What delusions can tell us about the cognitive nature of belief

The Conversation
November 19, 2024 

Chess Pieces Nikolay Litov/Shutterstock, CC BY-SA

Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity, but are not well understood.

Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held, but not widely shared. In previous work, we proposed that studying delusions provides unique insights into the cognitive nature of belief and its dysfunction.

Based on evidence from delusions and other psychological disciplines, we offered a tentative five-stage cognitive model of belief formation.

When faced with an unexpected sensory input or social communication, we seek to account for this based on existing beliefs, memories, and other social information. We then evaluate our account in terms of how well this explains our experiences and how consistent it is with our prior beliefs. If it passes these criteria, the belief is accepted. It then guides what we pay attention to and what other ideas we may consider.

We propose that delusions can arise at different stages in this model. Our approach highlights the importance of the individual’s search for meaning and social context in shaping delusions. It also draws attention to the impact of a delusion, once formed, on subsequent perceptions and thinking.

This model linking delusions and beliefs differs from earlier accounts that suggested delusions were distinct from belief or arise as a largely passive response to anomalous sensory input such as a hallucination. Previous research, for example, has found that some people who believed that family members were replaced by impostors (known as Capgras delusion) had deficits in processing familiar faces, which could have generated this idea.

Based on this, some have suggested that other delusions arise in a similar way, but in combination with an as yet undiscovered deficit in the cognitive process of evaluating our beliefs.

But these accounts didn’t fully consider other contributing factors, such as the individual’s prior beliefs, social context and their personal attempts to explain their experiences.

Informative case study

The study of delusions has been informed by select informative case studies. Unlike large group studies, case studies allow researchers a more detailed exploration of the origins and course of clinical features not explained by current theories.

We recently published a paper in the international journal Cortex that describes a unique case study of a woman who temporally experienced compelling delusions during a brief hospital admission for postpartum psychosis, which can give rise to hallucinations, delusions, mood swings and confusion. This is a rare complication of pregnancy, affecting around 1-2 in 1,000 women, thought to be due to hormonal changes or immunological factors.

Natalie (a pseudonym) had no previous medical or psychiatric history. She developed postpartum psychosis while in hospital after the birth of her second child.

As part of her condition, Natalie reported several delusions, including the belief that strangers were her parents-in-law in disguise (known as Fregoli delusion). Natalie recovered quickly with treatment. The combination of interviews and observations while she was experiencing the delusions and her later retrospective account offered a unique window into the onset and experience of her delusions.

Following a full recovery, Natalie confirmed that she considered her delusions to be strongly held beliefs. She likened them to her conviction that her husband was her husband. This is contrary to some views that suggested that delusions are different from normal beliefs.

Natalie was able to identify specific features that contributed to her delusions. In the case of believing that strangers were her in-laws, Natalie identified mannerisms, behaviors and speech patterns of the strangers that reminded her of her in-laws. This suggested that the delusion could have arisen from inappropriate activation of memory representations of familiar people based on these cues and other factors.


Natalie also recalled other beliefs, including that she was dead (known as Cotard delusion), which she did not share with clinicians at the time. She noted that she entertained this idea due to the failure of other explanations to account for her strange experiences and an idea from a television show.



Rational thought can be involved in delusional thinking. Pormezz/Shutterstock


Natalie said she eventually dismissed this idea as implausible, while still holding other delusional ideas. This suggests that belief evaluation may involve different thresholds for different delusions. It also highlights the private nature of some delusions.

Across all of her delusions, Natalie described her active involvement in trying to explain and manage her experiences. She reported considering different explanations and testing these by seeking further information. For example, she asked questions of the people she thought were her in-laws. This suggests a surprisingly similar approach to how we typically form beliefs.

Natalie recalled the influence of television and movies on her ideas. She also recalled how she elaborated on her delusions, once formed, based on information in her surroundings.

These features challenge theories that delusions simply arise from anomalous sensory data. They instead highlight the role of the individual’s search for meaning and social context, as well as the subsequent impact of delusions on perception and thinking.
Implications

As a case study, Natalie’s experiences are not necessarily representative of all people who experience delusions or postpartum psychosis. However, Natalie’s case presents informative features that theories of delusions need to account for.

In particular, Natalie’s personalized insights highlight the critical role of the individual in actively trying to understand their experiences and bestow meaning. This is opposed to just passively accepting beliefs in response to anomalous sensory data or neuropsychological deficits. This suggests psychological therapies may be useful in treating psychosis, in combination with other treatments, in some cases.

More generally, Natalie’s account reveals commonalities between delusions and ordinary beliefs and supports the view that delusions can be understood in terms of cognitive processes across the stages of normal belief formation that we identified.

While there remain challenges in investigating delusions, further study may offer insights into the underpinnings of everyday belief and, in turn, of ourselves.

Michael Connors, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry, UNSW Sydney and Peter W Halligan, Hon Professor of Neuropsychology, Cardiff University


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How pirates steer corporate innovation: Lessons from the front lines

Calgary Innovation Week runs from Nov. 13-21, 2024.

By Chris Hogg
DIGITAL JOURNAL
November 19, 2024

Image generated by OpenAI's DALL-E via ChatGPT

If you ask Tina Mathas who should lead transformative innovation projects, she’ll tell you it’s all about the pirates.

“It requires a different type of mindset, a different type of ecosystem and environment, and it should be protected,” says Mathas, co-founder of Flow Factory, a company that aims to enhance human performance by integrating the concept of “flow state” with artificial intelligence.

For transformative innovation, she argues, big companies need pirates — not quite drunken Jack Sparrow adventurers, but individuals who challenge traditional processes and navigate uncharted waters of creativity and risk.

Mathas’s declaration set the tone for a lively virtual panel on corporate innovation at Calgary Innovation Week. The discussion brought together industry leaders to dissect how innovation can thrive in corporate environments often resistant to change.

The challenges, they agreed, are substantial, but the potential rewards for organizations that get it right are transformative.

Making the case for pirates

“Transformative innovation requires pirates,” Mathas said. “It’s not just about solving today’s problems — it’s about being bold and taking risks on where we think the industry is going.”

Mathas described her experience at ATB Financial, where her team was tasked with “breaking the bank.”

Operating with a $50,000 budget, they delivered a market-ready banking platform in just five weeks.

“We had no banking experience,” she said, “and people didn’t understand how we got that done. We had board support, and we had executive support. In other words, we reported directly into the executive and we were separate from the main organization.

 We were the pirates.”

This freedom is crucial, Mathas said, because transformative innovation rarely succeeds when confined by a corporation’s standard processes.

“According to an Accenture study, 82% of organizations run innovation in exactly the same way as any other regular project. Plus it takes about 18 months, and you’re still facing a 90% failure rate,” she said, telling the audience that is the reason she left the corporate world.

Innovation begins with people and alignment with business goals

Jeff Hiscock of Pembina Pipelines shifted the focus to the human element of innovation, emphasizing the challenges of workforce turnover and retention. Focus on the importance of building environments that retain experienced talent, while simultaneously attracting new entrants to the workforce, he advised.

