It really was tremendous fun back in the Trump era when all you media mavens were acting as the willing accomplices of the Deep State in undermining and dispatching that notorious mean tweeter to Outer Slobbovia. Or at least to Mar-a-Lago.

How are you chaps -- and the weeping Rachel Maddow -- feeling now, as the Deep State turns on Joe Biden?

I mean, now that Trump is safely out of the way -- or is he? -- maybe you guys are ready to discuss the performance of the CDC and its octogenarian chappie Dr. Fauci during the late COVID episode.

Maybe you guys are ready to discuss the competence of the whole foreign policy / defense / intelligence community. Hey! The U.S. has 17 – seventeen -- intelligence agencies. Do you think that helped or hindered in the run-up to the Afghanistan debacle?

Maybe you guys are ready to discuss the curious case of the FBI and the DoJ and the armed insurrection that wasn’t. Isn’t it odd that all of a sudden they can’t bring in the bacon and send the whole MAGA movement off to reeducation camp? What gives, do you think? How about we all get together and cut the FBI budget by 57 percent?

Thaddeus G. McCotter at American Greatness rehearses Sen. Chuck Schumer (N-NY) sneering about President Trump to the now-tearful Rachel Maddow back in 2017:

Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you … So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this…. [The deep state is] very upset with how [Trump] has treated them and talked about them.

But you know, Chuckie Baby, if you and your Republican pals in the Senate ever got together and cut the intelligence community budget by 50 percent and the number of intelligence agencies by seven, I’ll bet those rough tough intelligence experts would all of a sudden get real tearful.

Because you know what I think? I think that all bureaucrats are pussies. The only thing they care about is their pensions. Right, Lois Lerner? And if the whole of Congress gets together and cuts their budget, just to show who’s boss, I’ll bet they’ll just fold and settle for rescuing the jobs of 57 deputy undersecretaries.

And you politicians are lions! You can do it!

Of course, the reactionary Curtis Yarvin recommends a more radical post-mortem for the Next Regime to accomplish on the pustulating corpse of Big Lib.

It must erase all old noble structures and institutions -- there can be nothing left of the old agencies, universities, newspapers, nonprofits, etc. Even the buildings have to go.

He reminds us that the Deep State is not just the government agencies but the full adornment of the Cathedral of the ruling class in all its conceited fatuous pompousness. But the buildings! Do they have to go? Maybe just the worst 40 brutalist buildings of the 17 intelligence agencies.

Another end-of-regime narrative is Malcolm Kyeyune’s “Farewell to Bourgeois Kings” in which he quotes Carl Schmitt on the inevitable end of the “epoch of monarchy” “when a sense of the principle of kingship, of honor, has been lost.”

Carl Schmitt! How dare he? Schmitt is a thinker you are not allowed to know about “mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism” as La Wik delicately puts it. Kyeyune continues:

Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.

Is that the situation today with regard to the century-old progressive project, now that “a sense of the principle of” wise educated administration by the Best People, “of honor, has been lost?” That it’s the end of the Deep State? Let’s go back to Kyeyune:

What Schmitt is saying is that when the legitimating claim for a particular form of elite is used up... the extinction of that particular elite becomes a foregone conclusion. 

Do you want to know why your “extinction” has become “a foregone conclusion,” dear educated elite and Deep State? It is because your legitimating claim is a lie, and always has been. Government has always been mostly a question of distributing loot and plunder among the supporters of the rulers, and your government is no exception. Your claim to fame is that you have done a better job than most ruling classes of dressing this sordid truth in magnificent imperial robes. 

Then the day comes when some smart-ass kid says the unsayable: that the emperor has no clothes.

Then the only question that matters is the size of the butcher’s bill.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: US Gov

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