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Americans have long struggled to define the notion of the state. They have simultaneously denied the very existence of a genuine state in the European sense and believed in a conspiratorial bureaucratic apparatus that controls the levers of government. This is what Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump, called the “deep state”: a supposed cabal of bureaucrats seeking to thwart the authority of the new president from within in order to prevent him from reducing and reforming a sprawling federal administrative apparatus.
The Long History of State Paranoia
According to Stephen Skowronek, a scholar of American governmental institutions, “the Trump administration invokes the deep state whenever it runs up against resistance from the institutions it is charged with overseeing.” But belief in a deep state also serves as a window into a longer, more obscure American tradition, reflected in what the historian Richard Hofstadter, writing about American politics, called in 1964 the “paranoid style.” Hofstadter linked this to the Anti-Masonic Party formed between 1820 and 1830, to Father Coughlin’s antisemitic followers in the 1930s, and to white conservatives in California who, in the 1950s, founded the John Birch Society, an organization devoted to combating the supposed clandestine influence of communists in the United States.
For conspiracy theorists, financial and banking interests provide the perfect pretext to legitimise all their suspicions. While farmers and manufacturers design and produce tangible goods, financiers would manipulate capitalism in abstract terms to their own advantage, turning it into an inexhaustible source of privileges.
This is not a story tied to the twenty-first century or to social media. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, applied an eighteenth‑century Dutch and British innovation to the new Bank of the United States, whose charter was approved by Congress for a twenty-year term in 1791.
This innovation consisted of granting a consortium of wealthy financiers the right to issue letters of credit, and later banknotes, to finance the government’s expenses and commercial exchanges. In 1816, a second bank obtained a similar charter for the same duration. Yet, caught in the political divisions of the Jackson era, it was accused of representing the “deep state” of its day, to the point of losing its official status in 1836. The Treasury even pulled its deposits, and in 1837 a recession followed. Private banks chartered by the states then took over, providing loans and issuing banknotes, often relying on the speculative value of newly opened territories and the appetite of the British textile industry for Southern cotton. In other words, the suspicion of a fusion between financial power and public power is not a phenomenon confined to the twenty‑first century.
The Construction of the Administrative State
Following the vast territorial acquisitions of 1803, 1819 and 1848, the substantial expansion of federally held lands and the settlement along the country’s river networks, the United States attracted investors from the East Coast and abroad. The nation had overcome the threats posed by major powers while managing to confine Indigenous peoples to ever smaller tracts. It also benefited from a booming overseas demand for cotton. Indeed, European colonial powers abroad followed similar dynamics rooted in violence, expropriation and resettlement. Yet white North Americans enjoyed a much vaster territory and a far less densely populated native population.
For proponents of conspiracy theories, financial and banking interests provide the perfect pretext to legitimise all their suspicions.
Charles S. Maier
Throughout the nineteenth century, the governments of the states continued to grant concessions to private companies for building roads, canals and bridges, often offering preferential financing terms and the right to collect revenues and tolls, without claiming outright ownership of the infrastructure. The recruitment, conscription, and heavy casualties of the Civil War imposed new national missions, leading to the creation of the United States Public Health Service, a multi‑purpose institution. In the following decades, significant administrations were established to manage inter‑state transportation, food and drug safety, veterans’ pensions and the reform of the civil service.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States built an overseas empire at the expense of Spain and created administrative agencies tasked with safeguarding food and drug safety, as well as managing national parks.
Following World War I, the federal government intervened to regulate the many emerging radio stations, without nationalizing them, by awarding and auctioning off the “bands of frequencies.” Congress formally created these agencies and approved their budgets, but left their management in the hands of the executive departments, opening the door to potential conflicts that still cast a shadow today. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reinforced local welfare systems strained by mass unemployment, but also launched new public works and protected the legal status of unions. It also legislated a national pension system requiring contributions by both employers and workers, and set out to organize the economy in preparation for World War II. As public agencies expanded, economists pointed to the growth of corporate bureaucracies around 1930: leaders and professional managers, rather than traditional founder‑owners, were becoming the decisive actors in major corporations. The bureaucracy itself acquired a kind of mystique in the eyes of scholars and the media.
These tendencies crossed political boundaries. The governments of both Republicans and Democrats contributed to the emergence of this “administrative state,” as social scientists would call it later. Agencies continued to multiply. Roosevelt created the Civil Aeronautics Authority in 1938, which became the Federal Aviation Administration two decades later. In 1970, President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), attached to the Department of Labor. The expansion of the administrative state has been linked to underlying socio‑economic trends: responses that were less political and more functional to industrialization, technological innovation, urban development, massive immigration (despite efforts to restrict it between 1924 and 1965) and a population that grew from under 4 million at independence to 130 million by 1940, and to 340 million today.
