Fear of tyranny is embedded in America’s origin story. The Declaration of Independence justified revolution by accusing George III of a plot to impose “absolute despotism” on the colonists. But when the British left, the spectre lingered, at least on the extremes. John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, shouting that the Great Emancipator was a tyrant. In the early 20th century, Henry Ford did much to promote the fake claim that a secret Jewish cabal was plotting a world dictatorship.
Meanwhile, as the federal government expanded in response to global conflict, large numbers of dissenting Americans began to spy incipient state oppression – with rather more justification than Booth or Ford.
During the First World War, dissidents found themselves menaced by what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation under, first, the 1917 Espionage Act, then the 1918 Sedition Act, which made criticising the government illegal. But it was after the Second World War that what we now think of as the “deep state” really began to take shape in the imagination, on the left and right alike.
During the New Deal of the 1930s, many on the left had cheered the growth of government. But when the Cold War sparked the McCarthyite hunt for crypto-communists, the state began to seem an implacable, sinister force. In 1947, the National Security Act created both the CIA – America’s first peacetime foreign espionage organisation – and the National Security Agency: a small, secretive group, entrenched deep inside the executive branch. In his 1956 study The Power Elite, the left-wing sociologist C Wright Mills scorned the dominant notion that American politics was an elegant balance of interests. Rather, he argued, corporations, the military and politicians were working in cahoots to concentrate power in unseen rooms, sucking the life out of democracy.
At the same time, elements on the right that had once seen tyranny in the New Deal now cast attempts at racially integrating schools as the merciless advance of liberal dictatorship. In The Invisible Government (1962), a far-right proto-shock jock called Dan Smoot wrote ominously of the terrifying power of the Council on Foreign Relations, and its “amazing web” of allied bodies and supportive corporations. The book went on to become one of the canonical texts of the John Birch Society, the most visible of the radical-right groups that sprang up in post-war America, with perhaps 100,000 members. Its paranoias went well beyond simple anti-communism: its founder preached that “the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal”. Previously, the term “the invisible government” had been used by progressives to call out corrupt corporate influence over politics. But Smoot repurposed it to denounce a conspiracy of globalist schemers, plotting to absorb the US into a “one-world socialist system”.