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?
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.
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.
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.
Most of the issues raised in the context of the Deep State debate in the US today are not unprecedented, but run parallel to the discourse fully articulated in Turkiye a generation ago as that country tried to make sense of and eventually confront its own Deep State in the midst of a coup.
During the 1990s and since the birth of the modern Turkish state in 1923 under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ankara was largely dominated by an authoritarian and aggressively secularist, military-led "Kemalist" elite, backed by oligarchic interests that profited from cozy relations with the state.
In the process, the Kemalist Deep State reduced the political class in Turkiye to a level of habituated obsequiousness to power that was in some ways understandable under the circumstances of the day but nevertheless extraordinary for a country with democratic aspirations and formal institutions.
The rise of the Deep State phenomenon in the United States has done great damage to the Republic.
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