As a former Congressional staff member with top secret security clearance, Mike Lofgren crunched the numbers for 28 years as part of the House and Senate Budget Committees and found that the numbers didn’t add up. The numbers led him to connect the dots to America’s “deep state”: where elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. He left the Republican party and wrote The Party Is Over.

Now he has written an essay called The Anatomy of the Deep State. It is a must-read.

An interview with Bill Moyers is below. “He says: I’m not a conspiracy theorist…This is something that hides in plain sight. It’s something we know about but we can’t connect the dots, or most people can’t.”

He talks about a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state. He also talks about Group Think, “a kind of assimilation of the views of your superiors and peers,” a all out plague in Washington.

Moyers: “If the ideology of the deep state is not right or left, Democrat or Republican, what is it?”

Lofgren: “It’s an ideology. I just don’t think we’ve named it. It’s kind of corporatism. Now the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They pretend to be merely neutral servants of the State giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters, but they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization and they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is: boots on the ground everywhere, it’s our right to meddle everywhere in the world, and the result of that is perpetual war.”

He does end on a hopeful note: