Western countries largely came into being after the Second World War in that their political and economic systems were formed up after the war. There was the aftermath of the war and the Cold War that shaped the political economy of the West. We still talk about “The West” in the 20th century sense of it, despite the fact that the Cold War is long over and many formerly communist countries are in the EU. The West is as much about political psychology as geography.

A part of that political psychology was a Marxist sense that the moral questions had been resolved, at least with regards to politics and economics. Social democracy was rebranded as liberal democracy in Europe and in the United States it was rebranded as democratic capitalism or free market capitalism. The mainstream political parties accepted the consensus on politics and economics but offered small alterations to it to distinguish themselves from the other parties.

In the United States, this meant that the two parties agreed on all the major items like dealing with the Russians but had different approaches to the same goal. In Europe, the main parties decorated themselves with things like environmentalism, socialism, and some cultural items, but they agreed on the most important items which were relations with the United States and anti-nationalism. The former was in response to communism and the latter was in response to fascism.

This is a highly simplified model of post-war reality, but useful in understanding the psychology of voters and the political class. The consensus and faith in it are what shaped politics until the current crisis. Politicians did not have to worry about policies or ideology, as the ideology was settled, so they just had to select from platforms that had been approved within the consensus. The voters showed their displeasure by voting against the incumbent or their satisfaction by voting for him.

Even in the multi-party system of Europe, voting was a binary thing. If the economy was good, then the parties that were associated with the status quo did well, but if the economy was bad, then those parties were punished. In the United States, you had the added aspect of party fatigue. Even in good times, a party that had been in power for too long would lose an election because the voters wanted a new look. Bill Clinton won in 1992 mostly due to this reason.

This worked fine if the public was satisfied with the consensus and no one was permitted to question the consensus. The fear of nuclear war solved the first part during the Cold War and credit money handled it after the Cold War. While there is always discontent, no matter how good things feel, it was never enough to cause any serious doubt about the status quo. The populist rumblings since the Cold War were marginalized by the media and political class.

That is where the second part of the model is important. The political classes in the West became increasing narrow after the Cold War. The seriousness of the situation in the Cold War required serious debate about the issues of the day, so the debate was open to a broader range of ideas. After the Cold War, triumphalism and the economic boom narrowed the range of tolerated opinion. The uniparty concept we see everywhere in the West is a product of this.

This is how the West has reached the current crisis. As the public has grown unsettled about public policy and the fruits of it, they find themselves with no reasonable options at the ballot box. The mainstream parties all hold the same views. This is especially obvious in Europe where parties that are allegedly polar opposites form governments, often as a way to exclude popular outsider parties. Germany and France now have governments without popular support as a result.

The root cause of the crisis in the West is that old Marxist line about once morality is settled, there is no need for politics. The Western consensus was a moral consensus, which means the politics within the consensus were performative. Since the end of the Second World War, the West did not have much in the way of politics, because everyone agreed on the important moral questions. After the Cold War, the moral consensus narrowed, and dissent was exiled.

The current crisis is due to elite moral consensus narrowing to a set of beliefs at odds with the sensibilities of the public. The moral consensus has collapsed with regards to the elites and the public. What the Cloud People believe is not only different from the beliefs of the people over whom they rule, the Dirt People, but it is hostile to the interests of the Dirt People. It is how the shuffling zombie that is the UK Prime Minister can boast about favoring aliens of British subjects.

It is why there is no solution within the democratic process. That process evolved to give the Dirt People choices approved by the Cloud People. There will never be an option to get rid of the Cloud People on the ballot. The point of the democratic process is to confirm to the Cloud People that they are the Cloud People. We see this with Trump, who is like a giant set upon by a massive swarm of bees. The democratic system will defend its master at any cost.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that the West has reached this crisis because the defenders of democracy are daring the people to do what is necessary for the will of the people to be respected by the state. The smug, soyish faces of the male politicians and the schoolmarmish demeaner of the females, reeks of contempt for the voters. They see the people as weak and contemptible for not doing what they should, in response to the elites.

Time will tell if this holds. The election results increasingly show that the public in the West do not like their options. As they search for alternatives, the system seeks to eliminate those options. Maybe the people will run out of excuses and rise up to do what they should have done long ago. Maybe Trump succeeds enough to destabilize the system to the point where it falters and is replaced. Maybe we just keep voting ourselves into civilizational collapse. Time will tell.

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The term “deep state” remains a popular way for newly awakened normies to think of how their government operates. It is not the people on the ballot at election time who are running things, but a shadowy cabal of people who operate outside the bounds of the political system. Whenever something goes wrong, they naturally assume it is the work of the deep state. The problem is that the deep state, as most people imagine it, does not exist. It is a useful fiction.

