The Deep State is gonna hate – and Americans want it gone. Again

American politics and capitalism have traditionally been deeply intertwined.

Money. Infotainment. Advertising.

Features American democracy essentially shares with the supermarket shelf, making the image of Uncle Sam look less like a statesman and more like a franchise logo.

So it’s no wonder that voting in the American midterm elections this year may carry a certain undertone of shopping for a better deal, trying to pick the healthier option between two soda brands in a vending machine.

You press the button. And beep. The system delivers.

But zooming out, what actual difference does that choice really make when both products are manufactured and cashed in on by the exact same parent company?

With lobbying spending hitting record highs this year ahead of the election cycle, this consumer dilemma translates into the language of modern day politics as:

“Remember the Swamp that Trump promised to drain?”

The reason why this has become a major question in the modern political landscape is hardly surprising. By 2016, Americans had pulled back the curtain on the corporate, secretive nature of politics realizing that financial undercurrents and special interests matter far more than campaign trail promises. Consequently, the public sentiment driving the election that year was largely,

“I honestly dislike both, but I’m gonna go with the lesser evil.”

And the lesser evil they chose.

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Donald Trump stood out among other candidates as an underdog billionaire outsider who would not be a puppet to big-money influence and was willing to take on the Deep State and challenge the system precisely because his own wealth made him less dependent on corporate backing. This is exactly what he himself claimed he would do, and this is what the Republican Party, who flocked to Trump during his second term, had effectively capitalized on. That is right up until the escalation with Iran, which made it more than a little harder to radiate the beautiful anti-establishment fragrance that so clearly set them apart from the Democrats.

This craving for an underdog hero who’s ready to fight the system is still felt today and reflects a deep, structural disillusionment with the two-party system, manifested most clearly in the historic rise of independent voters. According to this year’s Gallup survey, some 45% of US adults now identify as political independents, leaving both the Democratic and Republican parties trailing at 27%. Looking back two decades, that number stood at 33% in 2006.

The two parties are now going out of their way to garner the support of this group because the common wisdom holds that independents are the ones who decide midterms. And even though this year the Democrats are reportedly doing better with them compared to the Republicans, that 12-point increase in their number screams that a large proportion of Americans are still finding themselves sandwiched between choosing bad and choosing worse.

So let us break down the vices of the Deep State that lead to low political trust among American independents as well as the parties losing their adherents.

Divide and rule

The reported dissatisfaction with the two-party system, in part, stems from the fact that domestic issues in the US have become intensely, aggressively polarized, with partisan hostility growing over the last decade.

Grievance politics has essentially replaced consensus-based politics.

And partisan hatred does not flow upward from, nor is it generated by, the people.

By using the good old bogeyman of ‘the Other’ and perennial scapegoating, political elites seek to galvanize their electoral base and ensure more support for their own party, forcing people to show up and vote – lest America burn in flames of apocalyptic fire if they let the opposing party gain the upper hand.

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The growing negative sentiment at the grassroots becomes mere collateral damage in the partisan race to power. Amplified by never-ending culture wars in the media, you get a trickle-down effect where domestic issues gradually grow more explosive as ideological lines become sharper.

Additionally, by fueling a perpetual culture war and partisan gridlock, the public’s attention and anger are directed horizontally (citizen vs. citizen, Democrat vs. Republican) rather than vertically (the working class vs. the MIC, FIC, and TIC).

All of this, however, doesn’t seem to align with independents who reject the growing political tribalism and feel most at home in the moderate middle. So they are more than willing to shy away from their partisanship when caring for your country’s future practically equates to hating your neighbor.

Besides, the independents’ moderatism is not only about the intensity of beliefs. It is also the complexity of their worldviews that doesn’t seem to fit the red-blue 3D glasses design, ultimately leaving them ideologically homeless.

Third way? No way!

So when

“double haters”

talk about the Deep State and how it’s all the same and it doesn’t matter which party is in power, they are not talking about an absence of difference in domestic issues.

