The ‘Deep State’ and the 2024 US Presidential Election: Down to the Crossroads

Since 2016, Americans have become increasingly familiar with the idea of the Deep State and its opposition to former President Donald Trump, whose victories in the Republican primaries and the presidential election that year served as a singular, if circumscribed, rebuke to the bipartisan Washington political Establishment.

Today, as voters prepare for elections in this fourth year of President Joe Biden’s tenure with Trump again as the likely GOP candidate, they see even more clearly the difference between the way the U.S. administrative state actually runs in contrast to the formal American constitutional system. This subterfuge against the “rules-based order,” the very mantra and creedal testament the Establishment professes to justify its preeminence, is a defining characteristic of Deep States the world over.

This brings us to what is shaping up to be the overriding issue for 2024: aware of the Deep State, will voters finally condemn it as fundamentally un-American? Or will they disregard, or worse, embrace it—and thereby affirmatively consent to their own subjugation? The country is at a crossroads.

Sustaining the Operational Tempo…

Public concern in America about what is now understood to be the Deep State predates the Trump era and, in fact, was present on both the political left and right during the unipolar moment of US global hegemony. These concerns became more acute with the concomitant expansion of the US security state under Republican and Democratic presidents following 9/11 and into the first decades of the 21st century. Even before then, almost exactly 63 years ago, in his farewell address to the nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—a Republican who was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II—warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by what he called the immense “military-industrial complex,” pointing to the potential of the Defense bureaucracy working with what today can justifiably be called oligarchic corporate interests to undermine liberty and corrupt the democratic process.

It is undeniable that among the political Establishment, the particular shock of Trump’s election victory in 2016 and the rise of his populist movement were seen as existential threats. Ostensibly defending American political “norms,” the Establishment itself became a norm-breaker without peer in modern American history as it counter-attacked in defense of its equities. As the call to the barricades issued forth, governmental traditions and constitutional rights were blithely cast aside as impediments to the task at hand.

Today, the various extralegal impulses and orchestrated political-bureaucratic information operations that helped shape and drive the sustained attempt to oust Trump from office are now arrayed to incarcerate him and ban him from public life. Pundits, professors, and professional analysts would refer to this process as a coup d’etat if applied to similar situations in other countries.

Remember specifically the Russiagate hoax, the impeachments, and the government-led suppression of reporting and social media critical of Biden in 2020. Afterwards, a prominent media platform hailed the “shadow campaign” to beat Trump, spinning it not as rigging the election but merely “fortifying it” in the interests of democracy and stability.

Consider also the high-profile elite speculation that continues to this day about prospects for an actual military coup—that is to say, calling upon the generals to upend the constitutional order through threatened or actual violence against elected officials—legitimized as potentially necessary to derail Trump’s alleged bid for authoritarian rule. A journalistic subgenre emerged, with the corporate media whitewashing and even approving military and bureaucratic “resistance” and insubordination against Trump.

In this light, the corporate media’s ongoing presentation of the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol as nothing less than an actual armed and deadly “insurrection,” and the series of criminal indictments against Trump and other lawfare operations to keep him off the 2024 ballot, appear in part as attempts to justify the bureaucratic-media misfeasance that went before and is yet to come. Meanwhile, the widespread “mostly peaceful” leftist riots that shook the country in the run-up to the 2020 elections were memory-holed.

Moreover, fearing Trump’s return to the White House despite these efforts—once thought to be doomed, he now is even with or leads Biden in the RealClearPolitics poll average—Establishment organs have continued to work overtime to protect as much as possible the increasingly feeble President.

Having spent years relentlessly driving home the message that “the walls are closing in” on Trump, corporate media downplay or even ignore indications of Biden’s personal corruption and policy failings. They gaslight American voters about the Biden administration’s mismanagement of the economy and the border crisis. They also moved as quickly as possible past Biden’s profoundly inept pullout of US forces from Afghanistan and, sharing his overall world view, have tried to soft-pedal his administration’s extraordinary strategic blunders in Ukraine and the Middle East. It is quite likely that without the constant framing of issues in support of Establishment equities, Biden’s dismal approval ratings in public opinion surveys would be at catastrophic levels.

…and Deforming Political Culture

Consequently, the upcoming elections might well determine whether Deep State operations will be rejected as illegitimate and illegal, or established once and for all as a fact of political life in a Republic that, until now, has prided itself on the inalienable rights and freedoms under law of its sovereign citizenry.

Driven by ambition and political desperation, Biden himself has encouraged action against Trump and his supporters in public and private. Apparently, he is oblivious to or uninterested in the truth that one cannot “save democracy” and the Republic by destroying them.

Faced with sufficiently dire straits, politicians can be tempted to ride the Deep State tiger. However, there are two dangers here. The first is that the techniques and mechanisms they have conjured up against their enemies are legitimized for use in partisan fashion by others in turn. Indeed, some of the corporate media’s railing about Trumpian “authoritarianism” reflects not only Democratic Party talking points but an implicit awareness about the potential blowback against perpetrators for what has transpired since 2016 should Biden lose.

The second danger is perhaps even more profound. In their desire to destroy Trump and delegitimize his voters for personal and partisan ends, Biden and his team are fueling a Deep State ethos that transcends mere party partisanship and is unmoored from any sense of accountability and responsibility to the electorate. Having used the organs of the state in a bid to neuter the political opposition, Biden and his supporters themselves could be next.

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