Doug Casey (link below), has been making this argument since the 1970s, which is why the essay still relevant. The phrase "Deep State" is newer than the thing it names. What he is describing is an informal but durable network that uses the official State as both weapon and camouflage, and that network is structurally hostile to individual liberty because liberty is the one thing it cannot digest without shrinking.
The important clarification is that this is not a secret society with a membership list and a handshake. Casey's point, and it is the one most people still miss, is that the apparatus is hidden in plain sight. The same people rotate through intelligence agencies, banking, university presidencies, media conglomerates, defense contractors, and "philanthropic" boards. They went to the same schools, attend the same conferences, sit on each other's compensation committees, and treat the revolving door between regulator and regulated as a career path rather than a scandal. You cannot vote that out, because elections only decide which faction of the managerial class gets first claim on the next budget cycle. The consensus itself stays in place.
That is why the three-tier dog metaphor is more useful than most conspiracy charts. The Top Dogs set the agenda and police the acceptable range of opinion. The Running Dogs: clearance holders, mid-level bureaucrats, corporate compliance officers, credentialed academics, enforce it and punish deviation. The Whipped Dogs are the majority who depend on transfers, licenses, or government paycheques and who will roll over when a Top Dog or Running Dog decides someone has gone off-script. Lone wolves exist, but they are outnumbered and they are hunted. The structure does not require a single mastermind stroking a white cat. Shared incentives, shared social circles, and a shared philosophy of control are enough.
The Rome comparison is not decoration. Winwood Reade's image of carts arriving in the capital loaded with silks, spices, marble, timber, and grain, and leaving with nothing but dung, is a description of a city that consumes real production and exports only waste, coercion, and paper claims. Washington/Canberra/London etc does the same thing with tax revenue. It imports wealth created elsewhere and exports wars, fiat currency, regulatory complexity, and policies that make productive activity more expensive. A capital that produces almost nothing of independent value will always treat independent people as a problem to be managed.
Casey's reading of Trump is colder than either the devoted or the horrified versions. Trump is a nationalist and a traditionalist who wants the country to look more like an earlier version of itself. That is not the same thing as wanting to shrink the State. He has surrounded himself with people who live inside the existing machinery, approved enormous new spending, and treated agencies as instruments rather than enemies. A person without a moral core that treats the State as illegitimate will use the State for ends he considers righteous. That is continuity with extra branding, not abolition. Mussolini liked state-corporate partnership too. The comparison is not name-calling; it is a reminder that "business-oriented nationalism" has a long record of thickening the very apparatus it claims to discipline.
The pessimism about revolution or dictatorship as the only clean exits is mechanically plausible for a country this large. What the essay underplays is the quieter exit that does not wait for Washington to become virtuous. Parallel systems: money that the central bank cannot print at will, media that does not need the same advertisers and access, food and energy that do not run through a handful of regulated chokepoints, credentials that do not depend on captured universities, assets that are harder to freeze or inflate away, are how individuals reduce the surface area the apparatus can tax, license, and shame. Casey's commodities and gold recommendation is one instance of that principle, not the whole principle.
The Left-versus-Right contest remains useful theatre. Both sides of the official spectrum expand the administrative state; they merely disagree about which client groups should feed first. Once you treat the State as a parasite with its own survival drive rather than a broken tool that good people can repair, the pattern is easier to see. Productive people are the host. Individual liberty is what the host needs in order to keep producing. The Deep State needs the opposite: dependence, permission, and a population trained to love the institution that lives off it.
https://internationalman.com/articles/the-deep-state/