The Cargo Cult Science Empire
American political warfare as applied soft science, and Trump's Gorbachev moment
President Trump’s DOGE, headed by Elon Musk, is dismantling what it perceives to be inefficient and useless American institutions. I believe that these institutions are neither inefficient nor useless. Rather, they are the cornerstones of the apparatus of American covert statecraft built in the aftermath of World War 2 as an applied soft sciences project. Destroying them in the name of efficiency might have the same effect on the American Empire as Gorbachev’s reforms did on the USSR. Gorbachev did not want to destroy the Soviet Union but rather to make it more efficient, but in the end, his intentions proved irrelevant.
The beginning
In May 1948, George Kennan, the US State Department Policy Planning Director, outlined the need for an American political warfare apparatus in a document called The Inauguration Of Organized Political Warfare. Covert political warfare had been employed by the USSR and British Empire extensively, but the Americans had been handicapped by such sentiments as an imaginary “difference between peace and war.” This apparatus would engage in the “employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its political objectives.” It would work through networks of private intermediaries to ensure the necessary outcomes, overtly and covertly; this would achieve deniability and a “remote and deeply concealed official control”.
The context for Kennan’s suggestion was that America had conquered half of the globe at the same time as it developed the atomic bomb, which it immediately gave away to its best frenemy, the USSR. Conventional warfare on a WW2 scale was out of the question; it would simply cost too much in lives and resources. Further, direct military conquest and occupation are not very efficient or progressive ways to control a client state and exploit its resources. They breed resentment and resistance, which can be capitalized upon by one’s enemies. They also pose a drain on one’s military forces, who will at best be sitting around on occupation duty and at worst sucked into an open ended, bloody, expensive counterpartisan war. The veterans of America’s covert operations during WW2 knew this all very well, having spent the war making military occupation as costly and unpleasant as possible for the Axis powers. Therefore, America’s elite rejected this mode of imperial conquest and management.
Losing wars, winning at geopolitics
Since 1945, the American military has fought four major wars, two of them against irregular forces. It lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and managed draws in Korea and Iraq. Yet despite this unimpressive military record, the postwar American empire has only gone from strength to strength. This is because American power is not based on prowess in conventional warfare, which serves mostly as a backstop and deterrent. It is based on an extensive apparatus, outlined by Kennan above, which wages permanent political warfare on America’s enemies, allies and own population.
Better living through science
The shape and activities of this apparatus were delineated by men who had served in the Office of Strategic Services and Office of War Information during WW2. These agencies were militarized arms of the New Deal. They focused heavily on operational research and analysis, and drew from the best scholars the US had to offer. A seminal example was Professor Carleton Coon, whose illustrated books on anthropology I highly recommend.
During WW2, Coon led operational OSS teams in North Africa and served as the Tangier Station Chief. After the war, he wrote a proposal called “The World after the War: OSS-SOE: The Invisible Empire”, which suggested building a clandestine organization of applied social scientists using their mastery of the study of human relations to manage geopolitics and statecraft behind the scenes; in other words, the temporary wartime work of the OSS would be continued perpetually in peacetime.
Coon was not an exception. WW2 found the leading American scholars of every branch of soft science serving in the OSS and OWI, applying their academic skillset to the war. Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, ethnographers and economists all pitched in. After the war, many of them continued to work with the government in one capacity or another. In a broad sense, their work was what Kennan proposed: organized political warfare.
The American Empire that these men built is one run not on explicit military force, but on an apparatus practicing applied soft science. Progress and efficiency were the focus of the New Deal state and its soft scientists were no different. The most progressive, efficient way to project power and mobilize the resources of client countries was to identify and gain control of their key institutions and personnel: political and military leaders, academics, journalists and editors, cultural icons, entertainers, industrialists. Criminal and terrorist networks were also invaluable assets to develop; they could provide many covert services, including drug and weapons distribution networks, money laundering, human trafficking and mass atrocities which could be used to justify desired measures.
All of these measures required selection and training of the appropriate assets, preferably in a way which would allow fine grained control of their behavior. Applied psychology was very important here, and manifested itself in projects like MKULTRA. In this context, spooky government connections to the Laurel Canyon music scene and the Manson Family are more understandable. Developing entertainment icons who would influence the conscious and subconscious minds of hundreds of millions of people across the world provided a tremendous return on investment and paved the way for a level of the control apparatus where entertainers from the target country could be selected, recruited, trained and used to broadcast precise political messages.