“Thirty-five per cent of the energy workforce will turn over by 2035,” Hiscock said, referencing data from a provincial study. “A lot of that is through retirement. How do you create a workplace where those people want to stay in the roles longer?”

By focusing on creating workplaces that are innovative, engaging and adaptable, organizations can address this looming talent gap while driving forward their innovation goals.

Hiscock described innovation as a necessity, not a luxury, particularly in industries like energy.

“Innovation is about solving real problems that impact your business’s core value streams,” he said.

Pembina, for instance, focuses 70% of its innovation efforts on projects with direct EBITDA impacts, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.

However, Hiscock cautioned that innovation efforts often stall because of cultural resistance.

“What’s obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else,” he said. “It’s like playing a 4D chess game that only you can see. That’s a bad place to be.”

His solution? Securing buy-in from every level of the organization, not just senior executives.

From dollars to disruption

“Innovation isn’t about dollars, but it kind of is,” said Shannon Phillips, co-founder of Unbounded Thinking. Phillips’ work focuses on helping organizations, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, implement effective innovation management systems.

He explained that many companies struggle to balance innovation’s creative potential with the financial realities of running a business.

“If we keep talking about this vague concept of innovation that is just about something new and breakthrough, we’ll never get the respect that we need. We really need to start looking at how we measure it to make it part of our DNA, and to make it a revenue stream in itself.”

Phillips outlined a structured approach to categorizing innovation: core (incremental improvements), adjacent (new markets or products), and breakthrough (disruptive technologies).

He emphasized focusing on core innovation first, as it carries the least risk, while building maturity and trust over time to approach higher-risk, breakthrough projects effectively. This holistic, balanced approach helps companies mitigate risks and align innovation with their capabilities and goals.

“For smaller companies, it’s not a buzzword — it’s about survival,” he said. “They need proof that innovation will help them grow and keep their doors open.”

Partnerships that deliver

Lee Evans, head of low-carbon activities at TC Energy, discussed how partnerships can drive innovation in meaningful ways.

“We think about win-wins,” Evans said. “How do we find ways to work with others to support each other?”

As an example, TC Energy recently invested and partnered with Qube Technologies, a Calgary-based emissions monitoring company, to address its decarbonization goals.

Evans highlighted the importance of starting small with innovation initiatives.

“Minimum viable products are really important,” he said. “You test, you learn and then you scale.” This approach minimizes risk while building trust in the process.

Evans also stressed the need for resilience and adaptability.

“If you want to be working in this space, you’ve got to be resilient. You’ve got to be willing to face challenges and setbacks and be willing to pivot. Those are really important. And never give up if you think there’s true value in what you’re up to. Find ways to make sure people understand the value of what you’re doing.”

The role of government and academia in innovation

Panelists also weighed in on how external forces, like government policies and academic research, shape innovation.

Mathas argued that governments should incentivize competition to stimulate corporate innovation. “We need more competition coming into Canada and into Alberta to create more of that incentive to want to compete and to want to innovate.”

On the academic front, Mathas cautioned universities in their efforts to turn researchers into entrepreneurs. She said universities should focus on supporting research, not forcing students to commercialize their ideas because it can lead to a loss of investment in the research that drives real innovation.

Key takeaways for corporate innovators

The panel left attendees with practical advice for navigating the complexities of corporate innovation:Start small, think big: “Innovate like a startup, scale like an enterprise,” said Mathas.
Embrace failure: “Failures are just learning in disguise,” she added.
Focus on core problems: Hiscock advised innovators to align their projects with a company’s key value streams.
Measure impact: “We need to make innovation part of the DNA,” said Phillips.
Be resilient: “Understand the value of what you’re doing and keep going,” said Evans.

As the panel concluded, one message was clear: the future belongs to those bold enough to embrace risk, empower people and innovate with purpose.

TRUMPISTAN

Litman: Will Trump launch a reign of terror against his list of enemies? There's little to stop him

Opinion by Harry Litman


President Nixon with transcripts of White House tapes after he announced that he would turn them over to House impeachment investigators in 1974. The Watergate scandal led to Justice Department reforms that are unlikely to survive the second Trump administration. ((Associated Press))© (Associated Press)

During his ultimately victorious campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump made no bones about his intention to use the legal levers of government to go after his perceived enemies. When he takes office in January, we should therefore expect him to launch a reign of terror against dozens of people he sees as having crossed him. And his vengeance will be enabled by the Supreme Court opinion granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution.

A recent National Public Radio analysis determined that Trump has threatened more than 100 federal investigations or prosecutions to settle scores. They run the gamut from President Biden and his family, whom the president-elect has promised to pay back on Day 1 of his tenure by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate unspecified crimes; to former Rep. Liz Cheney, whom he recently suggested should face something like a firing squad; to judges involved in his prosecutions; and journalists who refuse to give up their sources.

Granted, Trump frequently gives the impression that he has little understanding of or even interest in many of the policies he pressed on the campaign trail. But retribution against his enemies is clearly something that gets him up in the morning. From well before his entry into politics, Trump has been single-minded in intimidating and exacting retribution against his opponents.

A passage from one of his tacky books that was read into evidence at his New York criminal trial declares, “My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

Trump is in this respect not unique in the annals of the American presidency. The desire to “screw” one’s enemies, a hallmark of the insecure leader, is the impulse that brought down Richard Nixon. Watergate originally sprang from Nixon’s vendetta against Daniel Ellsberg, whom he was determined to embarrass for exposing the Pentagon Papers.

In the wake of Nixon’s abuses, the country put in place a series of laws, regulations and norms designed to prevent government by vengeance. These included a prohibition on White House meddling in Justice Department prosecutions that took on canonical status.

I was a Justice official at the beginning of what became the Whitewater scandal, and it would have been unthinkable at the time for a White House official to try to direct the department to investigate a political enemy. No administration would have dared, and no department official would have acquiesced.

Since Watergate, the only administration that failed to fully respect that principle was Trump’s. His political appointees repeatedly pushed the department to at least provide information about continuing prosecutions. In those difficult years, the department sometimes resisted but sometimes relented. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, made it a priority to rebuild the wall between the White House and the Justice Department.

Trump has made it clear that he intends to raze that wall in his first days in office. Working off the blueprint of Project 2025, Trump has announced that he plans to hollow out the department’s career staff and replace them with political appointees who will serve at his pleasure and be loyal to him, not the Constitution.

At that point, there will be no real impediment to the use of federal power for revenge against Trump’s long list of enemies. It will be the opposite of the department’s proud aspiration to do “justice without fear or favor.”

Moreover, Trump has said he will rely on the Supreme Court’s immunity opinion to provide full cover against any legal resistance. When asked recently how he would handle special counsel Jack Smith, who led his two federal prosecutions, Trump replied, "It's so easy — I would fire him within two seconds," adding that he would enjoy “immunity at the Supreme Court.”

