Around the world, the institutions of liberal democratic systems are
waging a rear-guard action against sustained attacks from populist
and extremist movements. These trends are not new, but can be
traced to events in the recent past, as well as broader historical
developments. In this session, participants will learn why political
scientists are so concerned about these trends, and what ordinary
citizens can do to improve democratic accountability in Canada.
Both the Left and the right have adopted the terminology of the Deep State to describe those hidden structures and relationships that permeate a state’s administrative apparatus and represent a set of semi-permanent structures that sit below the political level. On both sides, the so-called Deep State has come to represent a fundamentally anti-democratic and secretive force operating out of public view and without accountability or transparency. The argument from the left is that the revolving doors of Wall Street, the military and the bureaucracy have created a club of common interests that works towards favourable policies for the wealthy, including low taxes, de-regulation, militarism and regressive social and economic policies that penalize the poor. For the right, the deep state has become a force for endless bloat, overspending, over-regulation and failed global liberal projects of democratization and cosmopolitanism. In particular, the right has focused on the Obama administration’s expansion of healthcare services as a wedge to entrench even more state bureaucracies.
The polarized state of politics in the US means that there is a tendency on both sides to overstate the power, significance and uniformity of the Deep State. In political science the term ‘deep state’ as it is presently used does not have technical or analytical meaning. However, political scientists sometimes made a distinction between 1. the state administrative apparatus; 2. the government, which changes frequently in response to democratic cycles; and 3. the semi-political institutions that are termed a ‘regime’, which melds the political and bureaucratic elements. These three elements (the bureaucracy, the government, and the regime) form a larger, and much more permanent organization termed ‘the state’ which encompasses and supersedes all of these components by embodying a single legal entity from which the authority of all of the other parts flows. The separation of institutional powers among the branches of government, and among the various bureaucracies, is permanently enshrined in the Constitution in order to prevent the abuse of power by any one of these components, all underpinned by the permanence of the rule of law.
The polarized state of politics in the US means that there is a tendency on both sides to overstate the power, significance and uniformity of the deep state.
The fact is, the directly ‘democratic’ components of the state are relatively shallow, since the temporary election of a government on top of a large permanent experienced bureaucratic apparatus cannot, of necessity, institute revolutionary changes in the short term which it is allotted. This transience of the government is by design. Changes are always contingent on the maintenance of popular support., because any program of policies and institutions must be vetted by the people periodically. The permanence of the administration and the transience of government are complementary forces which maintain stability by the periodic checks and balances provided by democratic elections, which provide sufficient flexibility for the state to maintain relevance and responsiveness to the needs and wishes of the people. This is one key way in which a democratic state is distinguished from an authoritarian one, since in an authoritarian state like Pakistan or Turkey (as it is becoming) the Deep State acts wholly independently 
of the electoral process and has much greater power as a result.
Clearly, something has gone wrong with this careful balance. As Eisenhower knew well, the ‘military-industrial complex’ was not made of and by the state, nor did it arise from state action, but was the main threat to the state. When Eisenhower warned at the conclusion of his term about the creeping power of the ‘military-industrial complex’, he was referring to the entrenchment of relationships among the component parts that had become a semi-permanent structure of interests antithetical to democracy. Similarly, Mike Lofgren refers to the Deep State not as “a secret, conspiratorial cabal” but rather as “hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.” As he says “it is not a tight-knit group, and has no clear objective. Rather, it is a sprawling network, stretching across the government and into the private sector.” This complex is composed of a loose network of relationships among ruling elites from the commercial, financial, military, scientific and governmental sectors. In other words, it is both public and private in origin and nature.
So, what is going on? First of all, the transfer of power from one government to the next has fundamentally broken down, not only because of excessive partisanship, but also due to social divisions of interest within the ruling elites, whose ability to maintain a common interest has been compromised.
Second, this set of alliances threatens the state writ large, because it can potentially affect the more permanent institutions without reference to the vetting of the periodic democratic checks of elections. The problem with these relationships is not that they are secret (they aren’t) nor that they are hostile to social, political and economic progress (because they have been and can be progressive) but because they have failed in their most important function: to create and maintain legitimacy. Until recently, this admittedly problematic arrangement could be relied upon to organize and underpin (or at least, not obstruct) peaceful and orderly transitions of government that, if not democratic, at least could be said to command the legitimate support of sufficient numbers of the public to maintain the authority of the state itself.
Finally (and you can probably see where I’m going here) the system has been broken by an inability of the ruling elites to agree on the fundamental direction of the state. The state itself is not broken, nor is the Constitution, nor (yet) is the democratic mechanism for transferring power between regimes.
What could once be a strategy for election, must now be a strategy of grasping for the broken pieces of the state that have been set adrift and unclaimed.
What is broken is the legitimacy of the state, its ability to rally support and meet demands, the most basic functions of statehood. The problem is not that the Deep State is a monolithic and autonomous shadowy force acting against the democratic will, the biggest problem is that the state is being broken apart into its component parts due to the inability of the ruling elite to maintain legitimacy and enable a peaceful transition of power.
What could once be done in public must now increasingly be done behind closed doors. What could once be said openly must now be cloaked in distraction and lies. What could once be a strategy for election, must now be a strategy of grasping for the broken pieces of the state that have been set adrift and unclaimed. The real threat is to the state, in its larger, wider meaning as a social, political and legal community of common interests and values.
