Conspiracy theorists are almost always wrong and often a bit kooky.
Now Steve Bannon, of all people, reportedly is telling loons on the Right that their favorite current conspiracy theory is garbage. For once, Bannon is right.
Bannon, the former major-domo at Breitbart News and onetime Trump White House strategist, was talking about the idea of a “deep state.” The phrase has come to refer to the rumor of a large, permanent, well organized, and largely hidden cadre of officials in law enforcement, intelligence, and the civil service who supposedly work in concert to subvert the people’s will and push leftist policies. Along with “swamp,” “neocon,” “treason,” and “coup,” it has become an almost mindless epithet hurled by Trump backers against their perceived enemies.
Bannon’s Breitbart was a leading popularizer of the notion that a sinister “deep state” exists. Now, though, the British Guardian reports that in a new, soon-to-be-released book, Bannon tells author James Stewart that “the deep state conspiracy theory is for nut cases.”
As the Guardian reported, Bannon said there is indeed a formidable government bureaucracy in the United States, but “there’s nothing ‘deep’ about it. It’s right in your face.”
Any conservative who has worked in Washington knows the federal bureaucracy leans rather heavily leftward overall. We also know that some operate in subterfuge so that they can claim “neutral” expertise when they are carrying out a politicized agenda. But Bannon is right: To attribute this to some overarching and sinister organization is to invent hobgoblins from thin air.
Virtually everyone rightward of the establishment media correctly scoffed and guffawed in the 1990s when Hillary Clinton started spouting off about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Mrs. Clinton’s allegation, in truth a cynical means of deflecting attention from her own corruption, was nonsense. To see the same conservatives who scoffed at her now believe in a vast left-wing conspiracy is to see the long-ago calumny about “the paranoid style in American politics” actually become reality.
Now we have Bannon, who arguably did more than anybody short of President Trump himself to spread the “deep state” idea, tell us in effect that the charge was a gimmick meant to fire up “the base” and make Trump look like a victim.
People need to keep their wits about them. The reality of a civil-service-protected liberal bureaucracy is bad enough as to require sober planning and stalwart action to combat it, transparently and honestly. Fevered paranoia makes that job only more difficult and thus is counterproductive. Deeply so.
