Aaron Good on the Deep State and American Empire

Class Unity spoke with political scientist and historian Aaron Good about the deep state, imperialism, elite conflict, and the accelerating crisis of the United States-led world order. The conversation explores how clandestine power, corporate oligarchy, media institutions, and a money-dominated electoral system combine to limit democratic control. Good also considers what parts of the political left and right understand—or fail to understand—about empire, nationalism, international politics, and the possibility of class solidarity. His book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State develops these arguments in greater historical depth, and his American Exception podcast continues the same inquiry. The original Class Unity conversation can be viewed on YouTube.

 

Class Unity

Welcome, Aaron, and thank you for joining us. We usually begin by giving our guests a chance to describe their work and what they have been thinking about lately. Would you like to start there?

Aaron Good

Thank you for having me. I host a podcast, publish some episodes on video, and do a great many interviews, so I am rarely short of things to say. My path toward studying the darker and more criminal dimensions of the American state began after I worked on a presidential campaign that promised hope and change. I expected the new administration to reverse the previous administration’s most brazen abuses, perhaps prosecute serious crimes, and change course in the Middle East. None of that happened. Watching continuity prevail over electoral change forced me to look more seriously at the structure behind the visible government.

That led to an article I published in 2015 and, eventually, to my book. I tried to develop a theory of the deep state and of the tripartite American state. In political science, a regime is the full set of institutions that determines who actually commands the state. In ordinary Western speech, however, “regime” is usually reserved for governments the West dislikes, while our own system is described simply as a government in which the people are sovereign. That flattering distinction is not very convincing.

Arguments that seemed controversial when I first made them now look increasingly self-evident. I sometimes wish the historical record had proved me wrong. It would be reassuring to discover that the rule of law still constrained power and that sufficiently serious crimes brought accountability. Instead, the current period has made the lawlessness of the system unusually open. Scandals surrounding the presidency, the destruction in Gaza, bipartisan support for military escalation, and the absence of serious demands for accountability all point to a dangerous moment. The prospects for effective political organization may be limited right now, but one democratic freedom we still possess is the ability to speak honestly about what is happening. That is worth doing.

Class Unity

We enjoyed your book and want to begin with the deep state. An older formulation describes a visible government that is theoretically controllable through elections and, beneath it, a hybrid of public and private institutions that follows a more consistent course regardless of which party formally holds office. It stresses that this structure is not necessarily a secret cabal: much of it operates in plain sight, and private enterprise is integral to it. What does that account get right, and how do you use the term?

Aaron Good

It gets a good deal right, especially by locating Wall Street and corporate power near the apex of the system. I use “deep state” in two related senses. The first is narrower: the clandestine part of the governing apparatus. This is not merely the publicly acknowledged national-security bureaucracy. It includes the most secretive portions of the intelligence services, as well as tolerated or protected elements of organized crime and other covert networks. Such forces do not reliably answer to electoral authority and can sometimes undermine even the declared policy of the national-security state.

A historical president’s struggle with the intelligence establishment illustrates the point. During the scandal that removed him from office, figures within and around the intelligence apparatus worked to damage him. He dismissed the agency’s director and installed someone he hoped would uncover compromising information, yet he still could not bring the relevant forces under control or determine who ultimately stood behind the operation. Whatever one thinks of that president, the episode shows that even the formal head of state may not understand where decisive power lies.

The second sense is broader and might better be called the deep regime. It includes all the institutions that make top-down governance possible inside a nominal democracy. The concentrated ownership of the media belongs here, as does an electoral system in which candidates assemble coalitions of wealthy patrons and then compete against opponents doing the same. Power is therefore more pervasive than the image of a hidden room full of plotters suggests. It may be more like a social stratum or an environment that conditions every major political decision.

At the same time, the ruling class is not monolithic. Elite factions conflict with one another, and those conflicts help explain spectacular episodes that a purely functional account of capitalism can miss: assassinations, political blackmail, covert operations, and scandals involving compromised officials. If class interests were completely unified and self-executing, there would be little need for blackmail networks or clandestine struggles. Historical materialism remains indispensable; in a compressed sense one could even say that the deep state is capitalism. But the internal contests among elites, and the dirty methods used to settle them, are also historically consequential.

