WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF FLEXIBILITY. WE HAVE FLEX TIME, FLEX workers, flex spending, flex enrollment, flex cars, flex technology, flex perks, mind flex—even flex identities. “Flex” has become an integral part not only of how we live, but of how power and influence are wielded. While influencers flex their roles and representations, organizations, institutions, and states, too, must be flexible in ways they haven’t been before. The mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible. Even the short-term consultant doing one project at a time cannot afford to owe too much allegiance to the company or government agency. Such individuals are in these organizations (some of the time anyway), but they are seldom of them.1
Being in, but not of, an organization enables these players to pursue a “coincidence of interests,” that is, to interweave and perform overlapping roles that serve their own goals or those of their associates. Because these “nonstate” actors working for companies, quasi-governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) frequently do work that officials once did, they have privileged access to official information—information that they can deploy to their own ends. And they have more opportunities to use this information for purposes that are neither in the public interest nor easily detected, all the while controlling the message to keep their game going.2
Take, for instance, Barry R. McCaffrey, retired four-star army general, military analyst for the media, defense industry consultant, president of his own consulting firm, part-time professor, and expert, whose advice on the conduct of the post-9/11 U.S. wars was sought by the George W. Bush administration and Congress. Crucial to McCaffrey’s success in these roles was the special access afforded him by the Pentagon and associates still in the military. This included special trips to war zones arranged specifically for him, according to a November 2008 exposé in the New York Times. McCaffrey gleaned information from these trips that proved useful in other roles—and not only his part-time professorship at the U.S. Military Academy, which the Pentagon claimed is the umbrella under which his outsider’s perspective was sought.
At a time when the administration was trying to convince the American people of the efficacy of U.S. intervention in Iraq, the general appeared frequently as a commentator on the television news—nearly a thousand times on NBC and its affiliates. He was variously introduced as a Gulf War hero, a professor, and a decorated veteran, but not as an unofficial spokesperson for the Pentagon and its positions. He also was oft-quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other leading newspapers. Further, in June 2007, according to the Times, he signed a consulting contract with one of many defense companies he had relationships with, which sought his services to win a lucrative government contract. Four days later, McCaffrey did the firm’s bidding by personally recommending to General David Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, that the company supply Iraq with armored vehicles, never mentioning his relationship to it. Nor did he reveal these ties when he appeared on CNBC that same week, during which he praised Petraeus, nor to Congress, where he not only lobbied to have the company supply Iraq with armored vehicles but directly criticized the company’s competitor.3
Using information and access to link institutions and to leverage influence is what General McCaffrey and other such players were expected to do by an administration seeking public support, media in need of high ratings, industry pursuing profits, and academia in search of superstars. But because only the individual player bridges all these institutions and venues—by, for instance, enlisting access and information available in one to open doors or enhance cachet in another—only he can connect all the dots. Such a game involves a complex, although subtle, system of incentives that must reinforce its players’ influential positions and access to knowledge and power. And the players must uphold their end of the bargain. When McCaffrey criticized the conduct of the war on the Today show, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly cut off his invitations to Pentagon special briefings. Tellingly, McCaffrey went back on the air, reiterated the Pentagon’s line, and regained entry into those briefings.4
McCaffrey owes some of his access to a Pentagon public relations campaign that enrolled retired, high-status military personnel as “message force multipliers” in the media, according to an earlier piece in the Times. McCaffrey was among the most high-profile members of the campaign, during which, from 2002 to 2008, the Pentagon provided the seventy-five analysts access to military campaigns and initiatives through private briefings, talking points, and escorted tours. Following the exposé and congressional calls for an investigation, government auditors looked into whether the Pentagon effort “constituted an illegal campaign of propaganda directed at the American public,” as the Times put it. The Pentagon’s inspector general found that Pentagon funds were not used inappropriately and that the retired military officers didn’t profit unfairly from the arrangement. President Obama’s Pentagon later rescinded the inspector general’s report, but no new one was issued. Even when they are not whitewashed, such government audits are not designed to capture the reality of today’s influencers and the environment in which they operate—a reality that poses potentially much greater harm to a democratic society than a mere drain on taxpayer dollars. While millions of viewers, Congress, and General Petraeus were led to believe that McCaffrey was offering his expert, unbiased opinions, McCaffrey’s interlocking roles created incentives for him (and others of his profile) to be a less-than-impartial expert. The Times understatedly remarked, “It can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.”5
Meanwhile, the official and private organizations in and out of which such movers and shakers glide either just go along to get along or are ill equipped to know what these actors are up to in the various venues in which they operate. In McCaffrey’s case, no institution, from the Pentagon to the defense contractor to NBC, had an incentive to be anything but complicit. Operators like the general have surpassed their hosts, speeding past the reach of effective monitoring by states, boards of directors, and shareholders, not to mention voters. And while the players sometimes cause raised eyebrows, they are highly effective in achieving their goals—and often benefit from wide acceptance. Much more than the influence peddlers of the past, these players forge a new system of power and influence—one that profoundly shapes governing and society.
This new breed of players is the product of an unprecedented confluence of four transformational developments that arose in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the redesign of governing, spawned by the rising tide of government outsourcing and deregulation under a “neoliberal” regime, and the rise of executive power; the end of the Cold War—of relations dominated by two competing alliances—which intensified the first development and created new, sparsely governed, arenas; the advent of evermore complex technologies, especially information and communication technologies; and the embrace of “truthiness,” which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record. While it may be jarring to mention such seemingly disparate developments in the same breath—and to name “truthiness” as one of them—the changes unleashed by these developments interact as never before.
The proliferation of roles, and the ability of players to construct coincidences of interest by those who perform them, are the natural outcome of these developments. So, for example, increased authority delegated to private players (facilitated by privatization, the close of the Cold War, and new, complex technologies) has enabled them to become guardians of information once resting in the hands of state and international authorities. While supposedly working on behalf of those authorities, such players (working, say, as consultants for states or as special envoys or intermediaries between them) can guard information and use it for their own purposes, all the while eluding monitoring designed for the past order of states and international bodies. And they get away with it. Appearances of the moment have become all-important in today’s truthiness society, as comic Jon Stewart expressed in his quip: “You cannot, in today’s world, judge a book by its contents.”6 Today’s premier influencers deftly elude such judgment. Pursuing their coincidences of interest, they weave new institutional forms of power and influence, in which official and private power and influence are interdependent and even reinforce each other.
The phenomenon I explore in Shadow Elite is no less than a systemic change. A new system has been ushered in—one that undermines the principles that have long defined modern states, free markets, and democracy itself.
I call the new breed of influencers “flexians.” When such operators work together in longstanding groups, thus multiplying their influence, they are flex nets. Flexians and flex nets operate at one extreme of a continuum in crafting their coincidences of interests.
Performing overlapping roles can be—and often is—not only benign, but can serve the interests of all the organizations involved, as well as the public’s. Yet in an international arena that “multiplies the possibilities for double strategies of smugglers . . . and brokers . . . there are many potential uncertainties and mistranslations surrounding individual positions,” as two political-legal scholars point out. Take, for instance, the individual who acts “as a political scientist in one context . . . and a lawyer in another; a spokesperson for nationalistic values in one context, a booster of the international rule of law in another.” This peripatetic political scientist/lawyer is not necessarily engaged in a “double strategy.” But his activities on behalf of one organization can be at odds with those on behalf of another—even to the point of undermining the goals of either, or both. Flexians take these coincidences of interest to the nth degree. When an individual serves in interdependent roles, and is in the public eye promoting policy prescriptions, and when fundamental questions lack straight answers—Who is he? Who funds him? For whom does he work? Where, ultimately, does his allegiance lie?—we have likely encountered a flexian.7
To get a sense of flex activity as we could watch it becoming acceptable, let’s take a look at Gerhard Schroeder, the Social Democratic chancellor of Germany from 1998 till 2005. While he did not flog a cause as do true flexians, he exhibited certain flex features and almost crossed the boundary into flexian-hood. In September 2005, before losing his bid for reelection, Schroeder signed a pact on behalf of his government with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant that commands a quarter of the world’s natural gas reserves and represents a murky mix of state and private power. The agreement was to construct a Baltic Sea pipeline to run directly from Russia to Germany and supply gas to Germany and other western European nations. That December, after the election, he accepted a position as the head of Gazprom’s shareholders’ committee, a post roughly equivalent to board chairman. As the Washington Post editorialized, through his actions, Schroeder “catapulted himself into a different league.”8
Germany paid a political price for the deal. Some Western Europeans warned that the pipeline would saddle Europe with greater dependency on Russian gas. And with the Russian navy ordered to protect the pipeline, critics foresaw new potential for espionage. Moreover, the two countries’ central European, Baltic, and Ukrainian neighbors, bypassed by the pipeline’s sea route, were outraged at being relegated to nonpartner status. In Poland, the deal unleashed sentiment recalling the Hitler-Stalin pact that had carved up the nation like a side of beef.9
