Given the centrality of the “deep state” to the MAGA worldview, merely uttering the phrase will immediately code you as a Trump partisan. But until quite recently, the concept was the province of the political left. Understanding its origins and evolution makes clear that the stakes are far greater than the political fate of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The deep state is a cancer that undermines popular sovereignty. Those who wish to restore democratic rule, regardless of political orientation, must therefore take it seriously.
The “deep state” first entered the English lexicon in the 1990s, when it was very occasionally used by scholars who borrowed it from Turkish. But it was Peter Dale Scott, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who popularized the term among critical left-leaning scholars of covert action when he first used it in his 2007 book The Road to 9/11.
In Turkish, derin devlet (“deep state”) referred to clandestine networks within the armed forces that saw themselves as having a transcendent legitimacy and authority rooted in the founding of the republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This authority, they believed, allowed them to use extra-legal means to protect the state from both external and internal threats, especially those emanating from the secular Marxist left and the Islamist religious right. Both threats, it was feared, might use Turkish democracy to change the direction of the country’s political development. Emboldened with these ideas, elements in the Turkish military have engaged in various types of political interference, maintained corrupt connections with heroin gangs, and launched coups both successful and failed.
As it spread beyond Turkey, the term “deep state” was adapted to describe similar networks in other countries. Always, the term implies that unelected officials and bureaucrats can undermine elected leaders and shape policy undemocratically and without public scrutiny. In Scott’s usage, it refers to “power not derived from the constitution but outside and above it, more powerful than the public state.” Long before importing the Turkish phrase into English, Scott was writing about “deep politics”: clandestine networks of government and business potentates that exercise power against the will of the citizenry and its elected representatives.