Political Intelligence 4: The Deep State

I am traveling next week so this newsletter will be silent until September 10th.

I will start with a piece of news that struck my fancy:

More than 200 people who previously worked for President George W. Bush and Senators Mitt Romney and John McCain have signed a letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

BTW, neither Dubya nor Romney came to the RNC, which only underscores the fact that the Democrats are the party of the establishment. I want to say this in the most neutral way possible, for one could argue that the establishment is a damn good establishment. I have met a handful of mid- to senior level US officials in my life and every single one of them has struck me as good at what they do, both competent and professional. A couple were even funny and self-deprecating, the kind of person who you want to hang out at the bar after the conference ends. But the establishment also has the repeated tendency to start wars, topple governments and support genocide, so maybe it’s not a damn good establishment. Especially if you are not a citizen of the United States. We will come back to that establishment in a minute.

I have been saying, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes out loud, that 'intelligence studies' should be a thing. Or if you want it to sound fancier, let's call it 'cognitive studies.' What do I mean by these phrases?

Treat all human institutions as if they were AI, i.e., both artificial and intelligent.

I might even be ready to remove the 'as if’ equivocation, and say:

Treat all human institutions as AI.

for all our institutions are a) artificial, as in created not found, and b) intelligent, as in having some emergent characteristics that an observer landing from Mars or an Octopus would classify as exhibiting smarts, however misguided. The question is whether the artificial and the intelligent go together in a manner that throws more light than the two considered separately.

There are atleast two precursors to this way of thinking about the human (and also non-human!) world:

1. The mid-twentieth century explosion of rational modeling of human and biological systems. That gave rise to expected utility theory, game theory, and many other mathematical methods that have great increased the scope of economics (some would say to the detriment of the world…). I might want to replace economic imperialism with cognitive imperialism.

2. At the subversive end of things, let’s look at science studies as an interdisciplinary enterprise that also arose at about the same time, one that looks at the practice of science (not its norms and ideals) as a quintessentially modern enterprise and labs should be studied just as we would study factories and religious rituals. Cognitive Studies is a generalization of Science Studies. It’s not just scientists who are producing and distributing knowledge - in the age of Whatsapp University, all of us are (even if it’s alternate facts).

There’s room in cognitive studies for everyone…. A couple of essays ago, I mentioned how ‘attention’ is an example of a cognitive concept that also has a social life, and that it generalizes the concept of ‘interest’ which is used all the time when describing economic and political events. I believe there are many many more. But what about a domain of study? Is there anything the cognitivist can help grasp better than it’s been so far?

Here’s a potential topic that ties my general interests to the November election: the Deep State.

The term "Deep State" refers to a belief or theory that there exists a coordinated network of powerful individuals or groups within government, military, intelligence agencies, and other institutions who are said to secretly manipulate or control national policy, regardless of which political party is in power.

This concept suggests that beyond the publicly visible government structures, there is a hidden layer of influence that operates independently of the democratic process and elected leadership. Proponents of this idea often claim that this network pursues its own agenda, which may differ from or even oppose the publicly stated goals of the elected government. I am not conspiratorially minded, and in fact, I don’t think the Deep State needs to operate in the shadows at all. Its power is being exercised in the open, though it may take a cognitive analysis to explain why people experience it as cloak and dagger.

Those 200 people who signed the letter at the beginning of this essay: Deep State. Nikki Haley: Deep State. Kamala Harris: Deep State. IMHO. Once again, not in any conspiratorial fashion, but because that’s how the system works.

The establishment is more than the Deep State though. It also includes the captains of industry, the CEOs of FAANG, Wall Street Firms, Energy industries etc. I would even go two levels below the CEO to include senior management types. “The Man.” If you include the establishment in the Deep State, at least for electoral purposes, then it exercises power by biasing the system towards some types of candidates and not others. Kamala Harris is the choice of the Deep State not because there was some long-nursed conspiracy to topple Biden in a coup and put her in place, but because she navigated her career as a prosecutor and then Senator so that those with endorsements or donations to give (all Deep Staters) were backing her over other choices, and those decisions compound over time.

Positioning + Persistence + Luck…..

In the next essay, I will inaugurate the argument that the interest → attention axis does a pretty good job of explaining the establishment.