Other peculiarities characterized the deal. The pipeline consortium’s chief executive is Mathias Warnig, an ex-Stasi captain. As an East German spy, Warnig had worked with Vladimir Putin in the 1980s when the Russian president was overseeing the KGB bureau in Dresden. (The chair, or once deputy chair, of Gazprom’s board of directors from 2000 to 2005 was Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin associate from St. Petersburg who became first deputy prime minister in 2005 and took over as president in 2008.) And according to Russian sources, while the German public learned of the pipeline deal in fall 2005, certain elites in Moscow had heard of it a full half year earlier.10
In this episode, crudely put, one sovereign state bought the chancellor of another state, one that is not only sovereign but the third largest industrialized nation in the world. Schroeder’s arrangement with Gazprom evokes the unregulated deal making of a disintegrating command economy, such as those of 1990s transitional eastern Europe, and the circumvention of the free market by a public officer. During the Cold War, obviously, the deal would have been impossible. The Soviet Union did not have private companies, even ones thoroughly entangled with state power as it does today, to make private pacts with foreign leaders. The idea that the chief representative of a key ally of the United States would strike a deal with its rival that could potentially undermine its own national interest seems unthinkable; and the idea that word of such a deal would be spoken of in Moscow long before Berlin, equally unthinkable. Yet the end of the Cold War has shaken up not only relations among states but also their relations to markets, while creating new opportunities and incentives for the merging of official and private interests and power. Gazprom stands as a monument to what a Russian sociologist has called the “privatization of the state by the state”—a practice that apparently is becoming more acceptable.11
The Gazprom-Schroeder covenant challenged previous convention among Western democracies. Even though many people found Schroeder’s behavior unacceptable, even scandalous, social pressure or cultural restraint did not deter him. More than four years after he accepted the position with Gazprom, he remained board chairman. If neither public opinion nor available mechanisms of states or international systems can hold Schroeder accountable, then who or what can? What he was able to get away with demonstrates an emerging standard of acceptability in which flexians and almost-flexians operate.12
Schroeder’s deal with Gazprom does not seem so very different from some of the dealings exposed by the American financial crisis, which have evoked a public outcry about the collusion of high finance and government. Goldman Sachs, the vast investment bank with a wide reach of subsidiaries, investors, and friends—among them Henry Paulson, the former Sachs CEO and secretary of the Treasury who presided over the bailout of the company as the financial crisis came to a head in the fall of 2008—has been called “government Sachs.”13
The new breed of players, who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.
Flexians craft overlapping roles for themselves—coincidences of interest—to promote public policies (and sometimes their personal finances as well). These players, who generally work on more fronts and are more elastic in their dealings than similar operators in the past, both make the new system work and demonstrate how it does so. Consider, for example, Bruce P. Jackson, unofficial envoy, lobbyist, business professional, NGO founder and officer, and Republican Party activist. An operative with longtime ties to prominent neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as to Dick Cheney, Jackson served both in the Department of Defense and as a U.S. Army military intelligence officer from 1979 through the 1980s. After leaving government, he entered the private sector as a strategist for Lockheed Martin, today the largest federal contractor.14
In 1996, while Jackson was employed by Lockheed as vice president for strategy and planning, he and other neoconservatives founded the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO (later renamed the U.S. Committee on NATO) to push for the entry of former Eastern Bloc nations into what had been a Cold War defense group. Members of the board included Perle and Wolfowitz. (Jackson was also a project director of the Project for the New American Century, whose signatories included Wolfowitz and Cheney.) Jackson served as president of the committee while still working for Lockheed, where, in 1997, he was made responsible for securing fresh international markets for the company after the end of the Cold War. NATO enlargement, of course, would supply that in spades. In 1996 and 2000 he served on and chaired, respectively, Republican Party platform subcommittees responsible for national security and foreign policy. According to journalist John Judis, the efforts of Jackson and the committee proved important to winning Senate approval for expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.15
With that success in hand, Jackson and his fellows worked to further enlarge NATO and set up a spinoff organization with the same principal officers in the same offices as the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. In congressional testimony, Jackson credits himself with creating the “Big Bang” concept of NATO expansion that the would-be (second-step) NATO allies largely later adopted. This endeavor meshed nicely with another goal halfway around the world: to overthrow Saddam Hussein via American power. That effort was exemplified by Jackson’s creation in 2002 of another neoconservative-powered lobbying group, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which he chaired. During that same year, in which he cut his formal ties to Lockheed, Jackson burnished his profile as a de facto representative for the George W. Bush administration in eastern Europe. Jackson was characterized by the U.S. ambassador to NATO as “an indispensable part of our efforts in reaching out to these [former Soviet bloc] governments” and by Georgia’s president as “an official with clout.” (The government of Romania also signed Jackson up to facilitate its entry into NATO, according to Le Monde and Romanian newspapers, though Jackson denies this.) Jackson’s standing as a Bush administration envoy in the eyes of American and eastern European officialdom was indispensable to his efforts to convince the NATO hopefuls to do the administration’s bidding—that is, to back the U.S.