American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State | by Aaron Good May 2020 |

Some excerpts:

The tripartite state is comprised of the democratic or public state, the security state, and the deep state. A key contention herein is that the deep state developed alongside postwar US exceptionism--the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law, ostensibly on the basis of "national security." Theories of hegemony and empire are analyzed and critiqued and refined. To wit: the post-World War II US empire has been sustained by hegemonic institutions which rely on various degrees of consent and coercion--both in a dyadic sense but increasingly through structural dominance following the collapse of Bretton Woods. Rival hypotheses related to the state and US foreign policy are analyzed and critiqued. To explore the concept of a deep state within a nominal democracy, open democratic modes of power are contrasted with top-down or dark power.

[This thesis] is influenced and inspired by works like The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills (1956) and Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin (2008).

Democracy as a concept has been greatly contested in political science. In a broad normative sense, a country is democratic to the extent that the general public rather than the elite controls the political system. Institutionally, a democracy is characterized by the rule of law, political rights, free and fair elections, and accountability (Linz and Stepan 1996). Within the American social sciences, most seminal 20th century scholars and theorists of American democracy have focused on US domestic politics and US society. This would include political scientists like Dahl and Lindblom (1953) as well as sociologists like C. Wright Mills (1956). One of the central concerns of this dissertation is the relationship between expansive foreign policy and democratic decline. One of the few American political scientists to focus squarely on this issue was Harold D. Lasswell (1941). His neglected "garrison state" construct is worth revisiting and reassessing given the subsequent rise of US global dominance and democratic decline.

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