Dominic Cummings is an unusual man. When I first saw his name, in Tim Shipman’s book Brexit: All Out War, I imagined him as a sort of vast Chesterton or Mycroft Holmes figure, doing everything by the power of mind. But then I saw a picture: and he looked more like a Dickensian character, Traddles or Clennam or someone. Funny, since his critique is that of Dickens in Little Dorrit, that the art of government, regrettably, is “How Not To Do It”.
Cummings is unusual for being both a cog in the machinery of the state and also a spanner in the works of the state. I cannot think of anyone in the history of England who has been both things at once. Lytton Strachey: all spanner and no cog. Lloyd George: all cog and no spanner. Disraeli bent his spanner into a cog. So did J.M. Keynes. Enoch Powell twisted his cog into a spanner. So did Edmund Burke. But Cummings has always been an insider-outsider, a strange in/out figure, spanner and cog.
Not many people in ze media like Cummings. Nick Cohen certainly does not and blames him for not wanting war in Ukraine. In fact, Cohen reminds me that I have something in common with Cummings, namely, Norman Stone:
Cummings’s mentor at Oxford, Norman Stone, a decent historian until the drink did for him, ended his days penning apologias for Hungarian authoritarianism. Viktor Orbán was so impressed by the flattery that he attended Stone’s funeral.
Or (and I am rapping you on the skull with a teaspoon, Cohen), Orban respected Stone, who was a great historian and a great man, and so did Cummings. (I, too, was at the funeral in Budapest; I hear Cummings was at the memorial in London.) Lots of silly things are said about Cummings, especially by those who think by joining preprinted dots. On November 15th 2019 Emily Thornberry in the Commons said: “There are questions about the Prime Minister’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, his relationship with Oxford academic Norman Stone, the mysterious three years that he spent in post-communist Russia aged just 23…” Libby Eyres, who knew Cummings at Exeter College, Oxford, crowed when he was fired from No. 10 by, it was supposed, Carrie Symonds and Allegra Stratton: “Girl power has won the day: now it’s time to let the grown-ups be in charge.” [Slow clap, anyone?] Anyhow, I only mention this to indicate that there is a lot of low-level slurry about Cummings in the press. Whereas he is evidently a considerable man.
The subject today is the deep state. Cummings has recently dilated on ‘The Deep State’ to the Pharos Foundation, in a video posted on YouTube on November 28th. Beverly Turner has picked it up for GB News and it is likely to get more play: you should listen to it. Cummings begins with a naïve historical comparison: he likens our time to the 1840s, on the grounds that our elites are witnessing new technology, the break-up of the old security order, and the rise of mad ideas in the universities. Then he says bureaucracy has taken over government. Aha –
Now, this is where I have to interrupt Cummings and dilate a bit about the deep state.
What is the deep state?
It is a new phrase for an old thing, but actually – as usual – it is not one thing, but two things, and the two things are different, and yet their meanings slide into each other.
First, the phrase. It comes from Turkey, funnily enough. It is derin devlet, where derin is deep, and devlet is state. Our meaning, the meaning in English, the American meaning, is derived from this, but what we mean by it is not exactly what the Turks originally meant by it. So I shall distinguish, a bit abstractly (as things are never as clearly cut as they are in an essay), between derin devlet as a phrase for one thing, and ‘deep state’ as a phrase for another.
- The original meaning of deep state, i.e., derin devlet, is, and I can quote from some literature on the subject: “criminal or rogue elements that have somehow muscled their way into power” (this is from an article by Ryan Gingeras in the academic Middle East Journal of 2011): i.e., gangsters, smugglers, military officers, clandestine agents, all involved in the opium trade, heroin, money laundering, and state security. The term emerged after a scandal in in the 1990s in which a known mafia hitman was killed in a car crash which also killed the Director of the Police Academy in Istanbul and involved an MP. A former President, Suleyman Demirel, said gnomically in 2005: “The deep state is the state itself”, and a scholar called Belma Akcura wrote a book entitled Derin Decvlet Oldu Devlet (The Deep State Was the State), in 2006.