-crafted invasion of Iraq. Toward that end, Jackson helped draft a declaration supporting the invasion that was signed by the foreign ministers of ten nations then up for NATO membership—later called the Vilnius Ten. This declaration was politically significant, for it came at a time when the administration was eager to show that its “Coalition of the Willing” had substance.16
Players like Jackson, ostensibly a private citizen, yet working stealthily for U.S. executive branch masters, peddling and helping to craft policy, are accountable only to their patrons. Such players are not confined by government diplomacy or lobbying rules, yet they routinely perform those functions in a way few diplomats or lobbyists would have the portfolio to do. The whole package that constituted Bruce Jackson—from the exact source(s) of his marching orders, to the source(s) of his funds, to the promises he supposedly made on behalf of the United States to foreign governments, to the fallout from those promises—is saturated with ambiguity.
Jackson’s type of brokering has become much more necessary in the post–Cold War world, with its expanded fragmentation of power and frequent relinquishing of information by states to all manner of private players. But such an enterprise is also much more fraught with potential ambiguity, making spies and even double agents look like the simplest of animals. The ability of brokers like Jackson to flex their overlapping roles is made easier when dealing across national, legal, and cultural contexts and in societies in political and legal flux. The reorganizing world has stimulated opportunities for flexians, without establishing balances to check these players’ activities. Obtaining reliable information about a player’s roles, sources of funds, and actual track record may be difficult, and viable monitoring systems are usually lacking. Flexians can thus continue unchecked to convert their environment into one that is friendly to them.
Now let’s turn to a flexian who has championed, mastered, and made acceptable what he calls the “evolving door”: Steven Kelman. He is a living example of how the new system has changed the profile of many of today’s most successful influencers, moving them beyond the revolving door of the past. In the grand tradition of academics trooping to Washington to put their theories into practice, Kelman was invited by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to come from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to assume the top contracting job in the federal government, heading the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), part of the Office of Management and Budget.17
Kelman would perform a lead role in the Clinton administration’s efforts at reinventing government. Known for his belief that the rules designed to prevent collusion between government contractors and public officials inhibited more efficient and innovative contracting practices, he set out to reform that system by deregulating the awarding of contracts. While Kelman’s reforms did streamline the process, they also encouraged privatization of heretofore officially available information and processes (as detailed in Chapter 4), advanced the partnership idea, and spurred more opportunities for nontransparent deal making between government and contractor officials.18
Soon after his departure from government in 1997, Kelman became a member of a Department of Defense (DOD) task force charged with identifying “DOD Policies and Practices that Weaken Health, Competitiveness of U.S. Defense Industry.” One of the stated concerns prompting the formation of this body, according to a DOD press release, was the “beating” that the defense industry was taking on Wall Street at the time. While the task force presented Kelman’s credentials as affiliated with Harvard and as a former OFPP administrator, he simultaneously served on the board of directors of, and held an equity interest in a company with nearly billion-dollar per year average sales, almost all in government contracts.19
Kelman also put his punditry skills to work. He began writing a column for a trade publication, Federal Computer Week, distributed to nearly 100,000 readers, mostly government personnel involved in IT, contracting, or program management. In his column he has endorsed contractor-friendly policies for more than a decade. To his readers, Kelman is just a former OFPP administrator and Harvard professor promoting “good government”; his industry connections and consulting projects are rarely revealed. And this points to another feature of flexian performance: the tendency to hide behind one’s most appealing role. In the world of media and punditry, flexians want to appear objective and devoid of self-interest. There they generally identify themselves to the unsuspecting public in their most honorable, least partisan role, thus concealing or downplaying other agendas. This is strategic: A high-prestige imprimatur like Harvard’s enables Kelman and flexians like him to promote views for which they might not get a hearing if they had to fall back on their less neutral roles, such as those of company or industry consultant.20