Here, the rifts are hard to ignore.

A curious soteriological parallel to the Red vs. Blue division was popularized by English writer Anthony Burgess. The former are pessimistic Augustinians who consider humans to be inherently sinful, thus stressing conservative values and caution toward social progress, while the latter are optimistic Pelagians who see people as inherently good and believe that changing the environment will eventually allow humans to realize their inherent striving for perfection, progress, and freedom.

In Burgess’s novel ‘The Wanting Seed’, the main character lectures his students on how the Pelagian phase (Pelphase), in which the state celebrates homosexuality and discourages childbirth to manage the population, and the Augustinian phase (Gusphase), which pushes back on the liberalism of the Pelphase and propagates law and order, conservative values and militarism, supplant one another in a never-ending cycle. The transition between them is marked by a violent, anarchic Interphase, yet they always coexist in an eternal dance.

The inescapability of this cycle is precisely what makes the American voter feel that the system is incapable of genuine change. Moreover, the liberal and conservative paradigms in the US rigidly entail a certain economic model, preventing you from opting out of the additional socialist or capitalist packages that come attached to them.

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In the Gusphase (read: the Repphase), the pessimistic view that humans are inherently corrupt prompts the state to abandon futile attempts to reform its citizens. This leads to economic deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism designed to channel human greed. The resulting material wealth, paradoxically, convinces society that humans are actually good, triggering a shift to Pelphase (read: the Demphase) optimism, where the government introduces heavy economic regulation in an attempt to engineer a utopia and falls into totalitarian vices.

There seems to be no third way within this two-party system that could offer a combination of social conservatism and economic leftism or a mix of social liberal values with a classical liberal economic system. Moderates, who have not yet been conditioned to be neatly boxed into the left/right dichotomy, feel trapped because they have to either opt for conservative values alongside unbridled capitalism, or vote for the public healthcare and educational benefits of a social safety net knowing they would have put up with the state-sponsored cultural wokeism permeating the Democratic Party.

So while Republican voters got the revival of the Augustinian spirit they had so yearned for, Americans also missed out on economic benefits that could potentially flow from a smart embrace of at least some socialist features, if the system wasn’t so rigid… Or if it wasn’t for the skyrocketing gas prices following the outbreak of the war with Iran, which brings us to the next favorite item on the deep-state menu.

Forever wars

Partisan disillusionment is also felt acutely among so-called woke right Republicans, many of whom voted Trump into office precisely to disrupt the entire neocon apparatus so addicted to aggressive foreign policy. Instead, they were left with a profound sense of betrayal.

Culture wars do play a massive domestic role, and their impact is entirely real. No question about that. Yet, the moment you look past domestic disagreements, the illusion of ideological friction completely vanishes.

Permanent Washington is just being Permanent WARshington. When people lament the lack of decision-making power in American politics, they are usually referring to the foreign policy establishment that is entirely unaligned with what the public actually wants.

Historically, Washington’s global posture has maintained a striking degree of continuity. There have been individual fluctuations here and there – anomalies like JFK that sometimes went against the grain – but the overarching momentum has remained largely unchanged since the Second World War.

If the US foreign policy had a dictionary entry, it would read something along the lines of

A consistent, relentless pursuit of global hegemony, characterised by lecturing other nations on how to behave, manufacturing geopolitical crises, destabilizing regions whenever the dollar requires a timely boost, and fomenting regime change under the guise of exporting democratic values, the real goal, of course, being the constant urge to assert absolute economic control and keep foreign governments under the thumb.

This immutable neocon ethos is what ordinary Americans mean when they invoke terms like the Deep State, the Uniparty, or the Swamp. These labels reflect a profound aversion among independents (and not only) to the thirst for foreign military interventions and warmongering that remain so popular within the American establishment.

