Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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Gadianton
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Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by Gadianton »

One of the beliefs of QAnon, in other words, one of the beliefs of the average Republican today (including Binger), is that there's a "deep state" calling all the shots and we need an outsider like Trump, not corrupted by the system, to hold them accountable or get rid of them or whatever.

While it's not a fundamentally Republican phenomena, politicians with little experience who win as culture warriors and pot-stirrers seems the fashion for Republicans right now. Day-to-day community operations are an afterthought if a thought at all, let alone any thoughts for the future.

I've had my own doubts about insiders. I've mentioned before in 2015 I considered Trump, worrying that Hillary would know what she's doing, and could get too much done for causes that I thought might be pointless. I figured Trump would be incompetent and unable to do anything, and that could be a positive. (EA convinced me Trump was bad).

I was wrong, Trump was incompetent, but very capable of taking a golf club to a set of nice dishes. Well, let's back up and consider my initial position that I wanted political gridlock. I believed in strong institutions that pretty much ran themselves. A strong CEO might come into a company and now it's either stifle it or double it. If the president is like a CEO, then things must be really bad before I want to take the chance of too much change by betting on an over-achieving president.

Trump amplifies the problem, groping for absolute control, and anybody pro-Trump is taking the bet next level of risk, like Elon buying Twitter and accountable to nobody. It's 50-50 whether Elon sends it to the dustbin or 10xs it. But Elon kind of knows what he's doing, Trump just knows how to grab the power, not how to use it, so odds are 1% that he makes America great and 99% he runs it into the ground.

So the MAGA right wing has some real diversity here. You have those like trump who want to push all the buttons without knowing anything, and you have others who don't care about the buttons at all and just want to be on TV. Both push institutions in the same direction of further independence for different reasons. I can only imagine the meetings top FBI and CIA officials of had about how to protect themselves and the country from incompetent leaders with an ax to grind. If Trump ends up winning with the supreme court and congress behind him, then we either go full-blown China/Russia or institutions find some way to push back, and prevent the buttons from being pushed. And with the loudmouths who do little else but talk, institutions deepen their own path because nobody is really looking. But MAGA is made up entirely of one or the other, incompetence in the day-to-day being the common theme.

I don't know if there is an official definition of a deep state, but I'd start with the idea of independent institutions, and then add selective pressures from incompetent / authoritarian leaders. Either the institutions evolve into something resistant to politicians placed by the people and learn to work together behind the scenes, thereby becoming a deep state, or fall to the whims of an authoritarian leader, and become the tools of fascism.

What I'm saying is that while it's very possible Republicans / QAnon will get their chance of living in a China or Russia, thanks to themselves, there is also a chance they will inadvertently create a deep state that is able to keep the country going despite them.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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I guess we’ll get a chance to see after the Red Wave takes the 🏠. But down to brass tacks, are we talking about right-wing churches advocating for Christian Nationalism and being political centers of gravity that then translate into fascists being voted into office, and subsequently assigned to committees that they then set about destroying? Are we talking about 5th columnists firing government employees and replacing them with ideological comrades?

Like. I guess I don’t really understand what a Deep State is supposed to do? Is it assigning a transgender person to the post of HHS Secretary who’ll, I dunno, push the ‘transgender agenda’ within the HHS as an act of the LW Deep State? I’m not sure what that even means, but I’m fairly certain the right-wing views Admiral Levine as a deep state move. Conversely, is it a right-wing deep state move to take control of the the Supreme Court who then implement a right-wing agenda?

Perhaps a concrete example of the Deep State, a real one - not imagined in the fevered brain of a moron, could help advance your thought exercise a bit.

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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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thank you for the comments Doc, I have a couple thoughts but need to crank out part 2.

Part 1 basically says perpetual rampant mis-manager / non-manager politicians who run on slogans may create a deep state by institutions finding ways to prevent their incompetent or destructive overseers from making decisions.

Part 2 is the problem of voters perpetually putting rampant mis-manager / non-manager politicians into power.

It's often said that Democrats are bad at messaging. Kotkin makes the point occasionally that the adults (whoever they are) need to communicate better to the voters.