A Washington Post news report’s use of Kelman’s “expert” commentary is one of many such cases. The Post article concerned a controversial government financing scheme championed by the Bush II administration, known as Share in Savings contracting. The Post quoted Kelman as a Harvard professor and former Clinton procurement policy chief who supported the technique. But he was at the time a registered lobbyist for a government contractor that was one of the largest beneficiaries of such contracting. While the Post issued a correction after the matter came to public light, most presentations by flexians are made with impunity and go unnoticed.21 In an equally revealing incident, Kelman, in a Post op-ed, decried inspectors general reports that “generally advocate more checks and controls.” Earlier an IG had recommended that a government contractor, in which Kelman held an equity interest and served on the board of directors of, be debarred from receiving federal contracts. “Small wonder he has it in for IGs,” commented the Project On Government Oversight, a public interest organization.22
ALL THESE PLAYERS, operating in and around diverse organizations and geographical areas, and of diverse ideological persuasions, surge beyond standard roles and responsibilities, as well as beyond standard rules and practices of Western states and international organizations. In the process, their operations swirl in and above the institutions for which they supposedly work—state, corporate, international, or other.
These players also have in common that their activities may sound like a simple litany of questionable ethics. They elicit shock from some: “Wow, did you see what he arranged/did/got away with/accomplished?” Observers are hard pressed to find comparable cases within their own institutional memories. But, just as often, the response is tolerance—and sometimes downright admiration for the flexians’ sheer nerve.
Another common response to the actions of flexians is to label them “conflict of interest” or “corruption.” Yet while parties to corrupt activities typically engage in them for profit, the same cannot be said of flexians, who seek influence and to promote their views at least as much as money. And “coincidences of interest” crafted by the players to skirt the letter of the law are often difficult, if not impossible, to pin down as conflicts of interest. When those coincidences span the globe, limited organizational reach and the limited jurisdictions of legal systems can only further empower the players, who seek to derail any mechanisms of accountability that might apply. Flexians are additionally hard to challenge because, while some of their activities are open and appear eminently respectable, others are murky or hidden, often just below the surface.
Thus, while it may be virtually impossible to determine whether flex activity today is statistically on the rise, it does appear to be widely tolerated. Tongues may click in public expression of disapproval but, in the end, passive acceptance and the entrenching system encourage recurrence. The very people who engage in these activities continue to command public respect and influence, sometimes even garnering more. Moreover, national and international governments and organizations are often attracted to, and reward, flexians because they get things done.
Journalists and public interest watchdogs have excavated and published details of activities by all these players, but to little consequence. All of them continue to operate unbridled by institutional constraint or adverse public opinion; their careers—and their likely bank balances—soar ever higher. And the public interest falls by the wayside. But merely exposing certain activities is not enough; framing them is essential.
My longtime focus on central and eastern Europe, studying communism as it really worked and then came undone, was excellent preparation for charting this new phenomenon. For it was there that I observed the sophisticated practices of dealing under the table, reading between the lines, shifting self-presentations, and social networking for survival. These were not only art forms in a society (Poland) where the “authorities” were far removed from the will of the people; they also helped nudge formal bureaucracy and economy away from communism. And when that system unraveled and informal maneuvering was given free rein, self-enfranchising individuals and networks acquired information, resources, and influence heretofore in the hands of communist authorities. These players maneuvered the power vacuums created by crumbling command systems (made obvious by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union), sometimes joining forces with outside operators as they rushed into the same vacuums.
In late-1980s/early-1990s Poland, as it was sprinting away from communism, a revealing practice attracted my attention. Many officials I was interviewing gave me multiple business cards bearing different job titles. It’s hard to count how many times I was given one, two, three, or even more cards by the same official.
This happened first in Poland, then in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and later in Russia and Ukraine after the Soviet Union fell apart. A deputy minister of privatization, a housing and environmental official, and a key presidential adviser each gave me multiple business cards. In all these countries my interlocutors had established new roles, in fact several roles at once, each to be trotted out as the occasion arose. Typically they knew little about me. As a Western scholar with entrée in the region, they clearly reasoned, I must have potentially useful contacts among Western foundations, businessmen, or aid agencies.
