Deep State
Yes. The original point of the “Deep State” meme was to explain that unelected bureaucracy, courts etc. exist, an election doesn’t change everything, PM/POTUS isn’t all-powerful.
But
- people have turned it into v4.0 of Illuminati/WEF/Da-joos conspiracy theories
- a Deep State is not inherently evil (and essential for guaranteeing stability in messy democracies).
Instead a Deep State is merely one of many “commanding heights of power”— just like elected govt, media, film, social media, books, education, academia, tech companies, corporate power, influential people, etc. —that a political movement must conquer in order to succeed.
Focusing on the Deep State (or on any one of these commanding heights) rather than the political movement (Left-liberalism) that controls it is basically the same fallacy as attacking people for their identities rather than the ideology:
Liberals wear their identities as ablative armour. When they offend RWs, the latter assume the former are motivated by their micro-identities (ethnicity/religion/da joos) and lash out at those groups, leaving the Liberal Raj unscathed.
It is the reigning political movement, the Left-liberal Rāj, that wields agency, everything else is just its tools.