Is the USA Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde? Or is...
“Our intellectual problem, deep down, is that we love America.” (Emmanuel Todd)
When pushed into a decision, most people in the West will say that, on balance, America has been a force for good in the world. Historians follow suit. When I interviewed Felipe Fernández-Armesto in 2023, he said precisely that, echoing the wisdom of his history books. But daily news and deep reading of history make that judgment harder and harder to sustain.
This week’s history book recommendation—Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (2022)—makes a compelling case for ‘guilty’ before the jury of world opinion. But Good remains within the intellectual trap, created by our emotional attachment to stories that, despite all the abuse, the USA has a good heart.
When someone you love does something evil, or wrongs you violently, you face a moral, psychological and intellectual dilemma. When the fist strikes your face, you tell yourself, ‘He is not the man that I loved.’ It is Dr Jekyll doing this violence. Mr Hyde, whom I love, is, on balance, a force for good in the world.
The wronged party cannot escape the abuse unless they admit that the violence of Dr Jekyll and the sweet words of Mr Hyde come from the same psyche. So too the world faces a problem today. The wrongs that America does in the world come from the same psyche that whispered sweet nothings in our ears for decades. The USA was our indispensable nation. Both these Americas overpower their captives with threats. The weak cannot survive in the jungle world, outside the star-spangled cage the bully has built since 1945. But the real truth is that the abuse will only end when the world breaks the spell of love of America.
Emmanuel Todd shows the world how to break that spell, while Aaron Good remains caught in the belief that the abuser is a monster, not the republic that he loves. America is distorted by the ‘deep state.’ It is no longer its true self, represented by the enlightened political traditions of sweet-talking Mr Hyde.
In Defeat of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident), Todd piercingly declares that America is not a force for good, but an agent of nihilism.
It seemed necessary to me to have a central concept that symbolized America's conversion from good to evil. Our intellectual problem, deep down, is that we love America. … To fully accept the idea that today they follow a path that leads to poverty and social atomization, the concept of nihilism is essential.
—Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West (my translation)
America’s true nature is not democracy and enlightenment, but, Todd declares, oligarchy and destruction. The abuse of the world is in its nature, fixed in its culture, and rooted in its tearing social fabric. Accepting this shift in perspective, Todd argues:
“allows us to understand both the Trump phenomenon and Biden's foreign policy, the internal rot as well as the external megalomania, the violence that the American system exercises on its own citizens and on those of other countries.”
—Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West (my translation)
In American Exception, Aaron Good tried, like Todd, to come to terms with America's conversion from good to evil. For the standards of the American academy, he has written a brave, striking book. It forces us to revise judgments of the balance of good and evil that America does in the world. Or at least the good and evil done by the American Empire and its ‘Deep State’.
Admirably, Good makes an incontrovertible case that the USA government has repeatedly, recklessly over decades breached international law, its domestic laws, and all standards of democratic decency. The UN Charter declares that it is an act of aggression to interfere in the internal affairs of another state. How many times has the USA done that? He documents the extensive record of the USA declaring its acts an exception to this rule. Good documents that record stretching from the 1940s to the Reagan and Bush eras. He refers to how it continued under Obama and Biden. He would have shaken his head knowingly last week when Trump declared that the USA will ‘own’ Gaza.
This is what Good means by “exceptionism”. It varies the common argument about American “exceptionalism”. He makes an original contribution by arguing that the American government, or its deep state practitioners have enacted in foreign policy rule by exception. The German twentieth-century jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt argued that ‘He is sovereign who decides the exception.’ Good argues that the American deep state decides the exception, the cases when it can freely breach the UN charter and international law. By doing so, it acts as sovereign of the world.
The United States operates as an "exceptionist deep state" characterized by the institutionalized suspension of legal restraints and abrogation of the rule of law. In this "permanent state of exception," the USA government through the CIA and other agencies, commits lawless acts from assassination to regime change. These agencies operate outside the law - as their own heads like Michael McFaul and Mike Pompeo candidly admit - to subvert other democracies and states in the service of American hegemony of the global capitalist system.