When interviews with officials were winding down or turning more personal, they would hand me their official government card, followed in quick succession by other hot-off-the-press business cards—also theirs. Then they would fill me in on their activities: It seemed that, in addition to their government job, they also headed a consulting firm, a “foundation,” or an NGO (often one they or their wife had founded). Sometimes these entities even did business with the government offices these officials supervised.
Those exhibiting flexian features first revealed themselves to me as I observed both native and foreign operators during the so-called transition to democracy, as they facilitated and profited from the changes under way. The edgy players who adapted to the new environment with the most agility and creativity, who tried out novel ways of operating and got away with them, and sometimes were the most ethically challenged, were most rewarded with influence. In the study of foreign aid I undertook in the 1990s, these traits were exhibited in abundance. I saw how the overlapping roles, networks, and sponsors of the actors involved in the aid process were crucial to understanding how certain high-priority aid efforts played out.
Probably nowhere else could flex activity become as integral a part of changes under way and also mingle with global transactions than in the post-Soviet empire. There, legacies of a militarized economy and secret police combined with collapsed command systems, law subordinated to politics, and informal networking, not to mention Western-promoted radical privatization schemes, to accrue spoils to a connected few. There, as well, entire realms of financial practice were created and money laundering reached new heights. Some players who cut their teeth there have taken their skills beyond the region, plying their trade in a global environment where huge sums of money, off the books and largely unmonitored and unregulated by any institution, flow freely and lavishly.
The people I came to call flexians would soon appear on the world stage. Some of them operated across borders in the manner of global elites, international high fliers who ally more comfortably with their fellow global elites than with their own countrymen. In addition to the cross-pollination of practices—and not necessarily “best” ones—among such elites, parallel processes also developed as flexians, transmuting and changing their colors as necessary, carried the tradition of “the fix and the deal” to new levels. Like masterful dancers who push beyond accepted steps and recognized routines, flexians perform on the edge, trying out and inventing new patterns. These players live symbiotically within the system, quietly evading and stretching its rules as they help mediate its transformation. The new system they help fashion blurs the boundaries between the state and private sectors, bureaucratic and market practices, and legal and illegal standing. Ironically perhaps, the formerly communist world and the maneuverings that flowed from its transition away from communism proved an ideal training ground for examining governing, power, and influence in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century. There the new era of blurred boundaries is marked by privatization and contracting out, and a resulting fusion (and confusion) of state and private power.
Flex nets (like flexians) arose to fill a niche that is new. Just as flexians cannot be reduced to mere lobbyists, neither can flex nets be reduced to interest groups, lobbies, old-boy networks, and other such groupings in American society, government, and business. Flex nets are far more complex. Like interest groups and lobbies, flex nets serve a long-established function in the modern state—negotiating between official and private. But while flex nets incorporate aspects of these and other such groupings, they also differ from them in crucial ways—and those ways are precisely what make flex nets less visible and less accountable.
Four key features define both flexians as individuals and those influencers who work together as a flex net. Flexians functioning on their own exhibit the modus operandi embodied in all four features discussed below, as does a flex net as a whole. Because members of a flex net benefit from the actions of the collective, pooling resources and dividing labor, not all members of a flex net must exhibit these features individually.
One, personalizing bureaucracy. Flexians operate through personalized relations within and across official structures, and act primarily based on loyalty to people, not organizations, to realize their goals. They use the formal organizations with which they are affiliated—governmental, corporate, national, or international—but their chief allegiance is to themselves and their networks. Flexians work bureaucracy to their advantage, preferring to operate by means anathema to official, legal, and procedural objectivity—the hallmark of the modern state that harks back to the classic model elucidated by Max Weber, the influential German sociologist.
