The FBI And The Rise Of The National Security State

I’ve been referring a lot lately to the transformation of the American Republic into a “National Security State”, and to the fact that those of us who wish to preserve the republic currently appear to find ourselves in a “no-win” situation. Yesterday commenter Forbes linked to a terrific review article by Glenn Ellmers that addresses those issues.

Federal foes

On G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage.

The article is a review of a biography of J. Edgar Hoover but, as Ellmers and the title of the book make clear, the book is far more ambitious than a simple biography. Gage sees Hoover’s leadership of the FBI as key to understanding where the American Republic now finds itself. Ellmers himself identifies the FBI as “an indispensable weapon for the permanent government”. The indispensable government, by the way, is NOT the one We The People elect.

Ellmers begins his review by pointing out that the origins of the FBI, which coincide with the rise of Hoover in the Department of Justice, find their origin in the Progressive Era, in the war presidency of Woodrow Wilson. While the FBI made its name by busting Depression Era gangsters, Hoover, from the start of his career, was involved in rooting out subversives:

War Emergency Division

Immediately after getting his LL.M. degree, Hoover was hired by the Justice Department to work in the War Emergency Division. …

He soon became the head of the Division's Alien Enemy Bureau, authorized by President Woodrow Wilson at the beginning of World War I to arrest and jail allegedly disloyal foreigners without trial. He received additional authority from the 1917 Espionage Act. …

Bureau of Investigation

Head of the Radical Division

In August 1919, the 24-year-old Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division, also known as the Radical Division because its goal was to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals. America's First Red Scare was beginning, and one of Hoover's first assignments was to carry out the Palmer Raids.

Hoover and his chosen assistant, George Ruch, monitored a variety of U.S. radicals with the intent to punish, arrest, or deport those whose politics they decided were dangerous. …

…

Head of the Bureau of Investigation

In 1921, Hoover rose in the Bureau of Investigation to deputy head, and in 1924 the Attorney General made him the acting director.

Ellmers quotes Gage’s characterization of that period, and links it to the present:

The prosecution of the war under Woodrow Wilson, she writes, spurred

the birth of a vast new experiment in federal surveillance of political dissidents and “alien enemies,” so that was where Hoover got his start. World War I marked a turning point in the history of civil liberties, the moment that the federal government began to watch its citizens and residents on a mass scale, and to keep files on their political activities. Hoover happened to be present at the creation, an accident of timing that forever altered his ambitions and his professional path.

The potential for the FBI to turn against conservatives, pro-lifers, and maga voters—treating them as enemies of the regime—was present from the beginning. How this happened, however, is not essentially a story about partisanship or due process. It concerns the nature of republican government and whether the FBI’s anti-constitutional foundations even can be reformed.

For our purposes I’ll fast forward through the article to the parts that bear most directly on our current crisis—and the role played in that by the FBI.

Ellmers sees Watergate as a real turning point. He sees the second term of Richard Nixon as the last chance for America to rein in the Progressive administrative state—of which Hoover was a loyal and determined supporter. Ellmers cites Nixon himself to that effect:

Richard Nixon recorded in his diary after the 1972 election:

This is . . . probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.

Nixon was reelected in what is still one of the biggest landslides in American history. One can read the results as a referendum on whether the president or Congress should control the permanent government in the executive branch. The people supported Nixon’s plan; the administrative state did not. The final outcome of that battle has not yet been determined.

Change “administrative state” to “Interagency” and we find ourselves in the middle of Trump’s first impeachment. Both men were perceived by the ruling elite as enemies of the body politic they had created during the Progressive Era. They had to be eliminated by hook or by crook. Ellmers quotes political philosopher John Marini on the true significance of Watergate—the triumph of the allied administrative state (but especially those intel related agencies that we call the Deep State) and Congress over the presidency. Watergate marks the final emancipation of the executive agencies from effective executive control (by the president):

In Marini’s view, the regime of centralized bureaucracy solidified its hold on American politics during this period, when it joined with Congress to neutralize the threat posed by Nixon’s second-term platform. “The equivalent of a Watergate,” Marini writes “was an absolute necessity for the defenders of the New Deal order.” What “made consensus impossible was a disagreement over what constituted a fundamentally good or just regime.” For Marini, Watergate, which established the precedent for Donald Trump, was the attempt to neutralize a political event (an unacceptable election) through nonpolitical means, including the media and especially the investigative and prosecutorial powers of the Justice Department. Accusing political adversaries of lawbreaking and threatening criminal indictment has become the new form of waging political warfare. Thus, the FBI is an indispensable weapon for the permanent government, which now constitutes the most powerful faction in American society.