The irony and tragedy of Trump’s invocation of the opinion is that the court declared it was ruling not for Trump but “for the ages.” But it is indeed Trump whose unscrupulous ambition it has served. And while the court reasoned that immunity is needed to safeguard aggressive, nimble and presumably lawful presidential action, Trump takes the lesson that he can violate the Constitution with impunity.

The corrupt use of prosecutorial power can amount to a crime. For starters, the federal code criminalizes conspiring to injure any person because of their exercise of constitutional rights or their race. But the Supreme Court has ensured that Trump could carry out unlawful prosecutions: He can commit crimes but can't be made to answer for them.

Trump’s retribution agenda may encounter other roadblocks. Grand juries may not go along with prosecutions that reek of vengeance, and trial juries and judges are more likely to resist.

Also, presidential immunity doesn’t extend to other executive branch officials, and Trump will need confederates in the Justice Department to do his bidding. But with a clear Republican majority in the Senate, Trump is likely to get any senior official he wants confirmed. That could include the likes of the right-wing activist and attorney general hopeful Mike Davis, who wrote Wednesday of Trump’s opponents, “I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)”

As a practical matter, by far the most important protections against vengeful prosecutions are career federal prosecutors’ nonpartisan professionalism and the norms forbidding the White House from telling them whom to prosecute. Trump is plainly fixing to lay waste to those safeguards. That alone would constitute a giant step away from the rule of law and toward autocracy.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the “Talking San Diego” speaker series. @harrylitman

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Massachusetts Governor Vows to Refuse Trump Request for Help with Mass Deportations: 'Absolutely Not'

The Democratic governor warned other states of the pressure they will face following Trump's election

By Maryam Khanum
Published 11/07/24

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey expressed that she would refuse to assist in mass deportations in her state, and warned other states of the pressure they will face. Getty Images

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said that she would refuse to assist in mass deportations in her state, and warned states of the pressure they will face to penalize and deport undocumented immigrants.

"If the Trump administration requested, would the Massachusetts State Police assist in mass deportations?" MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell asked the governor.

"No. Absolutely not," Healey responded.

Massachusetts Governor says her state won’t assist with deportations if President Trump’s administration asks.

She says she will protect the illegals in her state. pic.twitter.com/I3oHWmtg8I— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) November 7, 2024

"I do think it's important that we all recognize that there's going to be a lot of pressure on states and state officials, and I can assure you, we're going to work really hard to deliver," Healey continued.

Former President Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election in the early hours of Wednesday morning, making him the 47th president of the United States. Trump largely targeted undocumented immigrants present within the United States over the course of his campaign, promising "to have the largest deportation in the history of our country" if elected.

"While I'm sure there may be litigation ahead, there's a lot of other ways that people are going to act and need to act for the sake of their states and their residents," Healey told MSNBC.

"I think that the key here is that, you know, every tool in the toolbox has got to be used to protect our citizens, to protect our residents and protect our states. And certainly, hold the line on democracy and the rule of law as a basic principle," she continued.

Originally published by Latin Times.

Climate ‘flashpoint’ looms for Trump’s China-centric focus on Pacific: US analysts

Deepening U.S. engagement with the Pacific is now firmly a consensus issue in Washington.

By Harry Pearl for BenarNews

2024.11.07

Then-President Donald Trump sports a flower lei after arriving aboard Air Force One at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, Nov. 3, 2017. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Growing U.S. security and diplomatic ties with Pacific island nations are unlikely to slow even if American foreign policy undergoes a major shake-up during Donald Trump’s second term, say former White House advisers and analysts.

Following decades of neglect, Washington has in recent years embarked on a Pacific charm offensive to counter the growing influence of China in the region.

While Trump’s unpredictably and climate change skepticism could be potential flashpoints in relations, deepening U.S. engagement with the Pacific is now firmly a consensus issue in Washington.

Trump is likely to maintain focus on the relationship, experts say, but he will have to prove that U.S. attention extends beyond just security-related matters.

“President Trump saw a strategic rationale for increased engagement in the Indo-Pacific and increased engagement in the Pacific islands,” said Alexander Gray, a senior fellow in national security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council.

“While the reality is that the security lens is going to galvanize our commitment of resources and time on the region, it’s important for us to send a message that we have other interests beyond just security,” added Gray, who was the first-ever director for Oceania & Indo-Pacific security at the National Security Council.

“We have to show an interest in development, economic assistance and economic growth.”

A number of firsts

Trump’s first term between 2017-21 contained a number of firsts for relations between the world’s No. 1 economy and Pacific islands.

Then-President Donald Trump meets with, from left, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine, Federated States of Micronesia President David Panuelo and Palau President Tommy Remengesau on May 21, 2019. (US Embassy Kolonia/White House via Facebook)

He invited the leaders of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau for a historic visit to the White House in May 2019. Later that year Mike Pompeo became the first-ever secretary of state to visit the Federated States of Micronesia.

In 2019, the White House announced more than US$100 million in new assistance to the region under its so-called Pacific Pledge, with additional funding provided the following year. Money was funneled into USAID operations in Pacific islands nations, maritime security, internet coverage, environmental challenges and disaster resilience.

The Biden-Harris administration built upon that relationship, including twice inviting Pacific Islands Forum leaders to meet at the White House in 2022 and 2023.

“The importance of the Pacific is bipartisan in the U.S. system. In fact, re-engagement with the Pacific islands started under the previous Trump administration,” said Kathryn Paik, who served as director for the Pacific and Southeast Asia at the NSC under President Joe Biden.

“This was largely due to increased Chinese interest in the region and the growing understanding within the U.S. system of the strategic importance of these islands.”

In particular, the Biden administration’s commitment to tackling climate change chimed well with Pacific nations, which are vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather events like cyclones that are predicted to become more frequent as the planet warms.

Radically different approach

Trump has taken a radically different approach — pledging to ramp up oil production and threatening to pull out of the Paris climate agreement for a second time.

In June 2017, Trump announced the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, the first nation in the world to do so.

That could make climate change a potential “flashpoint” between Pacific nations and another Trump administration, said Benjamin Reilly, a visiting professor at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

“The climate change issue is right at the top of the agenda for Pacific island leaders. It creates lots of difficulties when you have an administration that’s seen as downplaying the importance of that,” he told BenarNews.

President Joe Biden (R) meets with presidents of Pacific island nations at the U.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit in Washington, D.C., Sept. 29, 2022. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Paik, who is now a senior fellow with the Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the climate factor would complicate the relationship, but it was unlikely to “completely sink” it.

Despite Trump’s open skepticism about dangerous planet warming, U.S. support for resilience efforts across the Pacific might not be affected, some observers said.

“The Pacific certainly didn’t agree with us on our macro approach to climate change,” said Gray, who visited the region a number of times, including for the 2019 Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in Tuvalu. “But we made tremendous progress in advancing our relationships in the region because we were able to talk about resilience issues that affect people day to day.”

Shared values, mutual respect

Following Trump’s sweeping victory on Tuesday, Pacific island leaders tried to stress their shared interests with the U.S.

“We look forward to reinforcing the longstanding partnership between our nations, grounded in shared values and mutual respect,” said Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape.

Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni and Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabukia both said they looked forward to advancing bilateral relations and Pacific interests.

Pacific island nations have sought to benefit from the China-U.S. rivalry by securing more aid and foreign investment. But they have expressed alarm that their region is being turned into a geopolitical battleground.

Reilly said a danger for any new president was treating the Pacific islands as a “geopolitical chess board.”

“That’s a terrible way to actually engage and win hearts and minds and build enduring partnerships,” he said.

Paik said the U.S. now needs to build on the successes of the first phase of American re-engagement.

The U.S. renewed its compact of free association deals with Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands earlier this year, but “some of the implementation is still pending,” she said. The deals give the U.S. military exclusive access to their vast ocean territories in exchange for funding and the right for their citizens to live and work in the U.S.

“Some of the embassies have been opened, but we still only have one or two diplomats on the ground,” said Paik. “We still need to open an embassy in Kiribati and potentially other locations.

“We need to get ambassadors out to the region. We need a permanent ambassador to the PIF.”

No sitting U.S. president has ever visited a Pacific island nation.

In America’s gripping political chess game, what is really at stake?

As Harris and Trump go head to head in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance.

Faiq Zafar 

DAWN

Published November 1, 2024 

Said Lord Byron famously, “While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls — the world.”

As America’s high-octane presidential race makes inroads into its final stretch, it invokes many of Byron’s apocalyptic overtones.

“In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake,” Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris said at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina. “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and important election of our lifetime.”

As they brace for the great November showdown, Democrats have garnished their political rhetoric with similar allusions to the apocalypse should Trump take the White House in November. Of course, these clichéd talking-points don’t really explain some of the truly damning developments in their own camp. And there have been quite a few.

One such moment came gunning for Harris as she interacted with voters at a supermarket in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was asked to comment on an endorsement she had recently received.

In a move that had flabbergasted political pundits, journalists, and voters alike, former vice-president Dick Cheney, once vilified by Democrats, backed Harris for the top job, putting his weight behind a campaign he initially seemed to share little common ground with. Surprising still was a visibly excited Harris celebrating Cheney’s endorsement as if he was Santa Claus:

“I am honoured to have their endorsement. I think that leaders who are well-respected are making an important statement. (That) it’s okay to put country above party.”

The “well-respected” leader in question is the decorated and unapologetic architect of the illegal Iraq War, a self-described ‘Darth Vader’ who notoriously signed off on the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [read torture] programme, is liable for prosecution under every anti-torture and war crime statute known to man, and who, during his tenure under the Bush administration, crossed off murderous atrocities against the Global South like items off a grocery list. For Harris, however, there’s more to a person than the war crimes they commit.

At the time of writing, Harris is currently touring the country with his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, in a bid to tap into the conservative GoP base.

Democrat VP Kamala Harris campaigns alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) in Ripon, Wisconsin. Source: NPR

Arriving on the heels of more than 200 Republican endorsements, the Cheneys’ patronage of the Harris/ Walz ticket signals the latest development in a wider pattern of explicit bipartisan reshuffling, the likes of which Washington has seldom seen before. Legacy conservatives like the Bush family, Mike Pence, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troy, Geoff Duncan, and Jeff Flake, to name a few, have disavowed a second Trump presidency as a ‘unique threat to democracy’, thereby accentuating a burgeoning chasm within the GoP camp.

In a country where bipartisan consensus on any given issue is generally inconceivable, Republicans and Democrats have banded together amidst hollow slogans of ‘Country Above Party’ in unprecedented fashion, hoping to insulate the Oval Office from Donald Trump by any means necessary. To this end, nothing is off-limits. Goalposts will shift, ideologies and dogmas, hitherto uncompromisable, will be forsaken, bitter adversaries shall embrace like star crossed lovers, and once impregnable party lines shall be permeated with relative ease.

People who view the labyrinth that is American politics through a partisan lens don’t know how to make sense of these glaring contradictions. They tend to perceive these shifts as occasional glitches in a political simulation underpinned largely by a two-party system.

Thus, they are confused when more than 700 current and former national security officials from either side of the political aisle flock to endorse Harris as someone with the “temperament and values needed to serve as commander-in-chief”. They are bewildered at how politicians who profess to stand for global peace and prosperity, human rights, and individual liberty, bring themselves to ally with imperial hawks like the Cheneys, the Clintons, and the Bushs.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

For political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, Dr John Mearsheimer, such people miss the forest for the trees. Per Mearsheimer, the segmentation of American politics into a Republican and Democratic orientation is a game of smoke and mirrors — a remnant of a bygone era in American political life.

“I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” he said in a panel discussion with economist and Columbia professor, Dr Jeffery Sachs. “There is hardly any difference between the two parties.”

For many, this taps into a kind of Jungian dream — it reinforces something about America most people have known to be true for the longest time, but just didn’t quite know they knew it yet. Take for instance, the presidency of Democratic sweetheart Barack Obama. Voted into power amidst slogans of hope and change, Obama’s campaign had vowed to do away with many of the ills that had plagued the Bush years. However, incessant GoP filibustering ensured much of Obama’s domestic agenda never saw the light of day. Not only was the President unable to get many of his innocuous appointees into office, Republicans relentlessly impeded progress on issues like immigration reform, minimum wage increases, gun reform, climate change, and any domestic issue that would have aided in the real life amelioration of the American working class.

The GoP obstruction, however, did not seem to stop Obama from picking up the threads on many of his predecessor’s more controversial policies, all of which he had spent an entire campaign run deriding.

The Obama years saw citizens liquidated without due process, prisoners detained without charge, dragnet surveillance on the American people, and unprecedented witch-hunts against federal employees through the Insider Threat Programme.

Obama also spearheaded an increasingly deceptive recovery of the stock market after the 2008 financial crash, during which individual stock ownership plummeted to record lows, while cash-rich corporations lined their pockets via stock-buybacks. National economic inequality skyrocketed, GDP growth outran wage growth, and Wall Street remained unreformed, creating highly leveraged markets which were increasingly susceptible to breakdowns.

On the foreign policy front, Obama, who had run on the promise of putting an end to Bush’s forever wars, orchestrated regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, without so much as a peep from the adversarial Republicans that packed both Houses of Congress. When it came to capitulating to the status quo, Obama’s answer was always, “Yes We Can!”

A relatively unknown Obama embraces superstardom at the 2004 DNC keynote address. Source: Politico.com

To the uninitiated, this bipartisan convergence on issues of international governance, economics, and war but never on domestic issues like healthcare, infrastructure, gun reform, and education would appear to be somewhat of a random coincidence. But Mearsheimer’s thesis points to a larger pattern at play — a deeper collusion than what meets the eye.

If this hypothesis does hold true, and the Republican/ Democrat divide is just mere political theatre, what is it about Trump specifically that disrupts this script? What remarkable threat does he pose that makes him such an anathema to the American political class?
Pied Piper

Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2015 as little more than a second-generation plutocrat with a discernable last name, a flamboyant flair for showmanship, and no political experience save for an ill-advised interest in Obama’s birth certificate. His initial bid for the presidency commanded little, if any respect, least of all from his eventual rival, Hillary Clinton.