The Mighty Wurlitzer
Obviously, none of this could be done overtly. As Kennan recognized, it had to be covert and deniable. Therefore, the apparatus which was built consists of government agencies working through networks of private intermediaries such as foundations and NGOs working as contractors, subcontractors and so forth. This statecraft is practiced in the interests of the US government as a whole, but also its private clients such as multinational corporations, whose interests are thought to be contiguous with those of the US.
Properly implemented and coordinated, this apparatus has allowed the barely perceptible control of target countries on multiple levels, from the most private and intimate behavior of key population segments all the way up to national policy decisions. With agencies like USAID working through opaque webs of cutouts, not only were US government fingerprints obscured until recently, but the people interested in uncovering them have often been silenced. Frank Wisner, a senior CIA official, referred to it as “the Mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any tune-paint any picture he wanted in the minds of target demographics. Again, this is a far more efficient, cost effective and powerful means of control than direct military conquest.
Of course, the apparatus works the same way on US soil as it did overseas. In a globalized, interconnected world, it pretty much had to; you could not serve one message to Americans and another to, say, Cambodians for very long. Further, if you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; there is no reason to use a different tool to use the same sorts of problems in America than you use overseas, except for propriety, which quickly wears thin in the absence of transparency. If you can use your toolbox to fix elections in client states, then why not in America? If you can get a client state to go to war for you, then why not get America to go to war?
Everything worked fine until it didn’t
All of this worked alright until quite recently. Unless you happened to be caught up in some war the apparatus was covertly running, if you were an American, you were basically doing well. American construction workers had a higher standard of living than European programmers and third world doctors. Soccer moms with bullshit jobs living in McMansions and driving late year Escalades were normal in America but completely unimaginable in most of the rest of the world; America’s status as the metropole of a global empire had a lot to do with that. Even today, Alabama’s GDP per capita is higher than that of the UK, France and Japan.
The causes of the problems that the apparatus is now suffering are twofold. The first is that, at their heart, the soft sciences are cargo cult bullshit. As rough heuristic guides to getting stuff done, some of them work, some of the time, when implemented by serious people like Carleton Coon. But as toolsets for discovering objective truths about the human condition, they suck. Given the perverse structure of American academia (built after WW2 by similar people to those who built the political warfare apparatus,) the soft sciences quickly started turning out people who not only weren’t interested in finding out the truth about anything, but didn’t even really believe the truth existed as such, and had no qualms about disbursing and receiving grants to promote plainly ridiculous lies. This in itself would not have degraded the effectiveness of the apparatus very much, because those grants really played the function of cover for overseas and domestic covert political warfare operations, except for the second problem: while the apparatus was been capable of making itself opaque to the public in the more innocent and primitive past, that opacity no longer works given modern public cynicism and widely available analysis tools.
In combination, these problems resulted in the apparatus both running on totally bullshit grants and these grants being used by its enemies to make it look ludicrous and fraudulent. The worst part is that the nature of its mission makes it difficult for its leadership to effectively defend their work-to explain that while the programs look like total crap, they are absolutely essential to the continued functioning of the American Empire, the high living standard of its metropolitan residents, the thriving bottom line of its corporations. The staff of the apparatus have to stick to their cover story, and many of them have, by this point, even come to believe it.
President Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the very top layers of America’s political warfare apparatus; USAID is one, but others will follow. It’s not clear whether the American Empire can reinvent itself quickly enough to avoid collapse. As discussed above, the collapse of the USSR was triggered by Gorbachev taking initiative in dismantling its most obviously stupid, inefficient and evil parts. He was as surprised as anyone when those parts turned out to have had been loadbearing.
“gain control of their key institutions and personnel: political and military leaders.”
You mean like Indonesia? Why I heard tell one of our Presidents done grew up there! Do tell!
Allow me to offer a different perspective: this is not the collapse of American soft power, but rather, a hostile takeover of it by Silicon Valley. The techniques of social control embodied in social media are immensely more sophisticated than anything the OSS could ever have dreamed of. Having thus seized the Mandate of Heaven, California is dismantling Washington and remaking it in its own image.