The older definition is useful but somewhat sanitized because it does not travel very far into political assassinations, covert violence, or other taboo subjects. Still, its mainstream exposure helped make the underlying idea harder to dismiss. The phrase was later appropriated and distorted, often becoming a partisan slogan. Yet public awareness has grown that elections do not exhaust the structure of power and that a regime exists beyond the officials whose names appear on a ballot.

Class Unity

Let us turn to imperialism. One influential definition describes it as a project in which national grandeur masks schemes designed for vested business interests—especially absentee owners seeking markets, resources, and profits beyond the nation’s borders. How do you understand imperialism?

Aaron Good

That is a strong definition. The most useful concise formulation, in my view, is that imperialism is the process by which the elites of one nation expropriate the resources, markets, and labor of another for their own enrichment. The important point is that an elite project is presented as the national interest. Rentier interests—the people whose property generates income while they sleep—can devote a portion of that wealth to dominating the political system and the machinery of the state. They then launch or sustain imperial enterprises that produce still more wealth and power.

For a long time this was a competitive project among Western powers. Two world wars largely settled that rivalry, leaving the United States as the managing center of a wider Western imperial capitalism. That arrangement has endured for roughly eight decades. We are now watching it encounter the same limits that have confronted previous empires.

Class Unity

Are there important differences between right-wing and left-wing uses of “deep state” and “imperialism”?

Aaron Good

On the right, the deep state often becomes a floating signifier—an occult force blamed for everything without a coherent account of capitalism. Disturbing phenomena such as blackmail or sexual abuse may be treated as the system’s ultimate motive rather than as instruments inside a more intelligible structure of power. Without a critique of capitalism, it is difficult to reach a complete account. Even so, a growing number of conservatives recognize that corporate oligarchs govern major parts of social life. They may describe those oligarchs through cultural or ethnic categories, but they are nevertheless encountering the reality of concentrated corporate power.

Much of the institutional left has a different limitation. It struggles to confront the lawlessness of the state because journalism and academia have long maintained career-ending red lines around political assassinations, covert action, and similar subjects. If you cannot acknowledge that unelected apparatuses have repeatedly vetoed democratic outcomes, you misunderstand the regime. The more radical anti-imperialist left is often better equipped to recognize this. It would be absurd to imagine that a state capable of extreme covert violence abroad becomes scrupulously lawful at home.

Both left and right therefore contain useful insights and serious evasions. Some libertarian or conservative anti-imperialists are more valuable on questions of war than nominal leftists who support intervention after intervention. My first political test is opposition to Western imperial capitalism, because it is among the greatest threats to human civilization. Labels matter less than whether someone is prepared to confront that system consistently.

Class Unity

What do people who identify as leftists or Marxists misunderstand about practical politics, international politics, and conflict within the ruling class?

Aaron Good

The left should begin by uniting around opposition to imperial capitalism. It should step away from a liberal culture-war cosmology and articulate a broadly popular material program. I sometimes call the needed approach dialectical realism: retain a structural understanding of capitalism while paying attention to contingency, elite conflict, national institutions, and the actual balance of forces.

The claim that the ruling class is not monolithic matters here. Elite factions may share an interest in preserving class domination, but they disagree sharply over strategy, foreign alliances, and the distribution of rewards. During the late twentieth century, for example, there was a serious establishment dispute over the American relationship with Israel and the possibility of a Palestinian state. Scandals, leaks, and factional maneuvers helped defeat one wing of the establishment. The ascendant faction later fused the project of maintaining a dollar-centered global order with a project of remaking the Middle East through war.

A purely rational model of class interest cannot explain everything that followed. Oligarchic factions use assassination, intelligence services, media campaigns, think tanks, money, and blackmail. They can also become trapped by ideology and make catastrophically irrational choices. We need to be conspiracy realists: neither dismissing every covert explanation in advance nor embracing every spectacular theory without evidence. Power frequently conspires, but each claim still has to be investigated.

Class Unity

Does the political right get anything important right that the left tends to miss?

