Guess who said this: "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people."
Nope, it wasn't Donald Trump (as if he would use the word "ostensible"). No, that line came from the written platform of Theodore Roosevelt. So Trump is hardly the first powerful man in American history to spout off about the "deep state," people conspiring behind the scenes to wrest control of democracy from the president. As Americans gather today to celebrate Independence Day, history shows they have exactly the paranoid president their deserve.
Conspiracy theories have run through the United States of Paranoia, as author Jesse Walker calls it, from its earliest days.
Thomas Jefferson wrote these lines into the Declaration of Independence, as part of a lengthy list of crimes perpetrated by the King:
"He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized Nation. He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions."
It reads like a longer winded version of Trump's tweets with its overheated complaints of unfair treatment. Jefferson blamed the Indians in his day, Trump blames Mexicans and Muslims in his.
And those are just the outside forces. Americans have always been just as frightened of the internal agents, from the Salem witch trials to the Mormons to those American Communists Joseph McCarthy was looking for.
"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation," said New York City Mayor John Hylan in 1922.
These are not the conspiracies of oppressed people. These are the overwrought imaginations of powerful Americans, convinced that their enemies are coming to get them, to destroy their way of life and take their power.
In America, paranoia doesn't just cross lines of class and wealth, it crosses political lines as well. How different is Trump's belief in the "deep state" from Obama's belief that "secret oil billionaires" were plotting against him or from Hillary Clinton's belief of a "vast right-wing conspiracy?"
There are elements of truth to their beliefs. Jane Mayer's exhaustive book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right shows Obama and Clinton weren't entirely wrong. They just missed out the part that these billionaires have been at work for more than a century and much of their efforts, like the Koch brothers, for example, have actually been done in public and with mixed success.
Trump, like Obama and virtually every other president before them, is convinced that embarrassing leaks are simply the efforts of a faceless bureaucracy invisibly managed by others, both internally and externally.
And Americans agree with their presidents, whether they are named Trump or Obama, based on the television shows they watch. Whether it's in the White House (Designated Survivor, Scandal, House of Cards) or in small towns in middle America (Stranger Things, Riverdale), Americans seem certain there are multiple ongoing schemes in progress to seize power. It's a narrative that works for the powerless (the rich and powerful are keeping us down) and the powerful (the unwashed masses and other rich and powerful people are plotting against us).
Alert watchfulness - or what one scholar calls "prudent paranoia" - does have its place, however. Billionaires have conspired (and continue to fund public-interest groups and think tanks) to rig elections. Russia did meddle in the 2016 presidential election, although the effect of that meddling remains unclear. The CIA conducted mind-control experiments and overthrew foreign governments. The FBI embedded itself in the civil rights movement to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.
The truth of those conspiracies lends credibility to the notion that there are many more plots, operating just beneath the surface.
The current president is the paranoid-in-chief but he is no different from his fellow Americans, certain the conspiracy they believe is real and all of the others are just nonsense.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
