robert Houdek. He wasn’t elected and he wasn’t a political appointee. He was a long term public servant, who had risen in the ranks because he embodied the best of the United States’ ethos. 

How true this once was in Israel as well. Even more delicate than merely the rule of law is the balance between Jewish and universal ethics, between the warmth of the shtetl whether it be the Polish or Moroccan one, and the commitment to professionalism that many Israeli public servants still retain. In attacking the “deep state”, Netanyahu knows exactly what he is doing: separating democracy from its deep foundations, from the gravitational pull of its founding ethos in order to create an authoritarian state unmoored from its ballast. Netanyahu knows that without its depth dimension, democracy will dry up and blow away.