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ABSTRACT
The term “deep state” has enjoyed political prominence in recent years, especially in movements around former President Donald Trump. However, the term emerged in the activist milieu after the founding of Students for a Democratic Society, which sought to engender political realignment in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Those on the far right who use the term to level accusations of conspiracy at supposed subversives in the administrative state are unwittingly drawing on a long-running but little-analyzed intellectual tradition. In that tradition, conspiracy theories purport to unmask the real intentions of political actors in order to facilitate cooperation and recruitment across ideological and partisan divides. From the postwar period to the present, conspiracy theories, and the “deep state” vocabulary in particular, circulated freely across the left-right political divide. Authors and activists were attracted to these tropes and texts not merely because they appeared to reveal concrete truths about long-hidden elements of American political life, but also because their very ambiguity enabled them to be flexibly co-opted. Conspiracy theories allowed activists to mobilize around shared gaps in public knowledge about traumatic events like the assassination, activating public dissatisfaction with official explanations of those events. Their ambiguity, coupled with the seeming pervasiveness of conspiracy theorist tropes across political divides, appeared to activists seeking realignment of both the left and the right as a promising tactical opportunity to assert that they and their erstwhile enemies were actually engaged in a shared project. Activists thus came to see conspiracy theory not as the province of an exclusively left or right politics, but as an autonomous and contestable cultural space. This, in turn, led to cross-partisan encounters.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “The John Birch Society and the Conservative Movement.” The National Review 17(42): 914-18.
2 After his expulsion from the JBS in 1964, Oliver (Citation2006) would first accuse Welch of being an agent of a Jewish world conspiracy bent on “neutralizing” the radical right, before subsequently contradicting himself with allegations that Welch himself was also an anti-Semite who had drastically revised The Politician before publication to remove all “references to the Jews.”
3 The Revilo P. Oliver Papers, Buckley to Welch, October 21, 1960.
4 The Revilo P. Oliver Papers, Draskovich to Oliver, April 20, 1962; Draskovich to Oliver, August 12, 1963.
5 Ernie Lazar Archive, Welch to Smith, 1962.
6 Nearly a decade before Welch’s speech, William Guy Carr’s Pawns In The Game (Citation1955) similarly argued there was a connection between Weishaupt’s Illuminati and the communist conspiracy, claiming that both were in turn controlled by a Jewish world conspiracy. It is possible that Welch, who read widely, was influenced by Carr’s book. If so, Welch must have intentionally removed and de-emphasized the anti-Semitic parts of Carr’s narrative. See Ellis Citation2000.
7 Ernie Lazar Archive, Welch to Smith, 1962.
8 Common Sense, No. 411, August 1963.
9 The Social Creditor, Vol. 43, No. 6, June 22, 1963.
10 For some prominent examples, Allen cites Flynn in The Rockefeller File (Citation1976), and discusses his Pearl Harbor advance knowledge theory and relates it to the CFR in None Dare Call It Conspiracy (Citation1971).
11 Libertarian writers would lean on this form of argument to a sometimes-comical extent—for example, activist and techno-libertarian theorist Samuel E. Konkin III dedicated an entire chapter of his An Agorist Primer (Citation2008) to making advance knowledge arguments for every single war involving American forces since the War of 1812 (ibid., 82-89).
12 For an example of one such allegation, see U.S. Congress Special Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations: Summary of Activities of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, The Rockefeller Foundation (1954), p. 1-12, 58-63. Also see Committee member René Wormser’s book, Foundations: Their Power and Influence (Citation1958).
13 Dan Smoot Report, Vol. 7, No. 21.
14 Dan Smoot Report, Vol. 7, No. 11.
15 Dan Smoot Report, Vol. 7, No. 24.
16 Ibid.
17 Specifically, it evoked E. C. Knuth’s The Empire of the City (Citation1944), a self-published anti-British theory that gained some traction with isolationists during the war, and for which Republican Senator Henrik Shipstead, a known anti-Semite and proponent of the Jewish world conspiracy theory, penned an endorsement.
18 New Left Notes, June 24, 1968.
19 The “new class” concept, in turn, was itself influenced by James Burnham’s concept of the “managerial elite,” which had also proved highly influential in the early days of the JBS.
20 Also see New Left Notes, August 12, 1968.
21 For a complete list of directors and advisory board members see, for example, Harold Weisberg Archive, A Disk, Assassination Information Bureau file, Item 20. Oglesby to Weisberg, 4 December, 1978.
22 Harold Weisberg Archive, A Disk, Item 84: AIB JFK Assassination Selected Bibliography.
23 Lesar, along with Jim Hougan and Bud Fensterwald, would later diverge from Weisberg to follow a strategic trail quite similar to the one blazed by Oglesby and the AIB, remarking that serious assassination researchers should create a magazine focused not just on the JFK assassination, but on other “parapolitical” phenomena. This ultimately culminated in their formation of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), a strategic turn which earned the ire of Weisberg, who excoriated Lesar as a “conspiracy theorist.” As this exchange indicates, while “conspiracy theorist” was no pejorative to the activists of the AIB, to the assassination researchers these were fighting words. See Harold Weisberg Archive, L Disk, Item 15: Weisberg to Lesar, 20 October 1994.
24 See, for example, Harold Weisberg Archive, A Disk, AIB File, Weisberg to Goldberg, October 6, 1978; R Disk, Weisberg to Lesar, 13 January 1993.
25 Harold Weisberg Archive, S Disk, Scott File, Item 19, Weisberg to Lesar, June 20, 1973.
26 Harold Weisberg Archive, S Disk, Scott File, Item 18, Weisberg to Lesar, May 2, 1975.
27 Ibid.
28 Harold Weisberg Archive, A Disk, AIB File, Item 84.
29 Harold Weisberg Archive, A Disk, AIB File, Weisberg to Lardner, January 5, 1982.
30 “Study Group On Slayings of King and John Kennedy Is Disbanding,” The New York Times, December 16, 1979.
31 In early 2017, the terminology had already been making its rounds on conservative talk radio even before the appearance of the Steele Dossier, first appearing in episodes of Clyde Lewis’ Ground Zero conspiracy theory program wherein he discussed the Christic Institute’s theories regarding the death of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who was allegedly killed by “the deep state” in 1991.