Good argues that the government that commits these crimes is not who it says it is. It is a three-person Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or in Good’s awkward phrase, an "exceptionist tripartite state." This monster comprises the public state, the security state, and the deep state.
The public state is the liberal republic of the American constitution, the good Mr Hyde who believes in freedom, democracy, and respects the rules-based order, both foreign and domestic.
The security state includes agencies like the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI, that exercise real power outside the largely fictional oversight of Congress or the President. They conduct illegal activities regularly, and exempt themselves from the rule of law. However, they are still bound by some norms of democratic control, however loosely administered.
But the real power behind all the illusions, the real Mr Jekyll, who is the author of the crimes and the abuser of both the world and the innocent American people, is the deep state. Good writes that "The institutions that exercise undemocratic power over state and society collectively comprise the deep state." Its power does not derive from the constitution, but outside and above it. It is more powerful than the public state, and, in fact, directs the security state. Most scandalously of all, this deep state is not a state at all, but private actors. Todd might call this deep state an oligarchy. Marx called it a committee of the bourgeoisie, the state of the ruling class. Good agrees. He writes that:
"The deep state is an outgrowth of the overworld of private wealth and it includes most notably the institutions that advance overworld interests through the nexuses connecting the overworld, the underworld, and the national security organizations that mediate between them."
Good, American Exception
Good argues that this monstrous state is responsible for the loss of innocence of American democracy, including the replacement of Henry Wallace by Harry Truman, the assassination of President John F Kennedy, and the Watergate Scandal that removed President Nixon. He argues that the deep state acted in concert with the security state against each of these political actors when they threatened to disarm Dr Jekyll and make America Mr Hyde again.
The book is overloaded with cumbersome political science language, but his historical narrative goes like this.
In chapter six, “An imperial colossus - plans for an American Century,” Good narrates the first twenty years from the 1940s of the development of the deep state. It began with the wartime planning for the American century. Intriguingly, I learned from Good’s book that Henry Luce’s famous 1941 Life article, declaring the American Century, was prepared in collaboration with national security officials. The key document defining the exceptionist state, however, was a report to the USA National Security Council, NSC-68. It was written in 1950, but not declassified till 1975, after the Church committee investigation of the intelligence agencies. You can read it here in full now.
NSC-68 was a candid description of the strategy of Dr Jekyll’s American Empire, which was why it was kept closed to the Mr Hyde loving public for most of the Cold War. In Good’s account, President Kennedy was uncomfortable with this deep state’s power, and this caused his death in 1963. I will not go down that rabbit hole. In any case, Lyndon Baines Johnson became the President under whom, in Good’s account, the Empire returned to form.
In chapter seven, Good narrates the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, who was the rare US President who doubted US Primacy. The Deep State, in Good’s account, took its revenge through Watergate. Good has an appreciation of the crisis of America’s Undeclared Empire that occurred in the 1970s. “More than is commonly understood,” he writes, “the 1970s were a cataclysmic decade in US history and therefore in world history.” I prefer John Darwin’s account - as featured in my post-1945 world history guide - and that provided by Odd Arne Westad in The Cold War: a World History. In Odd Arne Westad’s account of Nixon in China, Westad credits Nixon, above all, rather than the courtier Kissinger, for sensing the new realities of world history in the 1970s.
Because he fundamentally distrusted his own people, Nixon had forced US foreign policy onto a track where, for the first time during the Cold War, it dealt with others on the assumption that US global hegemony would not last forever.”
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War
I will discuss this issue more in my deep dive this week. But the American Deep State could not bear too much of this reality. From the mid 1970s, American Primacy dawned again in America. Good documents its vision in the “Powell memorandum, written by later US Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell. You can read it here. Good writes that this advice on how to counter the “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” was:
“a manifesto of the American deep state. One might even describe it as a deep state declaration of independence from democracy.”