- The translated, Western, meaning of deep state is somewhat at odds with this. Perhaps the emphasis on state security is the same, but we are not talking about crime syndicates – except, perhaps, by happy implication. Rather, we are talking about, in Conrad Black’s words (in the National Interest of March/April 2018), “non-partisan and politically inactive people who are in or near government, and are in practice partisan and often hyperactive in their opposition to the administration”. I said it is a new phrase for an old thing. A lifetime ago, James Burnham called this “the managerial class”, C. Wright Mills called it “the power elite”; more recently, in 2009, Janine R. Wedel called it “the shadow elite”, and Jacob Silverman in New Labor Forum in 2018 suggested that although in theory it was “a shadowy power elite, removed from democratic accountability”, in practice it was “the [Trump] administration’s catch-all term for a nebulous collection of Obama-era appointees and civil service veterans who are working to undermine the Trump agenda”.
Can you see the difference?
Deep State 1 = outlaw, informal, but supporting the established regime.
Deep State 2 = inlaw, formal, but opposed to the established regime.
To speak more plainly, the original deep state was criminals, but our deep state is civil servants.
No wonder that when a selection of pundits was asked in 2018 (in the issue of the National Interest I cited) whether there is a deep state or not they divided fairly neatly on whether they were insiders who took it to be a phrase describing criminals or they were outsiders who took it to be a phrase describing civil servants. Ha, ha. No wonder everyone has difficulty making sense of things.
Anyhow, the short way of making sense of this is that our use of ‘deep state’ for the U.K. or USA is part of our modern supposition that our political order is not, as we formerly thought, a responsible state, but, rather, an extractive and ideological conspiracy carried out by formally non-political elites against (and through and over) the people supposedly represented by political elites: and hence – since we are upset about this discovery – something we want to talk about openly by calling it a “deep state”.
I hope that was useful.
Now, Cummings is extremely good on the problems of the modern deep state in the U.K. He says that politics is theatre, and amusingly calls MPs “NPCs” (I had to check the meaning with my sons, who assured me that NPCs refers to ‘Non-Player Characters’ in computer games): Cummings says they sign the documents in the boxes supplied to them by Sir Humphrey and only worry about their appearance on the BBC the following morning. They want to be seen to be in leadership, want to refer to “my Department”, and, as far as they are concerned, reality can go back to rest at ease in one of F.H. Bradley’s 19th Century philosophical books. Cummings is also good on immigration. And he says Gove only achieved anything at the Department of Education by “purging” the officials.
As Leavis always said, “Yes, but…”
There is a problem.
The problem with Cummings is that he a political rationalist. You may recall that he was, and remains, a Covid-maximalist: that is, he is one of the people who made COVID-19 into something. He believed it, remarkably. He took it to be factual. Whereas it was anything but. Cummings, the great political genius, was too preoccupied to notice that COVID-19 was almost entirely a political artefact, created out of almost nothing, by politicians and pseudo-politicians, including himself.
Cummings is, therefore, half right.
He is right on what is wrong. Right about the symptoms – “shitshow” and all that.
But he is wrong in his reasons. Wrong about the explanation and the remedy. Because he is a rationalist. He thinks problems can be solved by force. He is a bright ideas man.
A word on rationalism. The theorist of ‘rationalism in politics’ was Michael Oakeshott, and Oakeshott, when young, was influenced by the old and brilliant reactionary, whom I just mentioned, F.H. Bradley. The philosophy of Bradley is completely anti-positivist. There are no facts before theories: facts are created by theories. So, for Bradley and Oakeshott, we make our reality. There are limits to how much our reality can be made, if it is historical or physical. But when it is political, there is almost no limit to what can be made. My line about COVID-19 from the start has been that it was of political manufacture. And Cummings was part of this. His language of “the failure of government” is attractive to us, partly, because he is right – there is too much bureaucracy and there is too much holding the doors open for the corporations – but also unattractive, because he makes the argument from a false ground, on a rationalist basis: he thinks government fails because it is inefficient, a simulacrum, ‘fake’. Well! Others would say that this is a sign of the success of government. Government is there to hold a system together, not do anything. It does everything it does to hold everything together – hold its own obesity together.
