Over at Breitbart, one of my favorite writers goes by the pen name Virgil. And in this article, he lays out the scope and depth of what has come to be called The Deep State. Now some of the information is a bit dated since this is an older article. But I wanted to get to this nonetheless because it is important to understand that there is now an ongoing war between the Deep State, which includes what we have been calling “the establishment” and the Trump administration and its supporters. This will be an ongoing fight, so it is vital to understand just who the enemy is.
So now let’s get to the corpus of what we’re talking about. The term “Deep State” refers to the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are and wants to keep them like that—elections be damned.
Some might say that “Deep State” is just a synonym for the “Establishment,” and yet “Deep State” refers to a larger grouping, not just to the stereotypical elite “chattering class.” We can also observe that a Deep State can be found in just about every country in the world, but our focus here, of course, is on the United States.
And here in America, the Deep State has its own political consciousness, and it aims to survive any change of government with its collective will—and self-interest—fully intact.
Normally, the Deep State is hidden, albeit, at the same time, hiding in plain sight. That is, while nobody has “Deep State” on his or her business card, the reality of the Deep State is overwhelming: It’s not just the hulking office buildings of the Federal Triangle in downtown DC, it’s also the taxpayer-funded mini-metropolises that have sprouted up in Bethesda, Maryland, Crystal City, Virginia, and a dozen other hubs in and around the I-495 Beltway. (Hence the familiar phrase, “Beltway Bandits”; Virgil can attest that federal contractors have assumed a kind of ironic affection for that phrase—at least in their private conversations.)
A careful taxonomy of the Deep State must begin, of course, with the governmental bureaucracy, which, because of civil-service protections, does not change when one political party or the other takes control of the White House or Congress. Today, there are about 2.8 million civilian federal employees, as well 1.3 million in the uniformed military.