Problem A: you can't necessarily make the most important issues that a politician may be able to do something about of interest to a voter -- brains are wired to react to shock and bad news. If the right wing has an unmatched expertise in mud slinging there may not be a solution aside from better mud slinging, which isn't a real solution. But is this any different now than a couple hundred years ago? Yellow journalism and grifting aren't new tactics. The question is whether something about social media or our news sources can amplify the noise beyond any hope to ever retrieve the signal. I don't have any firm conclusions here, just throwing it out.

Problem B: Is it even possible for the average person to make an informed choice? Take some of the big issues: inflation, pandemics, the war and geopolitics; how on earth is the average person supposed to know enough to vote in the most constructive way? My right-wing friend has been on a "Bidenflation" rant the last few days, I'm not sure we're friends right now to be honest, but aside from the fact that he doesn't know the first thing about inflation, he's simply not bright enough to learn even the basics. But even if you can learn the basics, getting to the right answer may still be too difficult. Honorentheos, for example, is one of the few people I can think of who knows enough about enough topics to be qualified to vote. So the question is, has education kept pace with the increase in society's complexity? In other words, 200 years ago, did the average person know enough to make an informed choice, and if so, is that still true today?

So what I'm wondering is if it's possible that as the world gets more complex, does it outgrow democracy? If people either can't know enough to make good choices or they are too easily biased, then there may be a bias toward bad leaders, and that may mean that the best hope we have is for a deep state, because it's either that or a dictator.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by Morley »

Your 'problem B' is my abiding fear. I always discounted Plato's idealized concept of the philosopher king. Now I'm not so sure.


edit:
Gadianton wrote:
Wed Nov 09, 2022 2:51 am
In other words, 200 years ago, did the average person know enough to make an informed choice...?
I think it's pretty clear that the US foundering fathers weren't so sure they did.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

Joseph Tainter.

https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA

We talked about this basic concept maybe a decade ago. The idea being, social organizations have evolutionary paths where the ability of the system to handle increased levels of complexity yield increased civilization-based benefits. But eventually each advance in social order runs up against a new level of complexity it can't handle, then entropy pushes it back down to a lower level of complexity - i.e. collapse.

There is a threshold beyond which our current democracy won't be able to handle the complexity of the civilization we enjoy. The need? Adapt and evolve our social order.

The other side of this is most people seek simplicity - i.e. collapse. Authoritarian regimes are a lower state of society. No person, no Putin nor Trump is going to be better capable of handling increasing complexity than a democratized system that aggregate solutions through competition towards the greater good of society. And no philosopher king can, either.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

Another post on Tainter from his book written before the collapse of the Soviet Union:

https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2020/09/05 ... -collapse/

Quoted from the website:

For what seems like obvious reasons, my thoughts have turned towards civilizational collapse recently. As a result, I picked up a copy of a book entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter. It’s in the same vein, although slightly more academic, than Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

As a self-identified left-libertarian, I’m sympathetic towards anarchist philosophy and the right of people to be free from state interference. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, so I’ll not get into it in too much depth now, but suffice to say that it makes this book an interesting read!

In the first chapter of the book, Tainter gives numerous examples of societal collapse, which he defines as happening when a society “displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. As such, it encompasses not only the Roman and Mayan empires, which we’ve all heard of, but also many that we (or at least I) have not.

I wanted to share one example in full, because it blew my mind that people could live in this way, without the normal social bonds. What I find particularly interesting are the hints that things have not always been this way, due to clan names and the choice to live in villages.

The Ik are a people of northern Uganda who live at what must surely be the extreme of deprivation and disaster. A largely hunting and gathering people who have in recent times practiced some crop planting, the Ik are not classifiable as a complex society in the sense of Chapter 2. They are, nonetheless, a morbidly fascinating case of collapse in which a former, low level of social complexity has essentially disappeared.

Due to drought and disruption by national boundaries of the traditional cycle of movement, the Ik live in such a food- and water-scarce environment that there is absolutely no advantage to reciprocity and social sharing. The Ik, in consequence, display almost nothing of what could be considered societal organization. They are so highly fragmented that most activities, especially subsistence, are pursued individually. Each Ik will spend days or weeks on his or her own, searching for food and water. Sharing is virtually nonexistent. Two siblings or other kin can live side-by-side, one dying of starvation and the other well nourished, without the latter giving the slightest assistance to the other. The family as a social unit has become dysfunctional. Even conjugal pairs don’t form a cooperative unit except for a few specific purposes. Their motivation for marriage or cohabitation is that one person can’t build a house alone. The members of a conjugal pair forage alone, and do not share food. Indeed, their foraging is so independent that if both members happen to be at their residence together it is by accident.

