The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson— and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W. W. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson’s fight with the Bank of the United States — only on a far bigger and broader basis.  — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Letter to Col. Edward Mandell House (21 November 1933); as quoted in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, edited by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), pg. 373

Although the term the deep state (also described as the invisible government, or the secret government) has only gained widespread usage in recent years, the concept of double or dual governments is almost as old as the republic itself.

One of my all-time favorite books is the extremely rare 1934 volume by John McConaughy, Who Rules America?: A Century of Invisible Government, (published the same year as Albert Jay Nock’s seminal Our Enemy, The State).

Author McConaughy states:

‘Invisible Government’ is a phrase for which it would be difficult to formulate a dictionary definition without sacrifice of accuracy to brevity. It may perhaps be best described as the political and economic control of the community — or the political control for selfish, if not sinister, economic purposes — by individual men, or groups or organizations, who are careful to evade the responsibility which should always accompany power. They operate behind a mask or puppets in politics and business, and these must take the blame in courts of law, and before the bar of public opinion, for any errors in the technique of knavery.

McConaughy then impiously rips the masks off our elitist ‘Funding Fathers’ and their ‘invisible government’ for special privilege.

In what is one of the finest and most powerful histories of the early years of the American state, he demonstrates that the adoption of the Constitution amounted to a coup d’etat by these forces of ‘invisible government’.

Although the names and faces have changed over time, this is the same predatory plutocracy behind the Federal Reserve’s monetary meltdown and the Wall Street bankster bailouts, as well as Dwight Eisenhower’s military industrial complex and its related clandestine national security intelligence community apparat.

In 1964, shortly after the JFK assassination, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross wrote the first definitive examination of the Central Intelligence Agency, The Invisible Government, which was a major best-seller

In the opening of their expose’ they observed:

THERE ARE two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.

The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War.

This second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe.

The Invisible Government is not a formal body. It is a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government. It is not limited to the Central Intelligence Agency, although the CIA is at its heart. Nor is it confined to the nine other agencies which comprise what is known as the intelligence community: the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Invisible Government includes, also, many other units and agencies, as well as individuals, that appear outwardly to be a normal part of the conventional government. It even encompasses business firms and institutions that are seemingly private.

To an extent that is only beginning to be perceived, this shadow government is shaping the lives of 190,000,000 Americans. Major decisions involving peace or war are taking place out of public view. An informed citizen might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction.

This Invisible Government is a relatively new institution. It came into being as a result of two related factors: the rise of the United States after World War II to a position of pre-eminent world power, and the challenge to that power by Soviet Communism.

Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, edited by Eric Wilson, analyses the concept of clandestine government. It explores how covert political activity and transnational organised crime are linked — and how they ultimately work to the advantage of state and corporate power. The book shows that legitimate government is now routinely accompanied by extra-governmental covert operations. Using a variety of case studies, from the mafia in Italy to programs for food and reconstruction in Iraq, the contributors illustrate that para-political structures are not ‘deviant’, but central to the operation of global governments.

In particular see the chapter, “Democratic State vs. Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West ,” by Ola Tunander, which observes:

 In a 1955 study of the United States State Department, Hans Morgenthau discussed the existence of a US ‘dual state’.1

According to Morgenthau, the US state includes both a ‘regular state hierarchy’ that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden ‘security hierarchy’ – which I will refer to here as the ‘security state’ (also known in some countries as the ‘deep state’)2 – that not only acts in parallel to the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. In Morgenthau’s view, this security aspect of the state – the ‘security state’ – is able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law.3

Indeed, the ‘democratic state’ and the more autocratic ‘security state’ always ‘march side by side’!4

While the ‘democratic state’ offers legitimacy to security politics, the ‘security state’ intervenes where necessary, by limiting the range of democratic politics. While the ‘democratic state’ deals with political alternatives, the ‘security state’ enters the scene when ‘no alternative exists’, when particular activities are ‘securitised’5 – in the event of an ‘emergency’. In fact, the security state is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a ‘state of emergency’ will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, referred to as the ‘sovereign’.6

Logically speaking, one might argue that Morgenthau’s ‘dual state’ is derived from the same duality as that described in Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the ‘dual state’, which Fraenkel described as typifying the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. In the Nazi case, though, this duality was overt, combining the ‘regular’ legal state with a parallel ‘prerogative state’, an autocratic paramilitary emergency state or Machtstaat that operated outside or ‘above’ the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian ‘sovereign’. Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat (‘power state’, as distinct from the Rechtstaat) has its historical origins in the European aristocratic elite, which still played an important role within European society after the triumph of democracy. This elite acted behind the scene in the 1920s, but considered it necessary to intervene in support of the Nazi Party in the 1930s to prevent a possible socialist takeover. However, this autocratic Machtstaat – the Nazi SS-state – was arbitrary, because of its individualised command.7

In his analysis, Morgenthau draws a parallel between Nazi Germany and the US dual state. Indeed, in his view, the autocratic ‘security state’ may be less visible and less arbitrary in democratic societies such as the US, but it is no less important.

Morgenthau argues that

the power of making decisions remains with the authorities charged by law with making them, while, as a matter of fact, by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police… [and what I would call the security state:
author] at the very least exert an effective veto over [these] decisions.8

The Best of Charles Burris