In a leaked memo published by Wikileaks, it was in fact Clinton who intentionally orchestrated the elevation and propulsion of Donald Trump to the party nomination as part of what she termed the “Pied Piper” strategy — a concerted effort by the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to deliberately encourage media coverage of far-right Republican candidates, such as Donald Trump, in the Republican primary. The prevailing theory was that these candidates — seen as extreme or unelectable — would be easier for Clinton to defeat in a general election.


Leaked memo by the Clinton campaign calling for the implementation of the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy in 2015. Source: WikiLeaks



Few things in history have backfired with such ferocity. Not only had the Clinton campaign grossly miscalculated just how despised Hillary was to an enormous chunk of the American population, the timing of the strategy did not do the campaign any favours. 2016 was a turbulent time in American history. The forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, and the advent of the culture wars had pushed America to the brink of political exhaustion. In a climate sullied by such volatility, the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy essentially sought to put out fire by drenching it in gasoline, and up until this point, Trump was actually the DNC’s accelerant of choice.

Fast forward to 2024 and the same DNC now assails him as a parousia of Hitler, a “threat to our democracy in a way we have not seen,” as per Harris’ running mate Tim Walz during the vice-presidential debate on October 1. Of course, Walz’s derision of Trump would demand a lot more credibility had he not been running on the same ticket as Kamala Harris, who secured the party nomination in what can only be described as a blatant disregard for democratic procedure at best, and a palace coup orchestrated within the party’s elite ranks, at worst.

Widely regarded as one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in American history with a dismal favourability rating of 16 per cent as of June 2024, Kamala was nobody’s first choice to lead the Democratic presidential bid. When President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the race in July following an embarrassing night on the debate stage, he merely passed the baton to Harris, snubbing the conventional primary process wholesale. Harris then relied on the elite cadre in the Democratic Party to garnish her nomination with the requisite legitimacy. A candidate whose unpopularity rendered her unable to secure a single delegate in the 2020 primaries now leads the Democratic party ticket in 2024, bypassing any primary polling whatsoever.

Eight years on from the Pied Piper strategy, what danger does a political outsider like Trump pose to the Democratic establishment for them to feel compelled into such extremities?

When Trump took the national stage against Clinton in 2016, his populist, ultra-nationalist rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, women, minorities, and people of colour was not only expected, it was welcomed by a DNC which saw his far-right slants as easy conquest for a relatively moderate Clinton.

However, often the most dangerous lies are those interspersed with the truth. In a political masterstroke that eventually killed Hillary’s presidential aspirations, Trump punctuated his radical outbursts and far-right jingoism with something far more potent. Americans were angry. And Trump showed them exactly who to blame. His cries of ‘Drain the Swamp’ (“swamp” being a metaphor for entrenched political interests) instantly appealed to an enraged conservative mob that had found itself relegated to the peripheries of globalisation for far too long.

His characterisation of Washington as a corrupt cesspool of self-serving careerists carved him more than 304 electoral votes amidst a political storm no one predicted. In a bid for political relevance, Trump’s populism inadvertently tapped into something astoundingly powerful. Was he merely throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks? Or did he inadvertently stumble upon some kind of fourth wall?

Democrats have branded Trump’s rhetoric as the unhinged chauvinism of a power-hungry populist bent on destroying America’s democratic infrastructure. Such terms of endearment, however, are hardly surprising. In American political lore, the deep state has largely occupied a kind of mythological status, an enigma akin to that of the Loch Ness monster. Questions about its existence rarely evoke a serious answer, whistleblower accounts are laughed off as heresy, and any analysis with respect to its existence rarely breaks into the news cycle. Beneath the deflections and the distractions, the veneers and the illusions, the pertinent question remains: is the deep state real?
The Loch Ness monster of Washington

October 16, 1962 — a day that has lived on in America’s public consciousness in infamy. At 8:45am on a chilly autumn morning, a pajama-clad John F Kennedy breezed through a copy of the Washington Post when he was interrupted by a flustered McGeorge Bundy. The national security adviser apprised the 45-year-old president of an ominous escalation in the Cold War: photographic evidence from U2 flight missions over Cuba had unearthed Soviet nuclear-tipped missile installations in secret launch sites across the island, setting into motion a geopolitical chess game that would later claim notoriety as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In frenzied cabinet Room deliberations, panic-stricken members of Kennedy’s inner circle locked horns on what the best response to Khurshchev’s betrayal might look like. All diplomatic gloves had come off, and the iron fist dictated the order of the day. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sought the president’s green light for a ground invasion into Cuba, an escalation that would most certainly bring the country into direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed foe, one which could very well wipe the US off the face of the Earth. The cabinet was deadlocked, leaving Kennedy with a political dilemma of potentially world-ending implications. The sheer gravity of the moment was not lost on attorney-general Robert Kennedy, who passed a note to his brother, reading: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbour.”

As the cabinet ran the arduous calculations of a potentially apocalyptic fallout, an indecisive Kennedy took leave, effectively breaking the meeting. Instead of staying with his aides in the West Wing to calibrate a policy response, the president found himself at a cocktail party on the other side of DC, at the Georgetown residence of famed columnist Joseph Alsop. On the eve of a possible nuclear war, when the fate of the world rested in his hands, the American president was photographed amongst friends, eating, drinking, laughing.

President Kennedy at the residence of Joseph Alsop on October 16, 1962. Source: Politico Magazine

It was a move that perplexes Cold War historians to this day. When America stood one misstep away from nuclear Armageddon, why did its commander-in-chief forego his war room for a dinner date in Georgetown?

Conventionalists attribute this seeming erraticism to the president wanting to maintain a guise of normalcy, for fears of prematurely revealing his hand to White House watchers in the press. For the careful observer, however, the night provides one of those unique momentary glimpses behind the veil of political pageantry, when power, in its most unabashed and unadulterated, stripped of all theatrics and veneers, effervesces to the surface of history long enough to be palpable.

Much like Kennedy, many of Alsop’s guests that night were people who dominated the Georgetown scene and similar high-end neighbourhoods in DC in the 60s. According to Gregg Herkins’ groundbreaking book, ‘The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington’, at this party were people Kennedy could not afford to ignore, people who commandeered true power in the Beltway during that time.

Men of importance like the far-east chief and future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Bolby, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Chip Bohlen, the CIA’s longest-serving director Allan Dulles, one of the CIA’s founding fathers Frank Wisner, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, joined Kennedy at the Alsops’ on the night of October 16. It was here, at a small domicile two-and-a-half miles from the Capitol, that the policy response to the missile crisis was brokered.

The idea of faceless, conspiratorial cabals maneuvering the political and economic trajectory of a polity from the cold, dark corners of government can probably be traced back to the dawn of the nation-state itself. Indeed, it was this rudimentary conceptualisation that fuelled political rhetoric during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, when the concept of the deep state was first operationalised. In the case of America, however, the deep state is anything but.