Members of a flex net, with their loyalty to people over organizations, form an exclusive informal network that serves as an intricate spine—the corresponding (first) feature of flex nets. Flex nets draw their membership from a limited circle of players who interact with each other in multiple roles over time, both inside and outside government, to achieve mutual goals. While their roles and environments change, the group provides continuity. For instance, as detailed in Chapter 6, members of what I call the Neocon core, an informal group of a dozen or so members and a successful flex net, have worked with each other in various incarnations for some thirty years to realize their goals for American foreign policy via the assertion of military power. Whereas interest groups promote a political cause or defend the agendas of a particular group, and lobbies offer politicians support and resources in exchange for preference in policies, flex nets are not formal or permanent entities. Their existence is unannounced, and they do not seek to incorporate themselves as such. Moreover, members of flex nets are united by shared activities and interpersonal histories. “Interest groups” and “lobbies” do not convey the ambiguous state-private networks of flex nets, which coordinate power and influence from multiple vantage points—often far removed from public input, knowledge, or potential sanction.23
Two, privatizing information while branding conviction. Flexians believe—in any event, convincingly assert—that they have complete understanding of the cause that propels them into action. They have a theory. And theory that serves as an organizing catalyst is crucial in times of rapid and intense social change, as Vladimir Lenin famously pointed out. More than the opportunists who have benefited from blurred boundaries and disorder throughout history, flexians operate in today’s environment of perpetual change. They play on loopholes produced by the four transformational developments. Among them is the vacuum of information left at the end of the Cold War as states could no longer lay exclusive claim to official information. Being frequent gatekeepers of inside access and “knowledge” enables flexians to brand information and control its applications. They are highly skilled at using the media to sell solutions to economic, political, and social ills, sometimes along with their own role in those solutions, so they are also able to convince others of their unique understanding in an uncertain world, one that often takes them on faith. Thus, to keep going on and on (to borrow Celine Dion’s phrase), flexians offer easy-to-grasp stories and parables to a public yearning for simple explanations.24
When such influencers work together in a flex net, they exhibit shared conviction and action—the corresponding second feature of flex nets. Flex nets, like military elites and religious cults, induce obligation and loyalty through shared ideals and ordeals. Their goals as a unit are ideological and political, as well as to varying degrees financial and societal as a unit or a subset thereof. Members of a flex net act as a continuous, self-propelling unit to achieve objectives that are grounded in their common worldview, and to brand that view for the public. For instance, a cornerstone of the Neocon core’s success over several decades has been the skill of its members at challenging official U.S. intelligence, creating alternative versions, and branding them as official and definitive for politicians, government, and the media.25
As self-sustaining teams with their own agendas, flex nets cut through bureaucracy, connect entities, and streamline decision making. This efficiency can make them attractive to an administration and the public, as was the Neocon core to the Bush II administration, especially in the president’s first term. The sense of mission, perseverance, and ready strategy for advancing its goals that can make it an asset to an administration also means it can become a liability if the policies turn out to be unpopular, as did the Neocons’. And while members of a flex net serve “at the pleasure of the president,” as does anyone else, they go on and on trying to achieve their goals. They differ from the “Wise Men” of the past such as the influential advisers who refashioned American foreign policy at the end of World War II and John F. Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest” who executed the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These men were mainly instruments of the presidents whose policies they pursued.
Three, juggling roles and representations. Flexians perform interacting or ambiguous roles to maximize their influence and amass resources. Their repertoire of roles, each with something to offer, affords them more flexibility to wield influence in and across organizations than they would have if they were confined to one role. The juggling of flexians cannot be equated with the “revolving door,” in which people move serially between government and the private sector. The revolving door acquired its meaning in an age when the lobbyist and the power holder were the brick and mortar of the influence game. Their roles were defined and confined. The new breed of players is more elastic in its engagement. In the United States, for example, where players in policy and governing are just as or more likely to be outside formal (federal) government (in, say, consulting firms, think tanks, NGOs, and quasi-government organizations) than in it, players can occupy more roles than in the past and more easily structure their overlap to create a coincidence of interests. The ambiguity inherent in the interconnectedness of flexians’ roles that can be kept separate, merged, or played off against each other at will yields not only flexibility but deniability. Ambiguity is not a mere byproduct; it is a defense. It enables flexians to play different sets of constraints off each other, skirting accountability in one venue by claiming they were operating in another. They need not necessarily break the rules; they merely shift around them. In this way, flexians defy scrutiny and public accountability while advancing their own agendas.