Whether it is approving massive foreign aid packages, ousting foreign leaders, or pushing a reductive

“civilization versus barbarians”

narrative, both parties always seem to march in lockstep.

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Is the situation around Iran an exception?

On the surface, the GOP pursues a traditionally hawkish, maximum-pressure strategy, while the dovish Democrats are bashing them for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. However, the timing of this sudden fit of pacifism among the establishment Democrats is key here.

When the objective is to secure political capital right before the midterms, it becomes vital to show that your party is the true party of peace, and the opposing party is the true party of war. So you play the usual blame game, turning shared hatred into a synthetic common cause using the scapegoat to – yes, you guessed it – mobilize the voter base.

Yet, these same prominent Democratic leaders – including Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Hillary Clinton – have long characterized Iran as an existential global threat to the entire free world, ultimately clearing the runway for Trump’s Operation Epic Fury.

This reveals that establishment Democrats are not opposed to the war in Iran because they now have a sudden appetite for peace. They oppose it because that optics contrasts favorably against the Republicans.

“Too reckless, too hawkish,”

they say when talking about Iran. But when Trump expresses a desire to broker peace in Ukraine and actually shows that he wants to follow through, those very same Democrats aggressively push back.

Suddenly, Trump is labeled

“weak”

and scolded for not taking a hardline stance. How so?

RUSSIA

G

HATE

And that is where the Uniparty truly shines.

Watching legacy media coverage of the recent diplomatic developments with Steve Witkoff visiting St. Petersburg and the diesel deal between Russia and the US, the right- and left-wing media narratives become remarkably difficult to tell apart.

Fox News, which has traditionally defended Trump against the

“Dumbocrats and fake news CNN,”

now somehow is almost fully onboard with the latter on the issue of Ukraine. Both are pushing pretty much identical anti-Russian narratives, portraying Zelensky as a democratic leader who has always been ready to negotiate. In doing so, they conveniently omit the fact that he previously signed a formal decree barring Ukraine from holding talks with Russia.

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The diesel deal and Trump’s resurgent criticism of Zelensky have also been under fire from both Democratic politicians and hawkish Republicans, who joined forces to urge Trump to

“immediately reverse course”

and put maximum pressure on Russia.

On any other day, they might be fiercely clashing over Iran and hot domestic issues, but when the issue of Russian sanctions comes up, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

However, if we cut through all of this noise, for those who put their faith in Trump to dismantle the Deep State, this cautious move toward Russia hints at a promising return to his original promise to stop wars and finally

“drain the Swamp”

– two major issues crucial to his anti-establishment underdog persona – which is meant to help the Republicans remedy their public image right before the midterms and get some additional wins they so desperately need.

Now that the Iran conflict is in the spotlight, it has become difficult for MAGA Republicans to persuade their discouraged voters that they have actually been working to deliver on Trump’s original pledge to change the way the Washington establishment operates. Thus, the rapprochement with Russia serves as a timely signal that MAGA Republicans have not lost their anti-establishment valor and are trying to regain American trust.

Trump and the GOP certainly understand this. Their recent attempts to reinvigorate American-Russian relations perfectly play into the public craving for anti-establishment politics that rejects hatred, placing them in sharp opposition to the Deep State, which has Russophobia as its distinctive marker.

Whether that is sufficient to sway enough votes in their favor remains to be seen. But one thing is clear. A profound political vacuum has emerged, and it cannot remain unfilled.

There are already tentative signs of a new political majority rising out of the disenfranchised ranks of independents as well as disillusioned Democrats and Republicans, paving the way for a viable third party. This alignment is driven by a shared exhaustion with the Washington establishment that can no longer deliver what people actually want. Less hate and warmongering.

Talking about political parties, the protagonist in ‘The Wanting Seed’ says:

The old dichotomy, we recognize, subsists in ourselves and requires no naive projection into sects or factions. We are both God and the Devil, though not at the same time.

And while he might be wrong about the first part, he is surely not so wrong about the last.