In his book, ‘The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government’, former Republican Congressional aide Mike Lofgren draws on decades of political experience to recount first-hand run-ins with the American deep state. Born, not out of some clandestine conspiracy but a natural evolutionary process of Empire, the American deep state is not so much sinister (although it possesses menacing aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Unlike its Ottoman counterpart, agents of America’s deep state operate in broad daylight, playing by a set of neo-conservative dogmas rooted in the triumphalism of the Cold War. For these operatives, America is the indispensable nation, the city upon a hill whose vast military aptitude affords it the moral imperative to establish its footprint across the globe. It is an incredibly robust consensus incentivised by an intimately connected network of money, a collective ideological subscription to global American primacy, and cutthroat careerism to specific and powerful elements of corporate America.

Over the years, it’s come to be known by many names. Some have called it the “military-industrial complex”. Others have called it names like “the Establishment” or the “the Blob”. Neither do justice to the elaborate, sophisticated, oft-times impressive machinery that is the deep state.

As per Lofgren’s detailed account, the deep state is underpinned by the Department of Defence, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the Justice Department. It also envelops critical areas of the judiciary, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are an enigma even to most members of Congress, and certain federal trial courts like the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The metaphorical fort is held together by a rump Congress, consisting of the congressional leadership and some members of the defence and intelligence committees.

One of the principal actors greasing the wheels of this elaborate machinery is the department of the treasury, owing to its unilateral jurisdiction over financial flows, its extensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing international economic sanctions, and its natural symbiosis with Wall Street. Over the years, the treasury has quietly become the mecca of a new kind of national security operation, with some of its day-to-day execution outsourced to American financial institutions, including but not limited to major banks, investment firms, and payment processors, in almost the same way that the Pentagon has outsourced military logistics in war zones to private contractors.

Under regulations like the Bank Secrecy Act and partnerships with agencies like the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), these institutions are on the frontlines of financial surveillance, and help monitor, enforce, and comply with government directives of sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) measures.

In a special series in the Washington Post called ‘Top Secret America’, Dana Priest and William Arkin described, in addition to its public sector arm, the staggering scope of the privatised deep state. As of 2024, there are more than one million contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number far greater than that of cleared civilian employees of the government. This is supplemented by the capital and grandeur of Wall Street, which injects the cash needed to keep the political arm of the deep state quiescent as an illusory puppet show. Should an over-zealous politician forget his place and threaten the status-quo, Wall Street floods the streets of Washington with cash to help hired hands remember exactly who runs their town.

This inverted relationship is also true of the visible government and Silicon Valley, defined by Lofgren to include not only quintessential hardware and software companies, but the telecommunications infrastructure that enable these devices to work. Following the dotcom revolution of the late 1990s and the industry’s explosive boom during the 21st century, the Valley has largely outgunned traditional smokestack industries as a credible generator of unimaginable wealth. Its research-and-development capabilities are essential to the clandestine operations of the deep state — from globe-spanning surveillance technology to the avionics, sensors, and guidance systems in every military plane, ship, tank, missile, and drone, the Valley has proven to be the deep state’s crown jewel.

In terms of its scope, financial resources, and sheer global reach, the American deep state is a truly anomalous phenomenon. That said, it is hardly an optimal design. Its predisposition to expensive, futile wars, its sheer incapacity to forecast and respond to the 2008 stock market crash, and its manifest blindness to the blowback of its own policies are, in fact, rather routine. The lofty castle of the deep state has long stood upon pillars of salt and sand; were it not for a perverse incentive structure that rewards failure and redresses it as success, it would have collapsed long ago.
A ‘benevolent’ world empire

It would be pertinent to note that the deep state was not always a staple in American politics but has mutated over the years as an unintended consequence of a specific kind of political dogma. In fact, the isolationist years before 1941 saw the US maintain only the 17th largest military force in the world — impressive nonetheless, but nowhere near the nuclear-powered merchant of death it is today.

A product of the gruesome realities of the Second World War, the attainment of workable nuclear weapons was almost certainly the deep state’s moment of conception. The Manhattan Project and the Office of Strategic Services were the most expansive government projects in recorded history, shrouded in cabbalistic secrecy. Entire sequestered cities ranging from Oak Ridge in Tennessee to Los Alamos in New Mexico sprung up in a matter of months. As Lofgren put it ever so eloquently, “If the deep state is an evolved structure, nuclear weapons were the genetic mutation that gave it the key characteristics it possesses today: a penchant for secrecy, extravagant cost, and a lack of democratic accountability.”

The deep state is born — the ‘Trinity’ bomb at Los Alamos. Source: National Park Service



By 1945, what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce heralded as the ‘American Century’ was at hand. With the power of the Gods in the palm of their hand, Washington was entranced by an overwhelming sense of destiny to uplift the world from the ruination of war. In the decades following the War, the administrative state quietly waded through the waters of the Cold War, augmenting its influence on American political life, one silent victory at a time. With the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the Department of Defence, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council, there was an institutionalization of a permanent national security apparatus for the first time in American history. Ideological support for this apparatus soon followed with NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document sketching out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. As America locked horns with the Soviets, the deep state festered beneath the murky waters of Pennsylvania Avenue, slowly infecting and intellectually corrupting the American political class.

A copy of Henry Luce’s infamous article ‘The American Century’ in Time Magazine. Source: Time Magazine

Kennedy was as good an exemplar of this intellectual corruption as any. In one of the most conveniently misremembered ironies in American history, it was Kennedy, the darling of American liberalism, who campaigned on an imaginary “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. He accused the incumbent Dwight Eisenhower — chief organiser of American victory in Europe during the War — of being weak on defence, taking baby steps towards the Missile Crisis in Cuba which would later go on to define his legacy.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower, cognisant of the dangers of a permanent war mentality, famously warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” embodied by a new “military-industrial complex.” By that time, however, America had long crossed the Rubicon, and there was no turning back. The war machine’s new sweet tooth for the glacé of conflict gave rise to the Domino Theory — an idea that the spread of communism in one country would trigger a chain reaction in others. As history would have it, American troops laid waste to Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Grenada, and Panama, among countless others, lest the first domino fall.

When the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself in ‘91 in a death knell to the USSR, America, left without a worthy adversary on the global stage, was caught completely off-guard. For decades, the Cold War had provided balance to international relations, with the United States and the Soviet Union representing a clear global dichotomy: capitalism, democracy, and free markets versus communism, state control, and authoritarianism. With the death of the Leninist dream, communism as a credible global ideology, a hedge against America’s vulture capitalism, essentially died as well.

This left America crippled with a national identity crisis. With no grand villian to justify its foreign policy, military posture, and global strategy against, the US and its allies were left without a clear narrative for global engagement. For the first time ever in recorded history, the world was, in the truest sense of the word, truly unipolar.

The Malta Summit 1989 — President George W. Bush and President Gorbachev shake hands, signaling the end of the Cold War. Source: The Malta Independent

Realising the gaping ideological vacuum created by what Charles Krauthammer famously called ‘the unipolar moment’, a budding group of neo-conservative thinkers saw gold in the streets. Rooted in a nationalist history of American exceptionalism that advocated for aggressive military and political assertions of democracy and liberalism, the neo-conservative revolution chalked out a new approach for international engagement.