Aaron Good

At moments, parts of the right have shown more skepticism toward pharmaceutical power, regulatory capture, emergency authority, and the suppression of debate. During the pandemic, many people on the left treated confidence in institutions as a political virtue, even though those institutions are deeply entangled with profit and state power. In my view, serious questions about the origin of the virus, official responsibility, and the long-term consequences of emergency policy were prematurely placed outside acceptable discussion. Whatever conclusion one reaches, the left should not outsource its judgment to corporations or security agencies.

The right also understands, at least instinctively, that nationalism cannot simply be wished away. The left often treats any national attachment as equivalent to chauvinism or imperialism. But people inhabit national political communities, and national sovereignty has frequently been a vehicle for anti-colonial liberation. A popular American nationalism could oppose empire by distinguishing the interests of ordinary people from the interests of corporations and the military apparatus. It could support lawful, peaceful international cooperation rather than global domination.

There is no functioning international workers’ movement presently capable of replacing the nation as the practical unit of democratic politics. That does not mean celebrating militarism or exclusion. It means recognizing the terrain on which people can actually contest power. The national interest of working people is not the same thing as the global interest of an imperial ruling class.

Class Unity

What could bring such a politics into being?

Aaron Good

The grim answer is that the best opening may come from a major defeat for the United States on the world stage. The political system does not reliably transmit popular preferences, and empires usually change course only after overreach produces crisis. There can be hope in hopelessness: the existing order may be too rigid to reform itself, yet its failures can create a space that did not previously exist.

I worry that ruling elites are trying to prepare for this future by substituting automated systems for human cooperation—artificial intelligence, immense data centers, robotics, and new capacities for surveillance and coercion. Artificial intelligence therefore belongs alongside inequality, climate disruption, and nuclear war as an existential danger. The hopeful possibility is that a political reckoning arrives before those technologies make democratic resistance even more difficult.

Class Unity

To what extent is the Western left controlled opposition or infiltrated, and to what extent is it simply deceiving itself? Many institutions that claim the left label are quick to police anti-imperialist views and to denounce dissidents.

Aaron Good

It is impossible to know the exact scale of conscious infiltration. Institutions can make sincere people perform the role of infiltrators without their ever receiving instructions. Social engineering surely occurs, but incentives, funding, professional discipline, and status competition can produce much of the same behavior. People learn which subjects end careers and which formulations win grants, publication, or social approval.

In my view, a left that systematically opposes anti-imperialism ends up functioning as either an instrument or a dupe of power. Foundation-funded outlets may command large budgets while genuinely dissident organizations remain financially precarious. The contrast is revealing even when we cannot trace every relationship. Digital politics adds fake identities, manipulation, and atomization to the older mechanisms of control.

Our culture also rewards narcissism, personal branding, and fashionable moral performance. The regime can amplify those tendencies because they prevent durable solidarity. The answer is not endless suspicion of everyone around us; that produces more atomization. We need a persuasive politics of solidarity able to survive disagreement. A breakdown in the existing hegemony may create an opening for it.

Class Unity

What is the right unit of analysis for international politics and for the class composition of states? One prominent perspective emphasizes the possibility of lawful international cooperation and accommodation among sovereign states, while another treats great-power rivalry and international anarchy as permanent features of world politics. How do you assess those approaches?

Aaron Good

Both offer something useful. I am more sympathetic to the possibility of lawful, peaceful internationalism and a cooperative multipolar order. The first perspective has developed toward a strong critique of the national-security state, war, and the containment of China. The realist perspective is more pessimistic and assumes enduring competition among great powers, but it can be exceptionally sober about the influence of lobbies and the constraints on state behavior.

I do not think war among major powers is inevitable. States can accommodate China’s development and the legitimate national aspirations of other peoples. Earlier American leaders and international officials sometimes expressed elements of that vision, although they were constrained or removed before they could realize it. Intellectuals working outside government can now preserve a form of internationalism that the state itself has largely abandoned. Both perspectives are preferable to the policy establishment’s habit of dressing every escalation in moral language.

Class Unity

How do you understand the present condition of the United States and its empire? We see confrontation with Russia through Ukraine, threats against Venezuela and Iran, the rise of alternative international groupings, pressure on dollar hegemony, and increasingly open struggles over resources. Are we witnessing an implosion, and how far might the ruling class go to prevent it?