Good, American Exception
Chapter eight narrates the consolidation of the deep state through the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations. It highlights the growing influence of the “guardian elite” across American political and cultural institutions. This guardian elite are the “mandarins of US national security and corporate America.”
Since the end of World War II, the US Guardian Elite have functioned most decisively as executors of dark power. They have operated with huge budgets, under a cloak of state secrecy, and without meaningful oversight or legal restraints.”
Good, American Exception
The Guardian Elite includes grand strategists like Richard Haas, Jake Sullivan or Steve Bannon, and, in earlier times, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. It was the latter dark soul of the deep state, who I will examine some more in my deep dive, who said:
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
—Henry Kissinger
To this day, the rest of the world has been abused by this guardian elite. To this day, as I discussed in The Crooked Timber of the US Empire, they insist upon impunity for their lawless exceptionism.
Good’s book (a rewritten PhD) focuses on the story until Reagan, but does, in its conclusion, connect the story of the deep state briefly through Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump. There is a fascinating YouTube discussion between Good and Jeffrey Sachs that discloses the disappointment of both these progressive American intellectuals with Obama. It is well worth a watch, and I will be returning to Obama in a couple of weeks time.
Disappointment, however, did not teach Aaron Good, nor maybe Jeffrey Sachs, that the Good America was a false Promised Land. In the final chapter of American Exception, Good restates his belief in the good Mr Hyde. Titled, “Let us bring light to the dark side,” Good summarises his belief in the audacious revival of hope in the American tradition, which Hannah Arendt also believed in.
“Its famous hypocrisy notwithstanding, America was exceptional at its founding in terms of the Enlightenment principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Indeed, democracy may offer hope if humanity could somehow establish systems of governance that allow for the privileging of human needs over the interests of a tiny politico-economic elite of power.”
Good, American Exception
In other words, America’s Dr Jekyll is doing this violence. Enlightened Mr Hyde, whom so many across the political spectrum still love, is, on balance, a force for good in the world.
In Good’s account the deep state has twisted American democracy. It does not express America’s true nature, in Todd’s words, of nihilism and oligarchy. As a result, Good’s concluding grounds for hope read like consoling wishful thinking.
Imagine if democratic forces were to seize control of the government and use its authority to assert and apply the rule of law thought the various organs of the state–even going so far as to force exceptionist deep state persons and entities to operate transparently and lawfully!
Good, American Exception
This wishful thinking does not see the historical limitations of the USA. And, right on cue, in his final sentences, Good summons the American dream of Western civilization and intellectuals untainted by Dr Jekyll.
“Without fundamental redirection, the US is driving Western civilization toward a very grim future… American society must supplant the higher immorality which currently prevails. The master task of the twenty-first century scholar is to reacquaint power and wisdom.”
Good, American Exception
Despite its insights and documentation of American lawlessness, I left American Exception disappointed. I do recommend it for its history of repeated, intentional US violations of international law. But my advice is that Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West is a deeper search through the dark soul of the destructive American Empire.
And that deeper search does not believe in the idea of the ‘deep state.’ In the chapter “Le bande de Washington (The Washington Gang),” Todd mocks the idea of the deep state. How can a deep state emerge from a culture that is so nihilistic, a leadership group so shallow devoid of collective ethos, and a society in such demographic crisis? He writes:
“Je propose au contraire de fonder une “école de l’état superficiel’ (le shallow state?)”
[I propose on the contrary to found a school of the superficial state (the shallow state)]
—Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West (my translation)
In Wednesday’s deep dive I will take up Todd’s idea of the shallow state in the biographical case of the leading exponent of American foreign policy in the American Century, who many regard as the deepest thinker and darkest war criminal of the American deep state, Henry Kissinger. I will suggest, contrary to Good’s arguments on the deep state, instead that while Kissinger exhibited all the lawless, exceptionalist criminality of the American century, he was in truth a servile courtier of the shallow state.
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