The founding group for this new policy approach was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think-tank formed in 1992 on the “fundamental propositions that assert the belief that American leadership is good for both America and for the world”. In full cognisance of the unimaginable military might that lay at their feet, William Kristol, who acted as Project Chairman for PNAC, and Robert Kagen, co-founder of the PNAC, authored a critical policy document which was to later become the ideological foundation for the American Empire.

The document, titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” called on the United States to realise the moral imperative of its military prowess and assume its role as a “benevolent global hegemon”, a world empire which would use its military might to promote, and if need be, impose, liberal ideals of democracy and freedom. For the neo-cons, the unipolar moment was a stabilising force in international relations, a moment truly unique in human history and one wherein America needed to strike whilst the iron was hot. As authors of the Empire’s origin story, the neo-cons advocated maximum military and diplomatic engagement to ensure US values and influence dominate the international system.

In the decades that followed, the neo-conservative revolution slowly infiltrated the highest levels of government. In the Clinton administration especially, necons like secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright espoused a kind of hubris many have since come to know all too well: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Sure enough, wherever there was danger, the wrath of Empire, ruthless and swift as it is, made sure to follow. Where danger didn’t exist, it was simply manufactured all the same.

The phenomenon of cooked intelligence is best embodied by the summer of 1996 when American neo-conservative thinkers Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others authored a policy document for the new Israeli Prime Minister at the time — a young hardliner who went by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu. The document, titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ reflected a broader neo-conservative vision for Israeli dominance in the Middle East, with Israel functioning as the Empire’s guard dog in the region. The Clean Break papers advocated brute military engagement, regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and strong deterrence capabilities for Israel. During the Bush Jr years, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser, along with other neo-cons like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, occupied key strategic positions in the administration.

The 9/11 attacks presented the neo-conservatives with a unique opportunity to realise their foreign policy agenda and impose American ideals of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. At a time when American sentiment was at its most vulnerable, Netanyahu was called in to testify before Congress in 2002 as a “regional expert”. Realising his one shot at securing the realm, Netanyahu’s testimony was perfectly in conjunction with the Clean Break papers. Addressing Congress, Netanyahu laid the groundwork for a regime change operation against Saddam Hussein, claiming that doing so would rid the region of Islamic fanaticism and usher in a new era of peace and stability.

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Suspiciously enough, intelligence reports citing the existence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq popped up in the media soon after, with the United States putting boots on the ground in Iraq less than a year later. The Clean Break was finally underway, and the neo-cons’ insatiable thirst for war quenched at last — until the next one, of course. For more than three decades, the “benevolent hegemon” stoked war and violence across the world, leaving destruction, instability and despair in its wake. Little did it know that its day of reckoning was not too far off.


Benjamin Netanyahu testifies before Congress in 2002. Source: Vox.com


Red Caesar

Over two millennia ago, Rome stood somewhat of a similar inflection point. At the time, the Empire had already become an imperial force and was overstretched militarily across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. As a result, domestic resources flailed thin. Economic inequality ran amuck, with Roman senators, bureaucrats, and patrician families hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth as the plebeians and slaves were left fighting for scraps.

From within this cesspool of ideological corruption, political rot, and economic inequality rose a charismatic populist who vowed to return the dying empire to its former glory. His explosive rhetoric found an audience amongst an increasingly discontented polity. He galvaniSed the public against an entrenched aristocracy that commanded real power behind the toga-wearing mules of the Senate, and threatened to tear the very fabrics of the state apart. His ascendency was challenged at every step by the oligarchic structure that ruled Rome. When this populist finally grabbed hold of the reins of power, he never let go. And Rome chose to follow him every step of the way. So goes the story of Julius Caesar.

More than 2,000 years later, America finds itself at a crossroads similar to that of the great Republic it has modeled itself after. The neo-con revolution of the 90s and its subsequent infiltration into the Bush Jr and Obama administrations empowered the deep state, tossing America into the throws of the forever wars, overstretching its military and economic resources to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Presently, the US maintains more than 750 military bases across 80 different countries, increasingly at the cost of domestic infrastructure, social programmes, and other pressing needs. The repulsion of the Glass-Steagall Act through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed commercial banks to engage in investment banking, coupled with the overall deregulation of Wall Street, upped the risk prevalent in the financial system; this culminated in 2008 with the worst financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression. As working-class Americans lined up to cash unemployment checks, Obama, in lockstep with his hawkish secretary-of-state, spent trillions in wars of choice in the Middle East, all the while lining the pockets of cash-rich corporations and the military-industrial complex back home.

With Americans seething with frustration, something had to give. In September 2011, protesters chanting “We are the 99pc” flooded the streets of New York City in what is now known as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. A protest against the wealthiest 1pc, it derided the rampant economic inequality, corporate greed, neoliberal economics, and large financial institutions for causing the 2008 financial crisis.

On the opposing side of the political aisle, festering discontent amongst the public culminated in the Tea Party movement. A grassroots conservative response to the federal government’s actions post the 2008 financial crash, the movement called for limited government, fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, and a reduction in the federal deficit.

A grassroots consensus against the cistern of corruption and greed in Wall Street on both sides of the political aisle spooked the dark agents of the deep state, sending its extensive machinery into overdrive. With liberals and conservatives coalescing around the shadow state’s cash cow, danger to the status-quo was palpable. There was a need to break this overwhelmingly powerful consensus at the roots with something relatively superficial, but rooted in just enough reality to fragment society back into their ideological camps. Enter the culture wars.

Around the same time as the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements, the media dramatically ramped up coverage of racism, embracing novel theories of racial consciousness hitherto unheard of in American political discourse. Brilliant reporting by Zach Goldberg in Tablet magazine uncovers what appears to be a clear trend in liberal newspapers around the consequential 2011 mark, when the OWS and the Tea Party movements were galvanising the youth in droves. Around 2011, there was a notable surge in terms like “racism”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, and “racial inequality” among others, reported in some of the most widely read newspapers in the country. Take for instance the following graph, which displays the usage of terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from 1970 through 2019.






Around 2011, instances of the word “racist/racism” shot up considerably. Similar trends are apparent for other culture war mainstays, suspiciously around the same 2011 mark.






To be clear, racism undoubtedly permeates American society as an incredibly serious problem. However, did American society coincidentally grow more racist in the aftermath of the OWS and Tea Party movements than it was in the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton labelled young people of colour “superpredators” from behind the Seal of the President of the United States? This apparent shift in liberal reporting in 2011, amidst inflammatory rhetoric by American politicians and pundits, fractured American society in ways it still hasn’t quite healed from. Post 2011, the fracture was graphically evident.






In December 2006, 45pc of white Democrats and 41pc of white Republicans reported knowing someone they considered racist. By June 2015, this figure surged to 64pc for white Democrats but stayed at 41pc for white Republicans. Surprisingly enough, among Black and Hispanic Democrats, the trend was in the opposite direction. By inflating a very real social issue and manufacturing a culture war, the media created a political playing field ripe for a populist demagogue.

