The Transformational Idea of a Deep State and the Election of 2024

Abstract

Among the innumerable speculations, explanations, and theories about the election of 2024, and why it swept into power a Republican president and majorities in both houses of Congress, one explanation feels different than the others because it is different in that it isn’t based on an observable reality of (e.g.) one of the most common explanations, uncontrolled immigration. This paper argues that more than any of the explanations of the Trump election trifecta is the power of an idea, which, unlike migrants crossing a border, is not based on an observable reality. It is the idea that there exists within the American state another state populated by the nation’s corrupt enemies. The idea is, of course, the deep state. Its potency is perceptual, an idée fixe. Migrants crossing the Southern border is an observable reality. But what gave the deep state its salience is fueled by the evidence of things unseen, the kind of awe we associate with metaphysical phenomena, religious dogma, and the appetite for conspiracies. With a nod to intellectual history, this paper traces the idea to its modern roots in the theory of a now-forgotten political philosopher, James Burnham, who argued that, in the era of President Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of numerous new agencies staffed by numerous federal workers, it signaled what he called a “managerial revolution” in which government power had transitioned from the class of the owners of the means of production to a new class, the managers who controlled government.