THE BIG READ: Might there actually be a deep state conspiracy against democracy?

The outlawing of Marine Le Pen's presidential bid gives extra ammunition to those who say everything important is rigged

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

IS THERE actually a “deep state” controlling the outcome of politics in most ostensibly democratic countries?

Not so long ago, such an idea would have been left to the whackier end of the conspiracy theorist community. Yet former prime minister Liz Truss has used the term several times recently while giving her own explanation for her rapid downfall – it’s obviously a more attractive get-out clause than the idea that she just messed up very badly, very quickly.

The idea of a deep state is meant to refer to secret networks which operate independently of democratic politics to secure their own goals. Personally, I continue to think that Orwell’s idea of “Groupthink” more accurately explains the increasingly partial behaviour of elites against “populist” threats.

Take, for example, the knocking-out of Marine Le Pen this week from the 2027 French presidential race on grounds of her party having misused European parliamentary funds for national campaigning purposes. It is obviously an absurdly excessive punishment, delivered by a French judge, depriving the people of France the right to choose who the next president of the republic should be. Le Pen was the leading candidate in the polls. The French people were surely perfectly capable of weighing her misdemeanour against many other factors to decide who should lead their nation.

The judge’s decision is classic “lawfare” of a type unleashed by judicial elites across the West in recent years, always against perceived right-wing threats to the status quo. Similar methods were used to try and knock Donald Trump out of last year’s US