Each conjugal compound is stockaded against the others. Several compounds together form a village, but this is a largely meaningless occurrence. Villages have no political functions or organization, not even a central meeting place.

Children are minimally cared for by their mothers until age three, and then are put out to fend for themselves. This separation is absolute. By age three they are expected to find their own food and shelter, and those that survive do provide for themselves. Children band into age-sets for protection, since adults will steal a child’s food whenever possible. No food sharing occurs within an age-set. Groups of children will forage in agricultural fields, which scares off birds and baboons. This is often given as the reason for having children.

Although little is known about how the Ik got to their present situation, there are some indications of former organizational patterns. They possess clan names, although today these have no structural significance. They live in villages, but these no longer have any political meaning. The traditional authority structure of family, lineage, and clan leaders has been progressively weakened. It appears that a Although little is known about how the Ik got to their present situation, there are some indications of former organizational patterns. They possess clan names, although today these have no structural significance. They live in villages, but these no longer have any political meaning. The traditional authority structure of family, lineage, and clan leaders has been progressively weakened. It appears that a former level of organization has simply been abandoned by the Ik as unprofitable and unsuitable in their present distress (Turnbull 1978).
Last edited by honorentheos on Fri Nov 11, 2022 12:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

The above quote from the book reflected an understanding of the Ik people from a narrow source in the 1960s. Later research showed their culture isn't nearly as atomized.

But what that research also found was the original view came from observing the Ik immediately after their society had faced multiple events from prolonged drought to violence from outside groups, to portions of their traditional lands being converted to conservation areas. I.e - unmanaged complexity drove this (potentially temporary) utter collapse of society for an already marginalized group.

Now contextualize this to what we've experienced with a global pandemic, climate change, and globalization.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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honorentheos wrote:
Thu Nov 10, 2022 11:22 pm
Joseph Tainter.

https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA

We talked about this basic concept maybe a decade ago. The idea being, social organizations have evolutionary paths where the ability of the system to handle increased levels of complexity yield increased civilization-based benefits. But eventually each advance in social order runs up against a new level of complexity it can't handle, then entropy pushes it back down to a lower level of complexity - i.e. collapse.

There is a threshold beyond which our current democracy won't be able to handle the complexity of the civilization we enjoy. The need? Adapt and evolve our social order.

The other side of this is most people seek simplicity - i.e. collapse. Authoritarian regimes are a lower state of society. No person, no Putin nor Trump is going to be better capable of handling increasing complexity than a democratized system that aggregate solutions through competition towards the greater good of society. And no philosopher king can, either.
Thanks for posting the YouTube link. I’m chipping away at it as the TNF game goes to commercial breaks. I just stopped a little after 24 minutes, and am struck by the enormous, I’d say impossible obstacle, of getting our monkey brains to understand the oncoming now-here situation of resource scarcity and the inevitable conflict that arises from that - we’re just scaled up to a global hegemony vs. global hegemony rather than local infighting. It’s so complex that even bringing up an object lesson like ‘voracious fossil fuel consumption now screws over future humans’* will immediately destabilize the average person’s ability to stay on task, vis a vis a conversation like this, and the notion of hegemonic and global political action devolves into simple rhetoric designed to push these difficult realities out of our brains. Ironically, this behavior will drive us into the very thing we’re trying to avoid, which is war and poverty. The Universe is one of infinite recursion and it appears a large faction of us intends to repeat the behaviors of our ancestors that lead to death and suffering.

* for example, why not sip fossil fuels with hybrids and electric vehicles instead of guzzling them with big trucks and SUVs? Why not save fossil fuels for barges, commercial trucking, and airplanes? This kind of thing would require global cooperation so domestic consumption could fall in line with a planned economy *gasps* <- I just lost most consumers right here because little Johnny needs to be shuttled to school in a Ford Expedition, not some puny Prius!