Aaron Good

This is not a normal period. The rhetoric and conduct of the state have become much more brazen. Two linked projects—the attempt to construct a regional order around an expansionist Israel and the attempt to preserve a unipolar dollar empire—are both running into severe limits.

The expansion of the Western military alliance and the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 helped produce the confrontation with Russia. Whatever criticisms one makes of Russia, its conduct has often been more restrained than its raw military capacity would permit, while the most aggressive American faction has treated any accommodation as unacceptable. The United States repeatedly withdraws from agreements and treaties, then describes the predictable reaction of other states as unprovoked aggression. That pattern steadily destroys the credibility needed for diplomacy.

The operation against Venezuela and the effort to seize control of its oil reveal a similar lawlessness. I see those moves partly in relation to possible conflict with Iran and the vulnerability of Persian Gulf oil. A financial empire may create money, sanctions, and accounting claims, but it cannot conjure physical energy, infrastructure, or industrial capacity. Those material constraints will become more severe as dollar dominance erodes. The date and mechanism of a break are uncertain, but shortages and financial instability are likely to interact.

Europe’s deindustrialization, particularly in Germany, shows how irrational the system has become. Governments have accepted policies that damage their own productive base in order to preserve Atlantic discipline. Some elites may be insulated enough to imagine that even a nuclear gamble is preferable to losing their status or facing accountability. That is why imperial decline is so dangerous: a failing order may take risks that a confident one would avoid.

Class Unity

There are claims that the operation against Venezuela was staged or arranged in advance. Do you find that plausible?

Aaron Good

I find insider betrayal plausible; that is different from claiming that the country’s leader willingly participated in the entire operation. Extraordinary theories require evidence, and one should not leap from an anomaly to a complete story. But it would also be naïve to rule out covert collaboration in a system with a long history of bribery, intelligence penetration, and palace intrigue. My best judgment is that people within the security or governmental apparatus facilitated the operation. Whatever the precise mechanism, the result is a tragedy for Venezuela.

Class Unity

Could the transatlantic ruling class behave like a leader who is willing to damage an entire political order in order to avoid prison or personal ruin?

Aaron Good

Some factions could. The problem is deeper than any single officeholder, because a coalition of political, financial, military, and intelligence interests has developed around the same course. Extremely wealthy owners may expect their assets to protect them through a collapse, while state operators have more reason to fear legal liability. That difference can make the latter especially reckless.

History also teaches the oligarchs that they may survive catastrophe. Industrial and financial elites in defeated twentieth-century powers often retained substantial wealth and influence, while Western intelligence services absorbed useful figures from the defeated far right into the anti-communist apparatus. If the American empire loses its external capacity, however, the domestic political calculation may change. Ending the billionaire class could become thinkable in a way that it is not under a triumphant empire.

Class Unity

How does Germany fit into this picture, including the growth of its insurgent right?

Aaron Good

My detailed knowledge of that party is limited, so I would rather speak about the broader structure. European sovereignty has remained heavily constrained by American power. Democratic choices can be vetoed when they threaten the Atlantic order. The destruction of the Baltic gas pipelines, the long effort to prevent durable German-Russian economic cooperation, and the history of clandestine stay-behind networks all illustrate how coercion shadows formal democracy.

Germany and Japan became the two postwar military bookends of American power across Eurasia. Containing communism was only part of the purpose. The larger objective was to prevent independent regional integration that might escape American command. That arrangement is now unraveling, and the political consequences will not necessarily be progressive. Unless the left offers a credible account of sovereignty, production, and peace, anger at subordination can be captured by the right.

Class Unity

Thank you. Developments over the coming months may bring these conflicts within the ruling class into sharper view. Is there anything you would like to leave us with?

Aaron Good

I appreciate the chance to have this discussion. The situation is grim, and our immediate ability to alter it may be small. Still, understanding the conditions matters because periods of rapid change create opportunities that cannot be predicted in advance. We should spread awareness, cultivate class unity, and build solidarity both within nations and across them. My hope is that solidarity will eventually become the defining principle of a global human society.

Class Unity

Thank you for joining us. We hope to speak with you again.

 

CLASS UNITY