Hear about the history of Canada’s efforts to address this crucial global problem of climate change and explore the challenges ahead. Canada is struggling to balance an economy highly dependent on natural resources with the increasingly urgent need to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It is easy to complain about public employees: are they not a privileged, elite, sheltered group? It seems that public employees and the cost of public payrolls are, yet again, in the sights of critics from the right. In particular, attacking the ‘burden’ on taxpayers of ‘excessive’ pensions, benefits, and salaries is an easy and simple way to short-circuit a serious political discussion. In Canada, such attacks do not tend to have the racist overtones they have in the US, where a growing segment of public employees come from black, Latino or other racial and ethnic minority groups. Nevertheless, such attacks can be scathing.
One thing about these criticisms is that they essentially miss the point. The purpose of government is not the same as that of business, nor would taxpayers truly want their government to be run like a private for-profit enterprise. Imagine peoples’ reaction if the prices of government services truly followed the laws of supply and demand: the price of healthcare, prescriptions, surgeries, education, road and infrastructure construction, and a whole host of other high-demand items and services would be so high that it would quickly render many private businesses uneconomic. Imagine if every individual had to pay directly for their own education, health care, road use, sewers, personal protection, water, etc.?
The whole idea of having government deliver these services is the general recognition that these common goods are most efficiently (and cheaply!) delivered at collective cost, and by extension, that their operation and administration should be overseen by publicly-appointed administrators who are accountable for the expenses that are taxpayer-funded. You only need to spend a short amount of time in a country with a broken or absent public service to realize the importance of it.
While there is room for debating the extent and scope of public administration, there should also be acknowledgement within the debate that public service is not only legitimate and necessary, but beneficial. In the interests of shifting the discussion and possibly even changing the paradigm for public service, here are some ideas for thinking differently about public service:
When patients get better, when special needs adults are able to live independently, and when kids master a new skill, real social goods have been accomplished that save taxpayers money in the long run. Such a calculation simply cannot be reduced to a yardstick that trades off today’s revenues and expenditures. When these outcomes are compromised by budget cuts, not only do individuals pay a price, but the social costs are borne by everyone in society.
Talk of ‘rewarding excellence’ and ‘reducing the redundant’ does NOT improve performance. Competition is not the point of public service. Trying to incentivize outcomes increases stress and makes people resistant to change. Companies are discovering this on their own in recent years, but they are also discovering that a decent level of compensation is a prerequisite to a motivated, creative, and productive employee in any enterprise.
This may be a hard sell, but next time you’re waiting in line for a drivers’ license or filling out a passport application, consider the effort and expense required to ensure that all of those who use public services are treated consistently and fairly. Then consider what happens when those services are cut or reduced. How much is fairness worth to you?
In the open market, fraud and deceit flourish because businesses lack the ability to police themselves and are highly motivated to abuse their power and superior knowledge. The cost to legitimate businesses in restoring confidence when violations occur is significant. A large part of what government provides is trust and confidence when the market fails, which allows businesses to be profitable. If business is less profitable, economic activity slows and tax revenue falls. Beyond the purely instrumental argument that austerity directly reduces economic growth, austerity is self-defeating because it increases the hidden costs of doing business in hard times. 
Public servants create wealth, and create the conditions that enable private businesses to create wealth. Of course governments should be accountable for costs, especially since the disciplining competition of the market is less sharp and the high demand for public goods and services can tend to push prices up. However, the solution is not to heighten competition but to recognize and account for the benefits that public service provides, and not just to focus on its costs. A truly balanced account would show that taxpayers are investing their resources very efficiently indeed.
In quantum physics, there is the idea that a single particle can have an effect on a different particle many light years away. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’. In today’
s globalized world, economic activity shows similar ‘spooky’ characteristics, indeed, it is virtually a truism to say that what happens in one industry or segment of an economy will inevitably affect others at great distances. What is often overlooked in ideological debates between the right and the left, however, is the entanglement of the free market economy with the activities of government. They are separate, just like particles separated by great distances, but they are so closely entangled. Action in one sphere will unavoidably affect the other. 
Take, for example, the encroaching effects of the ‘fiscal cliff’. An increase in taxes coupled with spending cuts, could potentially cause a drop of as much as 1% of GDP growth in the US. The resulting reduction in economic activity would then impact government revenues, cutting into revenues just as measures to reduce the deficit kick in. This makes these measures, therefore, essentially self-defeating. Even a more measured response to deficit reduction that allows for some spending increase could potentially trigger inflation, since it will unavoidably give the impression that the government will just keep printing money to pay its debt. Inflation could also reduce economic activity and jeopardize growth, although it seems unlikely in the short term, by undermining investor confidence and leading to capital flight. The result, as with the fiscal cliff, is the same: a hit to government revenues and a self-defeating policy.
The first step to breaking the cycle is to recognize that the favoured solutions of both the right and the left are both inappropriate in the present context. Reducing taxes to stimulate the economy without accompanying measures to induce spending and investment just doesn’t work, there is no evidence of it ever having worked, and it does severe damage to the government’s ability to raise revenue. At the same time, government spending does not have the growth-inducing impact as in the past because th
e implied willingness to spend and borrow undermines investor confidence.
The solution lies in the awareness that government is both an economic actor and an economic hedge. Contrary to the arguments on the right, government cannot just ‘get out of the way’ and let the market grow. For one thing, it might grow somewhere else. For another thing, markets need government to backstop their activities and stop them from imploding on themselves. The sooner that people stop thinking of governments as part of the problem, and realize that free markets require governments to make decisions for the common good, the better off both the economy and the government will be. Governments and markets are not the same thing, their purposes are different and their instruments are different, but they are irrevocably enmeshed together.
Dr. Rosalind Warner 
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