This administrative proliferation carried a budgetary footprint. Public spending rose from roughly 10–15% of GDP before the Great Depression to about 35% since the 1960s. The share of revenue raised at the national level — and thus by the federal government — accounts for about 60% of that 35% of GDP, primarily through personal income taxes, corporate profits taxes, and social security contributions, shared between employers and employees. These taxes fund defense, Social Security pensions, road infrastructure, national health insurance (Medicare), the vast veterans’ hospital network, and the interest on the public debt. It should be noted, however, that 25–35% of federal expenditures are redistributed as subsidies to states and local authorities.
The political leaders of both major parties contributed to the emergence of this “administrative state,” as social scientists would call it later.
Charles S. Maier
The Republican and Democratic political elites repeatedly decried the growth of the public sector. Yet while the Truman administration pursued a substantial and sustained increase in military spending in 1949–1950, social scientists warned that a new configuration of public policy decision making was emerging in the long term, forging tight ties between the Pentagon and the defense industries. As early as 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills described leaders in both the public and private sectors as the “power elite.”
Even President Eisenhower, not particularly prone to conspiracy theories, warned about the “military‑industrial complex” when he left office in January 1961. The term might seem startling, but it rested on observable developments. Military expenditures, which had reached about 40% of GDP at the end of World War II (a proportion somewhat lower than that of other belligerent powers), fell briefly to roughly 5% of the federal budget between 1946 and 1949. They rose again with Cold War rearmament to about 13% of the federal budget, or roughly 2–3% of GDP. It is worth noting that the Truman administration had already decided to raise military spending for 1949–1950, even before the outbreak of the Korean War. The communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade had already heightened a sense of confrontation. Admittedly, this new engagement represented only a tenth of the scale of World War II needs and seemed manageable. Yet Eisenhower was right: the links between the Pentagon and the American defense industry would become a constant, as evidenced by every political gathering place in the country, from conference rooms to golf courses.
For the MAGA Movement, It’s Not the Size of the State That Is the Problem, But the Rule of Law
Despite these trends, it is not so much the budgetary growth that, in Bannon’s eyes and those of other Trump loyalists, reveals the dangers of a bureaucracy tethered to this “deep state.”
American conservatives have long fought to curb public expenditure and lighten administrative regulations. Sometimes, via ballot initiatives, they have managed to impose caps on taxes and debt at the state level, notably in California. But the entity Bannon and others attack as the “deep state” is simply what most observers, left and right, recognise as the State in plain terms — a public administration or bureaucracy that applies laws and decrees in accordance with constitutional provisions and the legislation approved by elected assemblies and executive authorities.
If Bannon sees an obstacle, it is not the size of the state or its prerogatives, but that civil servants dared to resist Trump’s attempts to overturn electoral results, opposed fiscal measures that would have enriched his family’s fortune, or blocked his personal vendettas. In short, those labelled as the “deep state” are those who strive to preserve the classical notion of a government of laws, not of men. It is the legal order that obstructs the president’s ability to govern directly.
A state governed by the rule of law always depends on the people who interpret the laws. In the United States, constitutional questions are ultimately interpreted by the nine justices of the Supreme Court. So far, they have tended to vindicate the president’s claim to dispense the full powers of the executive (the so‑called unitary executive theory) and to define the scope of that power, by votes of 7–2, 6–3 or 5–4.
The entity that Bannon and others attack as the “deep state” is simply what most observers, left and right, recognise as the State, full stop.
Charles S. Maier
Yet if the Court can affirm the president’s power, the Constitution also establishes the Supreme Court and assigns Congress the power to create the federal courts beneath it. Confronted in the 1930s with a string of systematically unfavorable decisions by judges appointed by previous Republican presidents, President Roosevelt contemplated enlarging the number of Supreme Court justices to secure a loyal majority (the so‑called court packing). He relinquished the plan in the face of public backlash, but the justices moderated their opposition and handed down a few favorable rulings. Nevertheless, the possibility of reforming the Supreme Court, whether by imposing term limits or by expanding its size, may no longer be taboo. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, court reform could well appear on the agenda.
When historians turn their eyes to the recent phenomena of the Trump era, they may note, with a touch of irony, that while Bannon and other MAGA supporters denounce the supposed resistance of the “deep state” to Trump’s program, the federal government has been making the American state more vulnerable than ever. Thus, the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), described as an initiative to curb needless government spending and entrusted to Elon Musk — a citizen of the United States, but also of South Africa and Canada — has dealt a heavy blow to public investment in education, research and other social programs, with consequences that extend well beyond American borders. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), whose budget has been cut, continues to play a major role in public health in developing countries.