I’m a neoliberal because I recognize the realities of human nature, but unless we start collectively *gasp!* thinking in terms of centuries and millenniums our monkey brains are going to hit a civilizational ceiling, and I kind of wonder if we’re not already there? We’re most definitely at a Great Filter point(s), and I hope the adults in the room can work together in a more humanistic fashion rather than simply locking their respective vectors down because they got their stuff so Screw you.

Anyway. Russia, I think, is an excellent object lesson ref what Tainter and you are talking about. Gobbling up land and resources while simultaneously damned over everyone else is a path that humanity can’t abide. How a good portion of the Western world can’t or won’t see how authoritarianism and resource hogging will be our collective *gasp!* downfall is puzzling and disheartening to witness. Trying to reason with them is a shocking reality check on the human condition. Perhaps, on some level, authoritarianism is just another death cult, and they’re hell bent on suiciding us because they’re existentially miserable.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Fri Nov 11, 2022 2:01 am
honorentheos wrote:
Thu Nov 10, 2022 11:22 pm
Joseph Tainter.

https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA
I’m a neoliberal because I recognize the realities of human nature, but unless we start collectively *gasp!* thinking in terms of centuries and millenniums our monkey brains are going to hit a civilizational ceiling, and I kind of wonder if we’re not already there? We’re most definitely at a Great Filter point(s), and I hope the adults in the room can work together in a more humanistic fashion rather than simply locking their respective vectors down because they got their stuff so Screw you.

Anyway. Russia, I think, is an excellent object lesson ref what Tainter and you are talking about. Gobbling up land and resources while simultaneously damned over everyone else is a path that humanity can’t abide. How a good portion of the Western world can’t or won’t see how authoritarianism and resource hogging will be our collective *gasp!* downfall is puzzling and disheartening to witness. Trying to reason with them is a shocking reality check on the human condition. Perhaps, on some level, authoritarianism is just another death cult, and they’re hell bent on suiciding us because they’re existentially miserable.

- Doc
Our assumed level of resource consumption is a major part of the issue. One aspect of Tainter's views, perhaps central to it, is how energy use and complexity are interrelated. In another podcast I saw with Tainter as guest not too long ago, the host built on Tainter's point regarding past human civilizations having complexity constraints relative to the cost-benefit of energy that the exploitation of oil has exploded. That host pointed out that, while the recommended American adult energy need is +/-2,000 kcals per day for our metabolic requirements, our externalized energy needs to maintain the societal order around us is over 200,000 kcals per person per day. That's staggering.

What it also is, is fragile. I think Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile is a compliment to Tainter since both frame their views around common problems - complexity and kicking the can down the road for paying the true cost of maintaining our complex societies. And their solution space is similar in that it calls for figuring out how modern human societies can voluntarily simplify without suffering rapid collapses of forced simplification.

That challenge as I see it, and as it relates to Gad's great OP, is that we aren't evolved to manage the complexity of our modern society. One doesn't have to look far to find people who openly long for simpler times, easy and obvious "solutions", less entanglements, fewer people who think differently or have other views. But with all the trappings of 2022. We long to understand...and can't. Nor could we not consume. Coming to grips with that? Not easy. But I think it is essential for the future. But getting around the consumption problem/energy-requirement problem is ridiculously difficult.

ETA: I feel one of my regular points on the board that never gets acknowledged is how uniquely complex US society is, which is a miracle, really. Having the third largest population, we lack "simplifying" measures like a shared ethnic background or shared cultural heritage of the two largest (China and India). Pluralism is a point of obvious structural stress in our society. Managing it effectively? Not easy. Often people point to other nations as examples that have significantly smaller populations and significantly less diverse cultures and say we should be like them. I shake my head and wonder when that person decided to side with Trump...
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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So what I'm wondering is if it's possible that as the world gets more complex, does it outgrow democracy? If people either can't know enough to make good choices or they are too easily biased, then there may be a bias toward bad leaders, and that may mean that the best hope we have is for a deep state, because it's either that or a dictator.
Make EAllusion Lord and emperor. Only He is intelligent enough to know what is best for humanity. Democracy clearly cannot be trusted given that voters chose economic nationalism and energy independence. They think they're owed cheap gas and prosperity when res Ipsa knows they should just shut up and be grateful they had enough to feed their family. Only DocCam is bold enough to weld the doors shut on their apartments to keep them from infecting those who are vulnerable to COVID. The deep state is our only hope. Never trust people with too much freedom.
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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