The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

Lofgren (The Party Is Over) argues that the shared-power, balanced participation vision embodied in our Madisonian constitutional democracy is pretty much a mirage, and that our "visible state" is manipulated greatly and gravely by "the deep state." What is this threatening Machiavellian machine? According to the author, who spent roughly a generation working in Congress, mostly as a senior policy analyst in the House and Senate, the deep state is "a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections." With echoes of Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address warning in 1961 about the military-industrial complex, Lofgren offers a compelling (depressing?) vision of what happens when a democracy becomes a plutocracy, when political dysfunction reigns supreme over democratic deliberation, and when the war on terrorism leads to the militarization of our foreign policy. Is there no way out? Lofgren proposes reforms from campaign finance to foreign policy to immigration policy.