History chronicles theocratic despotisms, feudal lords, exploitative slavocracies, imperial autocracies, peaceful republics, small-scale democracies, divine-right monarchies, murderous party dictatorships, and many more besides.

What is the 21st-century form of the state? There are plenty of opinions on this and the reality and change are still unfolding before us with dramatic upheavals and great resets. But it seems to be some form of omnipotent managerial technocracy, as if to fulfill the most pessimistic predictions of 20th-century thinkers who saw this form developing after the second world war.

In this system, the elected representatives of the people are reduced to bit players on the scene, marionettes whose main job is to keep up appearances that the systems of the past are still operating and that the voice of the people still matters.

In reality, the state consists of three distinct layers, which we can call deep, middle, and shallow. All three play crucial roles to exercise and retain hegemony over the population domestically and globally.

The deepest layers are those that operate mostly out of the public eye thanks to legal protections for classified information. They are the security and intelligence agencies that overlap closely with what is centralized law enforcement. In the US, this is inclusive of many agencies, including the FBI, DHS, CIA, NSA, NSC, CISA, and many more besides including all their cut-outs in the foundation world and private sector, some known and unknown. The term deep refers precisely to the clandestine manner in which they operate.

Next we have the layer of the middle state, mostly called the administrative state. In the US this consists of 400-plus civilian agencies with two million and more employees with positions that are protected by union rules and federal legislation. The elected president can appoint several hundred positions to head these agencies but all power and institutional knowledge belongs to the permanent bureaucracy, which knows that it wins all struggles. Political appointees come and go.