Don’t Be Silly

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Michael Froomkin

It would of course be absurd to suggest that there are relevant and unsavory historical parallels for the plan to have the executive branch create a separate force of spies and secret police answerable only to the maximum leader. Thus, any claim that the plan described in Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter “Deep State” Enemies bears even the slightest resemblance to a famous paramilitary body should be dismissed as hysteria.

To even suggest such a thing is as ridiculous as equating contemporary ‘opinion journalist’ Sean Hannity with a famous historical propagandist.

Yes, all utterly ridiculous. Just business as usual. Move along.

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3 Responses to Don’t Be Silly

  1. jones says:
    December 6, 2017 at 9:52 am

    One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries
    who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel
    structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations
    that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example,
    had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had
    achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office.
    After its head, Joachim von Ribbentrop, became foreign minister in 1938,
    the party’s foreign policy office increasingly supplanted the professional
    diplomats of the Foreign Office. A particularly important fascist “parallel
    organization” was the party police. Fascist parties that aspired to power
    tended to use their party militias to challenge the state’s monopoly of
    physical force.
    The fascist parties’ parallel structures challenged the liberal state by
    claiming that they were capable of doing some things better (bashing
    communists, for instance). After achieving power, the party could substitute
    its parallel structures for those of the state…
    — Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism

    See also

    Parallel legislative body ALEC:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

    More to come….

  2. Michael says:
    December 6, 2017 at 10:30 am

    I think ALEC is somewhat different — an extremely powerful and well-funded lobbyist. They don’t make law directly. That doesn’t mean they are not a problem, just a different sort of problem (tied in with campaign finance law).

  3. Vic says:
    December 16, 2017 at 11:25 am

    This is just conspiracy theory nonsense dreamed up by the anti-Trump contingent of today’s intelligence agencies who are so afraid of being fired or rendered null by the Predident that they have ceased any pretense of working for anyone but their own interests. (The number two man in FBI counterintelligence was carrying out an affair openly, including the exchange of many, many text messages, thus being complexly open to blackmail by foreign entities, yet THIS is what is worried about?)

    Even if this was true, it simply would not be governmentally possible to be implemented accourding to the raw idea expressed above. It would have ZERO effectiveness or ability to do anything, unless it reached a size that would inevitably require cooperation and support from elements of government outside of the White House. You can have Nixen’s plumbers, or the CIA, there is no possible middle ground that is both effective and small enough to be off books.

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