What does it mean when President Biden declares an event in which four people died, all of them Trump supporters and only one by violence, the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” and The New York Times marks the anniversary by proclaiming that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now”? The implication is politics as permanent crisis, which sounds strikingly like a definition of war.
This obvious threat inflation, which should be familiar after September 11, is used by governments and private corporations alike to award themselves more unaccountable power. To work, it relies on the public being cowed by the expertise and authority of institutions that operate in secret. These methods have proved to be highly effective for defending the power of America’s bureaucracies.
The problem with bureaucratised secrecy is what it does to the rest of society. As illusions come to seem real and formal mechanisms of truth-seeking appear blocked off, conspiracies offer themselves as a virtuous alternative. To encourage this in a country that already has a deep, native strain of paranoia and wild truth-seeking is a dangerous gamble.
The elements of fantasy and stagecraft present on January 6, from the costumed pageantry at the storming of the Capitol to the Broadway kitsch at its anniversary commemoration, point to the event’s dual origins in the US security state and the paranoid imagination that is a byproduct of government secrecy run amok.
“Secrecy is an institution of the administrative state that developed during the great conflicts of the twentieth century. It is distinctive primarily in that it is all but unexamined,” the scholar and American statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote toward the end of his long career in public life, when he turned his attention to the power in the shadows.
Moynihan, a Democratic Senator from New York, was known for his polarising work on race, poverty and the breakdown of the American family. But in his final published book, the liberal Cold Warrior delivered a revisionist account of the US conflict with the Soviet Union. Though he never wavered on the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause, Moynihan argued that the effort had been weakened and warped by the growth of a bureaucratic culture of secrecy. He delivered a measured but devastating attack on the underworld of administrative institutions better known today as “the deep state”.
In Secrecy: The American Experience, published in 1999, Moynihan argued that US policy had been systematically distorted by intelligence agency assessments that exaggerated the economic and military power of the Soviet Union. Because the agencies operated in secret, the exaggerations were not only shielded from scrutiny but had the perverse effect of fuelling their own growth. Over time, this process fundamentally transformed the American political system. “Secrecy is a form of regulation,” Moynihan wrote in the book’s opening line. This new form of regulation supervened democratic procedures and transferred power to bureaucracies operating in the shadows of the elected government.
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