The corollary to flexians’ juggling roles and representations is that members of a flex net form a resource pool—the corresponding third feature of flex nets. The influence of a flex net derives in part from its members’ effort to amass and coordinate both material and interpersonal resources. As members parlay their roles and standing into influence opportunities by placing themselves in positions and venues relevant to their goals, the network as a whole can wield far more influence than an individual on his own. The Neocon core, for instance, is an example of how a ready-made network of players with its own private agendas can straddle a state-private seesaw to: prescribe and help coordinate government policies of monumental import and impact; sell them to government officials, legislators, the media, and the public; help implement them; and continue this strategy, both to justify what they have done and to influence policies that follow from the course taken. While highly effective, such a group is elusive and more difficult to hold to account than lobbyists, interest groups, and the like.26
Four, relaxing rules at the interstices of official and private institutions. As flexians inhabit and shift among overlapping roles, they relax rules. They achieve their goals in part by finessing, circumventing, or rewriting both bureaucracy’s rules of accountability and businesses’ codes of competition, thus helping to create many of the choices and structural positions available to them. In (re)organizing relations among official and private institutions, flexians fundamentally change the qualities of each, fashion a new fusion, and give birth to an altogether new beast.
Collectively, members of a flex net help create a hybrid habitat—their corresponding fourth feature. A flex net’s strength lies in its coordinated ability to reorganize governing processes and bureaucracies to suit the group’s purposes. Members of these groups both use and supplant government, as well as establish might-be-official, might-be-unofficial practices to bypass it altogether. Poised to work closely with executive authorities, flex nets eschew legislative and judicial branches of government that may interfere with their activities. The Neocon core did all of these things to help take the United States to war in Iraq. As flex nets infuse governing with their supple, personalized, private-official networks, they transmogrify their environment, whether temporarily or more lastingly. While these groups might call to mind old notions such as conflict of interest, they illustrate why such labels no longer suffice. As a Washington observer sympathetic to the neoconservatives’ aims told me, “There is no conflict of interest, because they define the interest.”
THE RISE OF FLEXIANS and flex nets (and almost flexians and flex nets) illustrates the evolution of the American system of governing. In the old days, when an individual handed someone his business card, there was less doubt about who he represented and what activities he was engaged in. On a collective level, networks within government and political elites that undermine democracy are, of course, nothing new. One study of American political power from the Civil War to the New Deal, for instance, depicts the web of ties among government officials and the threat that those connections pose to the notion of democratic government. Most famously, a half century ago, in his treatise The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills described the interlocking group of government officials, military leaders, and corporate executives at the pinnacle of the nation’s establishment, who, he argued, effectively “controlled” major political and social decision making. The rise of flex activity augurs for an even less democratic era. Rather than climbing Mills’s pyramid of the political, military, and business establishment, members of flex nets wield influence by forging coincidences of interest among an array of roles across organizations, whose boundaries and purposes often blend. Emergent forms of governing, power, and influence thus play out not in formal organizations or among stable elites, but in social networks that operate within and among organizations at the nexus of official and private power. The players in this system are less stable, less visible, and more global in reach than their forebears. Flex nets are a paradox: more amorphous and less transparent than conventional lobbies and interest groups, yet more coherent and less accountable, as one political scientist has observed. While many activities of flexians, and certainly their views, are public, the full array of their machinations is almost always difficult to detect. And the mechanisms of democratic input and control that could check them are just as difficult to discern.27
The new breed of players—today’s shadow elite—are as elusive as they are ubiquitous. Agilely evading questions about who funds them, who they work for, or where their loyalties lie, individual flexians as well as those in flex nets benefit from the dust cloud of ambiguity and deniability they leave behind. They are not inherently unethical, in fact they sometimes do good and much-needed works, but they are subject to no greater oversight than their own consciences and the social pressure of their own networks. Their potential “corruption” is so interrelated that mechanisms that might curb their activities have yet to be invented. While charges of corruption may not stick, their activities are potentially more pernicious. They dilute effective monitoring, criticism, and consideration of alternative policies and, wherever they operate, have the potential to reshape governing. The inevitable result is that states, international organizations, companies, and NGOs face a new responsibility of grave proportions: investigating the track records, agendas, sponsors, and allegiances of the movers and shakers who work with them.
Over the past dozen or so years, my attempt to understand and explain the world of players who exhibit flexian behavior has led me to seek out others whose experiences and perspectives can shed light on this phenomenon. One of my many interlocutors has been the irrepressible Jack Blum. A lawyer and longtime observer of U.S. government agencies, he is an expert on money laundering as well as an investigator into Iran-Contra and other lesser-known affairs. In trying to capture the essence of the new breed, he told me one day: “If you’re in the academic world, or you’re a legal-type focused investigator, you want everything to fit into neat boxes, and none of this stuff fits into neat boxes. It’s these multiple roles that these people have. None of these people are neat.”28