In 2016, with political frustration at fever pitch, the threads of Empire finally gave way at the seams. On the Republican side of the political aisle, a culturally disenfranchised conservative mob nominated a populist in Donald Trump to the GoP ticket. In the Democrat camp, it took a socialist like Bernie Sanders to energise a young progressive base increasingly disillusioned by Obama’s capitulation to the establishment. The 2016 moment was truly unique, with two anti-deep state candidates across the political aisle galvanising an incredibly angry base.

The Democratic party establishment successfully quashed the Sanders threat by stacking the deck in favour of dedicated neo-con and deep state darling, Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published a trove of DNC emails, revealing that party officials had discussed ways to undermine Sanders’ campaign in favour of Clinton.

Additionally, in a deliberate effort to minimise Sanders’ exposure, the DNC scheduled a limited number of debates on weekends or holidays, at times fewer viewers would tune in. This played right to Clinton’s advantage, who had a higher name recognition at the time. Superdelegates — party officials who can vote for whomever they choose at the convention — cast their vote for Clinton uncharacteristically early in the primary process, curating an impression of inevitability around her candidacy and thereby discouraging potential Sanders supporters.

The Republican camp was far less successful in dealing with Trump, who was already a known commodity and had a flair for waddling through media attacks unscathed. There was something about a non-traditional renegade lambasting legacy neo-cons in the Republican primaries that was like a breath of fresh air for an incredibly frustrated conservative base.

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none … obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

Such outbursts were virtually unheard of in Washington. The fact that the barbs were clearly aimed at Jeb Bush, brother of former-president George W Bush Jr, who stood a couple of feet away from Trump on the debate stage, was cathartic for a conservative base that had grown increasingly disillusioned with the war-crazed neo-cons that dominated the GoP at the time. Like a Red Ceasar rising from the ashes, Trump’s brash insults and radical jingoism, supplemented with Hillary’s Pied Piper strategy, radically reconfigured the boundaries of acceptability in modern US politics, threatened to “demolish the deep state”, and usher in a new era in American politics.

Trump had a radically different foreign policy agenda than many of the neo-cons he railed against. Though not strictly an isolationist, Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda hinted at a voluntary disbandment of Empire. Corporate America’s dealmaker extraordinaire, he hoped to foster better relations with the deep state’s cardinal foe Vladmir Putin, renegotiate the establishment’s prized NAFTA, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific partnerships, reevaluate US engagement with NATO, and pivot US foreign policy away from the neo-conservative thinking of yesteryears toward a more non-interventionist approach.

During his first presidency, however, Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the terms of political power with the administrative state were mitigated by the ‘adults in the room’, a trope popularised by an anonymous 2018 submission to The New York Times by a former White House staffer. In an op-ed titled “I am the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, the staffer reassured readers that the president did indeed face substantial internal resistance within the West Wing.

“The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”

This time around, the Trump threat is far more dangerous. With deep state stalwart Joe Biden out of the running, his protege Kamala Harris has been forced to take off the training wheels and enter the race with the backing of the entire deep state machinery behind her.

From assassination attempts to a cascade of civil and felony indictments, all efforts to prevent another Trump run have yet failed. What the establishment has celebrated as deserved prosecution against a rogue former president has been decried as ‘lawfare’ by bipartisan legal experts — selective justice, lacking any sound legal foundation or precedent.

The hush-money case in New York City, for instance, is almost laughable, especially when predators like Bill Clinton strut across Democratic National Conventions to rapturous applause, and are paraded as one of its greatest Democratic exports to the White House. The Georgia ‘election interference’ case calls into question the First Amendment rights of a former president to voice concerns regarding the integrity of an election — a right the Democrats seemed to have no qualms with when Hillary Clinton attributed Trump’s 2016 victory to “Russian interference” without any evidence or proof.

With respect to Trump’s prosecution in the ‘classified documents’ case, the Democrats seem to forget that Joe Biden was exonerated by a special counsel for virtually the same transgressions. From gag orders limiting Trump’s ability to comment on his own prosecution to the imposition of absurd fines to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in what can only be perceived as an open effort to enforce personal bankruptcy, the legal machinery of the state seems to have been deployed in a nakedly partisan fashion. However, it only seems to have pushed Trump toward a harder line of attack.

Courtroom sketch of Donald Trump during the Georgia election interference proceedings. Source: Reuters

At a rally in Waco, Texas, Trump framed his onslaught against the shadow government in apocalyptic terms.

“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state”

However, much like Caesar, Trump’s defiance of the old Gods stems, not from an ideological commitment to democracy, but from a misplaced belief in his own divinity. He has successfully tapped into the rampant disillusionment with the status quo to rack up currency for his own political ambitions.

This time, Trump carries a blueprint for amassing unprecedented power, developed by a constellation of ‘America First’ conservative organisations. Under Project 2025, a policy document developed by the Heritage Foundation, Trump is expected to install loyalists into key appointment positions, staving off any more “adults in the room”. In fact, the former-president has noticeably recruited a more radical inner-circle. Unlike his previous stint, the Republican party now constitutes a much deeper bench of Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalists as compared to 2016, with deep state sceptics like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller expected to take critical cabinet positions.

Trump is also expected to reimpose the Schedule F order, which would be one of the most profound changes to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Under the order, presidents may increase political appointment positions from 4,000 to more than 50,000, making almost every major federal programme subservient to the Oval Office, effectively disintegrating the deep state.

However, Trump’s animosity towards the administrative state has attracted unlikely and dangerous allies. This time, the GoP campaign is backed by one of the richest men on the planet — Elon Musk, who up until March 2024 publicly disavowed any affiliation with Trump, has grown to become a valuable arrow in the former president’s quiver. From dedicating near unilateral algorithmic support for the Republican hopeful on his platform X to promising a $1 million giveaway for registered voters in key swing states, rarely has someone of Musk’s stature thrown themselves so explicitly behind a political candidate.

Though he may hide behind the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and far-right conspiracy theories typical of MAGA rednecks, Musk is no ideologue. In fact, his patronage of Trump is as close to a marriage of convenience as it gets. Trump’s bid to harness over-expansion of the administrative state provides Musk with a golden opportunity to realise his own political designs. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly earmarked the tech boy-wonder as his “efficiency” czar, a potential head of a new ‘government efficiency commission’. If this pans out, Musk shall have tremendous sway over the very government institutions that regulate his companies, institutions Musk has an adversarial history with.

Musk joins Trump at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Source: The Atlantic

Therefore, as Harris and Trump lock horns in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance. The election confronts Americans with two radically different paths. One, of a deep state candidate representing a decades-long entrenchment of global American primacy, and the other of a populist demagogue who threatens to tear the Empire down to its last shreds and build it anew in his image. November 5 is truly a contest between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Exactly who will win this high-stakes game of thrones is not known. What is known is that the losers will be the American people.


The author is a student at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and is interested in political, historical and social affairs.