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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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I’m also curious whether the claims will be retracted if Trump wins this year, since presumably that would be the deep state choosing to allow him to become president again, right?

Why would a sincerely curious person have reason to believe a 2024 Trump victory would negate or disprove beliefs of deep state opposition to Trump?

The core argument on the idea of a deep state is that it exists and is organized and has power that it utilizes for a cause, not that it is all-powerful and all-determining. There is no requirement for some Nybbler-level nihilism that the deep state determines all and resistance is futile because the deep state determines all. The premise of a deep state is that it is still a state, and while people frequently have unclear ideas of the limits of states they are also very aware that there are limitations of a state and their ability to fail if key actors are opposed (the basis of politically organizing against a vague group of interests) or fall out (divisions within the private coordination mechanisms causing visible turmoil). Even the most famous examples of deep states of contemporary history, including some of the ones that popularized the term like the Pakistani deep state, can have both clear power and clear limits and failures to their attempts to influence. For a somewhat more public version, the current fallout over Biden that is breaking the Democratic coalition apart is a failure of system, not evidence of that Biden's new critics are secretly pro-Trump. The non-public Democratic coordination mechanisms are still anti-Trump, they just are in disagreement as to how.

Organizations- public or secretive- can simply try and fail. Their failure does not imply they were secretly for the other side the entire time. This is particularly true when the reasons for their failures are the over-use of increasingly ineffective/discredited tools that have become less effective with time and over-use.