“An unacceptable election”! Deja vu all over again. Marini continues with this telling characterization of relations between the agencies and Congress:

As Marini notes, the FBI, and the Justice Department more broadly, “see themselves as defenders of institutional rationality, as a part of the social intelligence that establishes the legitimacy of rule within the administrative state.”

Since Nixon and Trump were hostile to the extra-constitutional administrative state, they had to go.

To guarantee both its authority and funding, the bureaucracy operates with the support of, and in consultation with, the senior leadership in Congress—which has in key respects ceased to be a partisan institution. Leaders of both parties are deeply attached to their power to supervise the administrative state. Of course, it is the Democrats who have long been the party of big government, and they are truly in charge over the long term. Nominal Republicans in Congress send out spirited fundraising letters invoking the Constitution, but in practice the gop leadership remains firmly within the bounds of establishment opinion. (May we wonder, based on the evidence, whether Senator Mitch McConnell even wanted a Republican majority in November? Might he be entirely content, and even find it preferable, to remain in the minority—retaining his perks without the burden of accountability?)

The Omnibus Spending Bill is evidence to the contrary—evidence that McConnell preferred to be in the minority, if the alternative was a return to constitutional government.

With regard to the congressional–bureaucratic nexus, consider the remarkable statement made by Mark Felt [“Deep Throat”] in a speech at Rutgers in October 1973, in which he called for FBI oversight by a congressional watchdog group comprising six senior legislators. Any disputes, Felt urged, “would be laid out on the table and [a] decision would be made between the FBI director and the committee members.” He added, “that type of political control would be better than political control from the White House.” This is a fairly good description of what has come to pass. …

Indeed it is a good description of exactly what we witnessed in the Russia Hoax. And we can see, too, why the Gang of Eight—House and Senate united—worked to undermine their own colleague, Devin Nunes. It all came to a head early in Trump’s first term. The Deep State was working to control and undermine—and rid itself of—Trump, but there was a sudden crisis that called for extraordinary measures:

Thus, when Donald Trump fired the FBI director James Comey in 2017, prominent law professors responded on cue to declare a “constitutional crisis” because the president was interfering in the FBI’s investigation of alleged White House misconduct. ... The modern FBI, the Justice Department, and the leak-addicted intelligence community, by contrast, represent an insular administrative apparatus that undermines, at its own discretion, the elected head of the government in order to protect its own interests.

Ellmers finishes with some reflections on the place of presidential elections in our fading republic:

Today, the last vestige of partisanship, and the last expression of popular sovereignty, is limited to presidential elections, which alone can reflect the deliberative will and consent of the people at large. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump have been the only serious threats to the half century of growth in the administrative state, and they were assailed accordingly. ...

... Trump’s ordeals are in many ways the second act of Watergate. ...

... when [Nixon] was engulfed by the Watergate scandal, he didn’t quite understand what was happening and—as he did in his 1960 bid for the presidency, with John F. Kennedy’s controversial victory—bowed out for the good of the country. But it isn’t clear that surrender was better for the country.

Trump stubbornly insists on continuing to challenge the 2020 election. He does so despite the outrage of the ruling class and the condemnation of all respectable opinion leaders. In fact, Trump’s great political virtue may be that he does so because of their outrage and condemnation. If Trumpism represents the last political defense of the sovereignty of the people, he must deny the authority of the establishment—in the bureaucracy, media, and academia—to define political legitimacy. The superficial view of Trump’s apolitical approach to his presidency is that all politics is now show business. The deeper truth is that Trump seems to intuit, without quite articulating, that America has descended into post-constitutionalism. He knows there is an existential war over the future of the American regime, as well as the meaning of its past, hence Make America Great Again.