Many people want political solutions to their problems—in other words, they want the government to force others to act as they prefer. Anyone with a moral sense, writes Doug Casey, recognizes that this only creates more problems. Clever operators, particularly those with Machiavellian ethics, use the government as a tool, but they prefer to work from behind a curtain. It is more effective, and far safer, to pull the puppet's strings from offstage. They occasionally step into the limelight, depending on circumstances and the depth of their personal narcissism, but their agenda comes down to two things: power and money. Call them the Deep State.

Once a country develops an entrenched Deep State, Casey argues, only a revolution or a dictatorship can eliminate it—and probably only in a small country. The American Deep State is a powerful informal network that controls most institutions. You will not read about it in the news, he says, because it controls the news. Politicians will not discuss it or even acknowledge its existence; that would be like a mobster discussing murder and robbery on the six o'clock news. The Deep State is hidden, but hidden in plain sight, and it is involved in almost every negative development happening right now.

The State

The Deep State uses and hides behind the State itself. Even though the essence of the State is coercion, people have been taught to love and respect it. Most people view the State through the quaint lens of a grade-school civics book, imagining it has something to do with "We the People" electing a Jimmy Stewart character to represent them. That ideal has always been a pernicious fiction, in Casey's view, because it idealizes, sanitizes, and legitimizes an intrinsically destructive institution based on force. As Mao once said, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.

The Deep State

The Deep State controls the State—the government—and is as old as history itself. The term "Deep State" originated in Turkey, where "derin devlet" described an alleged covert network of military officers and civil servants operating within and beyond the formal state, a concept that entered American political vocabulary in the 2010s as commentators on both left and right debated whether entrenched federal bureaucracies could resist elected leadership. Casey finds the term fitting for Turkey, since that country is the heir to the corrupt Byzantine and Ottoman empires. In the best Byzantine manner, he writes, the American Deep State has insinuated itself throughout the fabric of what once was America, its tendrils reaching from Washington into every part of civil society. Like a metastasized cancer, it can no longer be easily eradicated.

In many ways, Washington models itself after another city with a Deep State: ancient Rome. Casey quotes the Victorian-era freethinker Winwood Reade:

"Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo."

The Deep State controls the political and economic essence of the US, Casey contends. This goes beyond observing that there is no real difference between the left and right wings of what he calls the Demopublican Party. Republicans say they believe in economic freedom but don't, and they definitely don't believe in social freedom; Democrats say they believe in social freedom but don't, and they definitely don't believe in economic freedom. Both parties have since metastasized: MAGA has broken up the old-style Republicans, and radical socialists of various stripes have disassembled the traditional Democrats. The US itself, he writes, has degenerated from a fairly homogeneous country into a multicultural domestic empire, on the way to something like a civil war.

Who Is the Deep State?

The American Deep State is a real but informal structure that has arisen not merely to profit from the State but to control it, and it has a life of its own, like the government itself. Within government, it is composed of top-echelon employees of a dozen Praetorian agencies—such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA—along with top generals, admirals, and other military operatives, long-term congressmen and senators, and directors of important regulatory agencies.

But the Deep State extends well beyond government. It includes the heads of major corporations, all heavily involved in selling to the State and enabling it—absolutely including Silicon Valley, which at least once had a sense of humor, evidenced by its defunct "Don't Be Evil" motto. It also includes top people at the Fed and the heads of major banks, brokers, and insurers; the presidents and many professors at top universities, which act as Deep State recruiting centers; top media figures; and regulars at the WEF, Bohemian Grove, and the Council on Foreign Relations. They epitomize the status quo, held together by power, money, and propaganda. Altogether, Casey estimates, these people number a couple thousand.

He analogizes the structure of the Deep State to a huge pack of dogs. The people described above are the Top Dogs. But there are hundreds of thousands more who are not at the nexus yet directly depend on it, have considerable clout, and support the Deep State because it supports them. These include many of the wealthy, especially those who got that way through State connections; the 1.5 million people holding top secret clearances—a shocking but accurate number, he says, a figure consistent with the roughly 1.3 million clearance holders reported by the annual inventory of security clearances when it was last published—plus top players in organized crime, particularly the illegal drug business, little of which would exist without the State; and mid-level types in the police and military, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. These are the Running Dogs.

Beyond them are scores of millions who depend on things remaining as they are: the 50%-plus of Americans who are net recipients of State benefits—the 70 million on Social Security, the 90 million on Medicaid, the 50 million on food stamps, the many millions on hundreds of other programs, the 23 million government employees and most of their families—plus the many millions of average people just getting by. Casey calls this level, the vast majority of the population, the Whipped Dogs: they both love and fear their master, and will do as they are told. These three types of dogs make up the vast majority of the US population. Casey writes that he considers himself a Lone Wolf in this context, though dogs are enemies of wolves and tend to hunt them down.

