Jason Royce Lindsey takes the concept of the “deep state” and runs with it in The Concealment of the State. The deep state—a behind-the-scenes operation that has nothing to do with elected figures or public bureaucracies—has become, in Lindsey’s view, ever more hidden from sight even as it has grown more powerful. Due to the increasing demands of global capitalism, he argues, the deep state handles the need to continue to produce and to compete in the world, leaving the elected government—what Lindsey calls “the shallow state”—to deal with public outrage, strikes, and other forms of protest and resistance. This might sound like a conspiracy theory, but he does a good job of explaining how the deep state has withdrawn from ordinary politics, concentrating only on those aspects that either serve or threaten neoliberal purposes.

Although the author acknowledges that there has always been some form of the deep state, his argument is convincing that the degree of concealment of the state (that is, the further submerging of the deep state from public view) is unprecedented. This concealment creates the appearance of weaker sovereignty, a sense of the ascendance of the “free” market and related ideologies, which masks its true power. One of Lindsey’s most convincing points is that the split between a deep and shallow state can allow, for example, for extreme antistate ideologies to reign in the halls of Washington, even as the deep state attends to the true business at hand. In general, although he discusses many countries in the world, what he has to say applies best to the contemporary United States.

For Lindsey, the deep state takes on a form that only loosely resembles what we have come to think of as a state model. Rather than exclusively consisting of public authorities, the deep state today spreads into nongovernmental organizations and private firms as well. Whatever serves the interests and succor of global economy can be said to be part of the deep state and, in this way, remains hidden in plain sight from those who seek to resist it. In fact, for Lindsey, the delegation of state functions to private corporations handily accomplishes state concealment.

Along similar lines, the author attacks the idea of an “autonomous” market. The ideology of such autonomy, he suggests, is part of the way that the state can seem to disappear even as it expands its power over both the economic and the political realm. The public/private division then, far from describing a critical distinction in forms of political and social organization, serves instead to hide a commonality of interest that cuts across these categories to serve the purposes of global capitalism and the deep state. Indeed, he goes so far as to argue that the free market is “parasitic” (p. 47), dependent upon and inseparable from the political purposes of the state.

This view puts Lindsey at odds with a great deal of contemporary scholarship, ranging from Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) to a plethora of Foucault-inspired scholars who see sovereign power transforming into other forms (principally biopolitical forms of authority). Lindsey’s interlocutors are not these people however. He appears to have a solid political science orientation, citing empirical studies far more than he does theoretical models (and those theoretical models he does cite tend to involve questions of the development of the state, not its contemporary practices). It would have been helpful for Lindsey to have taken on this broader literature on waning or changing sovereignty. Presumably, his argument would be that these authors have taken the shallow state and its apparent travails as suggesting a larger decline of sovereignty. Yet that argument needs to be made and demonstrated (from my own reading of these works, it is not clear that this argument would be easy to make; Brown, for one, is very much aware of the transformations of the state in the light of global capitalism, as well as the tendency to spin off functions to the private sector).

Ultimately, Lindsey argues that the development of the concealed state (or at least its present extreme form that has emerged simultaneously with the defeat of capitalism’s principle enemies) is leading to a restoration of a kind of feudal structure, what he calls a “postindustrial peasantry.” Here, a small elite has access to knowledge and power from which the rest of us are utterly excluded. This argument sometimes feels a little forced: The idea of a postindustrial peasantry is perhaps a useful metaphor for understanding the failure of the liberal and modern project, but the parallels come in fairly fast and furious; he compares, for example, the medieval practice of shunning to contemporary cyberbullying, which seems a bit of a stretch.

The author’s reading of the deep state poses an interesting problem insofar as he is writing from an anarchist perspective. If the state has transformed itself beyond recognition, if it runs its true operations hidden from view, and if the political sphere—the zone of election, speeches, parties, and the like—is essentially a decoy, what is an anarchist to do? Lindsey’s strength definitely lies with his description of the situation. This is no small accomplishment because it suggests that a great deal of anarchist activism may be directed at a state that is effectively a false front. Yet, besides the example of Occupy Wall Street and a call for “new intermediaries with real authority who can expose the state” (p. 160), he does not have much more to offer us.

Still, the examples of resistance are thought provoking. In calling for “real authority,” Lindsey cites the interesting model that Mikhail Bakunin offers of the “authority of the bootmaker.” This is the authority that comes from local expertise, one that is recognized and acknowledged by individuals who buy and wear these boots. This kind of decentralized idea of expertise and authority is perhaps his best answer to the question of how to respond to the deep state. He writes: “Just as the anarchist tradition posed the idea of a real politics to the sham of mainstream political activity, perhaps so should we think about Bakunin’s idea of real authority. In this sense, the intermediaries who can expose the concealed, postmodern state are authorities in Bakunin’s sense. Of course, for Bakunin, there should always be an element of individual judgment. We should consult several boot makers or engineers and choose for ourselves which one convinces us with their skill and expertise. So, too, a broad range of intermediaries is needed. We can then make choices between these voices and support those that expose the state” (p. 151).

This evocation of an alternative form of authority reminds us that just as the state may have its deep and shallow aspects, so too do our responses to the state. On the surface, we have protests and letters to the editor, blogs and Facebook posts. But there is a subcurrent of resistance that also goes deep; this is the resistance that comes from aspects of life (whether political, social, or economic) that have nothing to do with the state, the authorities, decisions, and relationships that we form and that are, in effect, anarchist. We may think that our response to the deep state is hopeless, that we can only argue and kibitz before the false shows of democracy that conceal a far more determined and unaccountable form of order. But Lindsey’s comment reminds us that we are not, in fact, entirely determined by the state. There are all sorts of independent practices and forms of politics that serve as resources we can draw upon both in challenging and seeking alternatives to the state.

Lindsey does not expand on this; his focus is on exposure, not on responses to what has been exposed. But this book helps us to think about strategies of resistance, about what can be drawn from the deep state, and about how, in all of its overwhelming power, it can yet be opposed.