Cummings operates with the mentality of a maximiser. Maximisation: you might remember it from school mathematics. It is a big thing in business administration and industrial engineering, also, of course, anything involving computers. Maximisation is basically the utilitarianism of the machine. Input – machinery – output. Maximisers, from Bentham onwards, have looked at the state and said, “Inefficient: let us make it more efficient.” (Ironically, missing the point that, for some, maximisation = maximum extraction and maximum inefficiency.)
On the basis of no evidence except everything I know from history, I would like to suggest that no state has been more efficient than any other. No doubt some states have looked more efficient than others. But they have looked more efficient, usually, by looking on benignly while their citizens have been busy; or, latterly, and incrementally, by incorporating more and more of that citizen activity into their own warlike and then welfarelike circumference. The state circumference has increased: adding competitive examinations, ministers, departments, boards, committees, reports, etc: and despite each addition to taxation and expenditure the level of government efficiency has remained what it was in the unreformed parliament of Canning and Peel, or, indeed, what it was under Edward I or Penda the Mercian, i.e., almost entirely inefficient, except for extremely brief instants, like the second phrase of any war, but perhaps not even then. Now, in 2024, instead of Lord Raglan and Tite Barnacle, we have half a million civil servants.
Cummings has two suggestions, which, despite my criticisms, are still worth listening to. As I say, he is a very considerable man: and two inches of words from him are worth ten yards from anyone else. The first is to reverse the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the 1850s which reputedly instituted the modern impersonal anonymous apolitical permanent civil service. The second is to restore ministerial responsibility by restoring political talent to the House of Commons. Aye, and aye. Just as churchmen used to note in the 20th Century that talent chose university over the church, he observes that talent in the 21st Century chooses start-ups and creative destruction of economic corporate life over the theatrical stultifications of politics.
I approve, in a sort of if-I-were-sitting-with-Cummings-with-a-whisky sort of way. But I doubt as well. For Cummings, like most men with a suggestion, has to face the fact that if he strips away a permanent Civil Service: 1. there is no guarantee that he will suddenly get either responsibility or talent in his politicians; and 2. he will inevitably throw us back to the old world of before the 1840s when everything was done by patronage or what was called “jobbery”. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama, the acclaimed thinker, has just written, I find, an academic article in the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration of 2024, entitled ‘In Defence of the Deep State’, in which he says the USA under Trump, by draining the swamp, is likely to “return the country to the 19th Century patronage system”. Like the good academic he is, Fukuyama sits on the fence, saying we need “balance”: a bit of this and a bit of that. Boring, but he is facing the fact that Cummings is more likely to get partisan hacks than experts-techsperts if he abolishes the permanent Civil Service: and then the U.K. will be administered by Douglas Adams’s hairdressers – as well as being offered leadership by them. (Johnson: “Get haircut done”; Sunak: “Comb out to help out”; Starmer: “My father was a quiffmaker.”).
Anyhow, all this aside, it is obvious that ‘deep state’ language has made sense to many of us since COVID-19. It is not easy to analyse: we have the cabal element, the corporate element, but also the ‘mass formation’ and ‘death spiral’ elements, i.e., all the low-level elements which operate in NHS and HR and the various OFSTEDs and OFCOMs as well as in the trundle of the enslaved and ignorant media which has turned Cummings into yet one more ‘alternative’ voice. But let’s face it, SpAds are part of the deep state too.
Yet Cummings, despite his colossal mistake over COVID-19, is a voice worth pondering.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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