The Deep State is destructive, but great for the people in it, and like any living organism its prime directive is to survive. It survives by indoctrinating the fiction that it is both good and necessary—which, in Casey's view, is a lie. It is a parasite that promotes the notion that everyone can live at the expense of society. Is it a conspiracy headed by a man stroking a white cat? Casey thinks not—it is hard enough to get friends to agree on a movie, much less a group of power-hungry miscreants to coordinate running everyone's lives. But the Top Dogs all know each other, went to the same schools, belong to the same clubs, socialize, and, most importantly, share common interests, values, and philosophies.

The American Deep State rotates around the Washington Beltway. It imports America's wealth as tax revenue, much of which is consumed there by useless mouths, and exports things that reinforce the Deep State: wars, fiat currency, and destructive policies. This is unsustainable, Casey argues, because nothing of value can come out of a city full of parasites.

A Solution?

Many Americans still believe Donald Trump is the solution to what ails the US—that he is a maverick who will smash the Deep State. That is understandable, Casey writes, since although Trump is devoid of moral or philosophical principles, he is at least a cultural conservative who wants the country to resemble the happy days of yesteryear, when Mom, apple pie, and Chevrolets mattered more than Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Many believed him when he said he would abolish the income tax, never involve the US in foreign wars, and cut back the size of government. Those hopes are as dead as Elon Musk's DOGE, in Casey's words—the Department of Government Efficiency initiative that was wound down after roughly a year, having claimed substantial but disputed savings.

Trump is a nationalist, a traditionalist, and business-oriented—but so was Mussolini, who also favored massive State involvement in business. Most Americans are unaware, Casey writes, that the US government under Trump has taken equity positions in over a dozen corporations, with many more on the runway—something that works to cement the Deep State further into position. Trump has, almost necessarily, surrounded himself with Deep State players such as Commerce Secretary Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Bessent, and Fed Chairman Warsh—all denizens of the swamps in and around the Washington Beltway, Wall Street, academia, and the media.

Trump is not about to abolish government agencies (although Casey finds it nice to see what happened to USAID—the decades-old aid agency that the administration effectively dismantled, absorbing or terminating most of its programs) or fire many government employees; he sees these as resources and minions to do what he fancies. His lack of a moral core, Casey argues, guarantees that instead of trying to abolish the State—in the manner of Argentina's Milei, who has pursued aggressive spending cuts and ministry eliminations, or Ron Paul, the longtime Texas congressman and libertarian presidential candidate who spent his career calling for the abolition of the Fed and other agencies—he will simply use it in ways he considers righteous. The proof, Casey says, is the trillions in new government spending and deficits Trump has approved so far, with trillions more to come over the next two years, all of it feeding the Deep State.

On the bright side, Casey writes, Trump's rhetoric and actions, while generally horrible, are less objectionable than Kamala's—Kamala and the people behind her would have worked overtime to collectivize the US. On the not-so-bright side, Casey suspects the Democrats will win the mid-terms in November, impeach Trump, and tie him in knots over what he calls Trump's numerous illegalities and massive grift, regaining control of the apparatus of the State and not giving it up again.

The Deep State itself does not really care who holds office, though Casey believes it currently prefers the Democrats because Trump has become a loose cannon—totally unpredictable, except regarding his own pocketbook and a certain foreign country. The Establishment will get fatter and happier when the Dems take control, he writes, while the average American slides further into the Slough of Despond. That is what they will work for—and that is the way to bet, in Casey's assessment.

As for what this means for investors, Casey's conclusion is: stay long commodities, particularly gold and oil stocks.

This article was originally published on International Man.

About the Author

Doug Casey is a best-selling author, world-renowned speculator, and libertarian philosopher with a reputation for erudite—and often controversial—insights into politics, economics, and investment markets. He is widely respected as one of the preeminent authorities on "rational speculation," especially in the high-potential natural resource sector. His book Crisis Investing spent multiple weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling financial book of 1980 with 438,640 copies sold, surpassing titles such as Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, The Real War by Richard Nixon, and Cosmos by Carl Sagan. His next book, Strategic Investing, received the largest advance ever paid for a financial book at the time, and The International Man was the most-sold book in the history of Rhodesia. His more recent releases, Totally Incorrect (2012) and Right on the Money (2013), continue his tradition of challenging statism and advocating liberty and free markets. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including those of David Letterman, Merv Griffin, Charlie Rose, Phil Donahue, Regis Philbin, and Maury Povich, as well as NBC News and CNN; has been featured in Time, Forbes, People, and the Washington Post; and is a regular keynote speaker at FreedomFest. Casey has lived in 10 countries and visited over 175, and today resides mainly at La Estancia de Cafayate outside Salta, Argentina.