A Patrimonial State or an American Fascism?
Thus, it is not easy to pin a familiar historical or theoretical label on this swirl of private and public claims. The German sociologist Max Weber developed the concepts of patrimonial state and bureaucratic state to describe different forms of governance. These categories are broad, aimed at grasping a wide variety of institutions across history and the world. They were later complemented by the notion of neo-patrimonialism, describing a regime formally governed by rules but in practice operated through the ruler’s family and clientelist networks. Weber also delineated sources of legitimate authority as well as the structures of power: tradition, charisma, and rational‑legal authority. But what use are these classifications when narcissism, inconsistency, and self‑glorification are at play? Trump’s authority, in particular, springs from a largely negative quality: his capacity to channel the resentments that many Americans have come to feel toward what they perceive as the overbearing reach of political correctness.
The difficulty of classification has consequences: the fuzziness of the categories extends to those who oppose his regime. Mass demonstrations across the country against the Trump administration were organized under the banner of “No Kings,” implying that monarchies could wield authoritarian power that a presidential regime should be immune to. Even if the demonstrators acknowledge the existence of constitutional monarchies in Britain and Scandinavia, older conceptions of monarchy endowed it with arbitrary, even sacred powers, making the label plausible in certain contexts.
Some Americans, worried about Donald Trump’s thirst for power, have at times seen in him a would‑be fascist. But one must distinguish his personal authoritarian impulses from the danger that would come with a fascist regime. The MAGA movement is not a coherent fascist party; the United States has not endured a major defeat in war, despite the catastrophic withdrawals from Vietnam and, a generation later, from Afghanistan. The country has not suffered hyperinflation nor mass unemployment as in Weimar Germany.
Deindustrialization and persistent pockets of poverty, however, have undeniably contributed to a sense of economic vulnerability among Americans. While Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups are far from any Nazi stormtrooper identity, Trump did encourage their march on the Capitol after losing the 2020 election, hinting at the macabre possibility of real carnage. The intertwining of American and Israeli influence networks with hard‑line, adversarial positions on Middle East events, combined with campus protests since October 2023, has also fed the perception that the long‑standing political stability of the United States could quickly prove fragile. The deeply ingrained conviction that “this couldn’t happen here”—a nod to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel in which the United States slides into a blend of old‑fashioned racism and modern totalitarian terror—will be put to the test in the November midterm elections. But that does not answer the pressing question: what exactly could not happen here?
That question brings us to consider the possibility of American fascism. By American fascism one might mean the equivalent in left‑wing terms of the “deep state” so feared by Bannon.
Trump’s authority stems more from a negative quality: his ability to channel resentments.
Charles S. Maier
The debates over the nature of fascism have raged in the United States since European scholars took refuge here in the 1930s and 1940s. For these émigré theorists, whose thinking had been formed by Marxist categories, repression of unions and the Social Democratic Party appeared to be crucial steps in the establishment of Nazi power. Contemporary American debates on state theory and constitutionalism have not focused as intensely on collective labor rights, which had weakened since the 1940s and 1950s. The Weimar constitutional order fractured fundamentally in 1930, especially around the roles of capital and labor.
In the United States, constitutional conflicts have revolved around racial questions and the responses they demanded. Since the 1970s, individual reproductive rights (abortion) have also dominated discussions; since the ascent of President Trump, questions about freedom of expression have resurfaced, amplified today by the omnipresence of the Internet. The current debates under Trump’s presidencies have also centered on the role and authority of federal commissions whose members are appointed by the president but funded by Congress.
For the moment, with congressional Republicans unwilling to challenge the president’s claims of executive supremacy, the legal battles have taken center stage. As is often the case in American law, many questions are argued on opaque procedural grounds. Opponents seek injunctions against his decrees, while Justice Department lawyers seek to lift (or suspend) those injunctions. The cases proceed slowly from trial courts to the Supreme Court.
A Dramatic Need for New Concepts to Analyze the Growing Power of Big Businesses in the United States
The “deep state,” as Steve Bannon defines it, has served as a powerful metaphor for Americans seeking political bearings.
But it is, above all, an archaic analytic concept. It reflects the fact that the American state has entered a phase of exceptional instability, exposed to the new class divisions created by the dizzying transformations of the digital era. The central institutional question is whether a constitutional state worthy of the name can survive the maneuvers of Silicon Valley’s leaders, who, as a class, regard themselves as possessing extraordinary insight and rely on winning the favor of a president who also believes in his own exceptional abilities and in his right to reshape global and American politics. Who needs traditional fascism to impose a regime that so openly disdains the rule of law and erases the old distinctions between public power and private interests?