The dismantling of USAID is a good example. The reporting on it in the unofficial media made it seem as if this entity was controlling large swaths of the government, when in fact it was just a money laundering scheme. Instead of cleaning cash acquired through illegal means, it put government cash in the hands of media activists, lobbyists, not-for-profits, and policy shops tied to permanent Washington. It was a clearing house and networking hub for permanent Washington.

In a way, the economy of permanent Washington is something like the economies of ancient city states. Those city states operated what is called palace economies where agricultural products flowed into the palace of the ruler and were then distributed back to the populace as needed. Farmers, craftsmen, and traders maintained their own economy, but a substantial portion of their economic output flowed into the palace to be redistributed as the ruler saw fit.

That is how USAID functioned. It got tens of billions from Congress and used some of that to draw in tens of billions more from other sources in the government and private donors, which it then directed to friendly sources. This was not a formal scheme where they sat around in a hollowed-out volcano figuring out how to use the money to further their evil agenda. It was more like an extended network of friends who networked within this large community, underwritten by tax money.

Imagine if the Church of Scientology had infiltrated the government. Members got positions in the administrative state and the political system. They then directed money to organizations run by fellow cult members. Those organizations then used some of the money to lobby for more money from the system in the form of government contracts, but also by influence peddling to private actors. They would then organize these resources to control public policy.

That is the nature of the “deep state.” The people in it do not think of themselves as part of the deep state. From their perspective, they are just normal people working in the media, government, politics, and policy. Everyone they know is a normal person working in one of these areas. This is how they know they are normal and the people talking about the deep state are not normal. All the normal people they know agree with them that the deep state is a conspiracy theory.

As an example, look at the LinkedIn profile of Maggie Mitchell Salem, the current Executive Director of something called IRIS. That stands for Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services. It is an open borders not-for-profit located in Connecticut with a fifteen-million-dollar budget. According to the organization’s website, “IRIS inspired and is one of the seven organizations implementing a new national resettlement program, Welcome Corps.” They want your town full of Somalis.

Now, if you scan down Mx. Salem’s resume, you see that open borders is a new advocation for her. Five years ago, she was the Executive Director of something called the Qatar Foundation International. According to their website, they promote learning the Arabic language, using donations from the Qatari government. That is nonsense, of course, as its real purpose is to buy influence in Washington. They hire people like Mx. Salem to put their money in the right hands.

We know this from a story in the Tablet. According to that report, Mx. Salem was writing anti-Saudi stories for a man named Jamal Khashoggi, who was supposedly a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post. He was a dissident, in that he did not like new ruler of Saudi Arabia. The Qataris do not like the Saudis, so they paid Mx. Salem to handle Mr. Khashoggi to place anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, the Washington Post.

If you scan down further in Mx. Salem’s resume, you will learn that she started out in life as a foreign service officer, stationed in Tel Aviv. You will note that technically, USAID was under the supervision of the State Department. Mx. Salem used her government job to cultivate friendships in the Middle East and in Washington, so that one day she could get one of those good jobs at good wages in the deep state. By all accounts, the Qataris are very generous with their American friends.

Eventually, the Saudis grew tired of seeing anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, so they kidnapped Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and then chopped him up in their consulate. One of the reasons the Saudis are planning for a post-America world is they have grown weary of the perfidy of the deep state, which will fink on anyone for money. This is a feature of managerialism. Everyone is for sale, so anyone can buy what they want from the deep state.

This level of bungling by Mx. Salem in the dreaded private sector would have resulted in termination and banishment from the industry, but in the deep state where everyone knows your name, it is a minor bump in the road. She bounced over to the immigration rackets before getting a job in the Biden years running a not-for-profit in Tunisia and then back into the immigration rackets. The lines between the government and those who lobby the government are never very clear.

What you see in this one example is how the managerial state operates like a community that rules over the country. It is why voting does not matter, as the people running the thousands of entities that make up the system are always going to be people who have as their top priority the preservation of their class. It is not a deep state so much as a broad state that overlays everything. Every silo of power is controlled by people who believe the same things.

This is why the first bullet out of the Trump barrel this time was at USAID. It is also why they are attacking elite colleges like Harvard. These are important nodes of a system that organized the antibodies against him the first time. It is why they have systematically broken up the media connections within the government. The point is to destabilize and dismember this broad community of people who operate as the unofficial government of the American empire.

It sounds like an impossible task, given the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who make up this blob. The Khashoggi story, however, points to something else about this system. It is has grown increasingly incompetent and corrupt since the end of the Cold War. Hard times breed hard men and easy times breed perfidious women incapable of maintaining the structures of power. Trump is a symptom of a system that is collapsing in on itself.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!