Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If one is wondering why the Trump administration has been so epically incompetent in handling the coronavirus epidemic, the answer is surprisingly simple: the Advent of the Shallow State. In contrast to the Deep State, the Shallow State is actually real and measurable. It is also the predictable result of the Republican’s decades long assault on every facet of government in the name of limited government, a seemingly worthy objective that has devolved from a cogent ideological doctrine to limit the scale of government, to questioning and vilifying government itself and specifically those employed by it.  

This is exemplified by the invocation of The Deep State slur, a non-sensible notion proposing that a vast conspiracy exists, similar to Pizzagate, where scheming government workers, apparently embedded in government by virtue of their abilities to do the jobs they were hired to do, strive to undermine the righteous Republican zealots who have come the “fix” government. These zealots are by and large, remarkably inept and manifestly unqualified for the jobs they have taken, taken with the understanding that, not only would they endeavor to undermine and preferably dismantle whatever government agency they were appointed to lead, they would do so by uniformly disparaging those who work beside them. This is what has come to exemplify the Republican approach to governance, a reflection of the relentless intellectual hollowing-out of conservative ideology that is now a cynical, nihilistic crusade against government writ large that doesn’t even pretend to offer reasonable alternative solutions, just a never-ending jeremiad that exemplifies an utter lack of sincerity, creativity and serious policy-making in the Republican party.  The best example of this dichotomy is the zealous and never-ending quest to eliminate the ACA without even pretending to propose a viable alternative in its place.

The result is the Shallow State, a logical realization of Republicans’ decades-old campaign to render government inoperative in lieu of presenting a rational and practical solution for limiting its scale. If the American people have by and large opposed this wholesale dismantling and undermining of government, Republicans now resort to any stratagem that will effectively accomplish this task including; lying to and deceiving the public, read the endless cries of “fake news” (a similar dynamic has manifested itself in conservative journalism), in the hopes they won’t notice what’s occurring in plain sight; attempting to corrupt political processes using tools such as voter disenfranchisement, denying access to polling stations, and gerrymandering; undermining government officials no matter the importance of the topic (the coronanvirus being the latest example); stacking courts with ideological partisans rather than sober, fair-minded jurists, many of whom are remarkably unqualified; renouncing and belittling decades-old norms and policies, supported traditionally by both Republicans and Democrats, in a vain attempt to mollify their Dear Leader; and a wide array of other acts meant to service the goal of realizing the Shallow State or, really the abnegation of the concept of governing free societies itself. 

The party of responsible conservatism is now the party of arrogance, incompetence, and duplicity leavened by the required stunning and brazen hypocrisy in order to carry it out. While the Trump administration revels in its brash pomposity and belligerent ineptitude, the Republican Congress trips over itself to grovel shamelessly before them and heap sycophantic praise for that ineptitude, confident that they won’t be held accountable by voters either through wholesale deception or thinking themselves immunized by their slavish devotion to Trump, principles and ethics thrown to the wind in the process. And the Shallow State is born, led by the shallowest of government employees, Donald Trump.  

To be clear, this isn’t limited government, it’s wasteful, ineffective and self-destroying government that casts everyone working in it as a villain, and I’d include the military in that definition since they are all receiving a paycheck from Uncle Sam and heaven help them if they cross Dear Leader, and posits that government itself is meaningless and unnecessary. One might say that traditional Republican orthodoxy doesn’t state this. That’s the old, pre-Trump, pre-Tea Party orthodoxy. Today’s Republican Party is essentially a nihilistic, theocratic, hypocritical confederacy of desperate opportunists thoroughly lacking in practical solutions to important issues like immigration, healthcare, balanced budgets, individual rights, human rights, intelligent tax policy, workforce development, affordable housing, climate change, education, international relations, and most of all, limited government.  

This is the expected outcome of an ideological movement that has devolved into a self-reinforcing failure whose predictable result is to anoint a stunningly unqualified reality star buffoon such as Donald Trump as its leader and really, party tyrant. A quote from Ayn Rand, ostensibly a hero of the Tea Party movement but who I would imagine to be disgusted by the current state of the Republican Party seems fitting: “The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum.” Just so, limited government is a laudable goal, incompetent, immoral and wasteful government, exemplified by the Shallow State, is the vacuum that enables far worse acts to come. As Massa Gessen said in 2017: “Militant incompetence and autocracy are not in opposition: They are two sides of a coin.” Such is the danger of the Shallow State, an incompetent, corrupt shell of governance that provides fertile ground for the tyranny to come.

Originally published March 3rd, 2020.