The deep state is the right's new bogeyman.
I'd wager that until fairly recently, few people had ever heard the phrase. I'd also bet that roughly 99 percent of those who fling the term around have no idea that it's borrowed from Turkish politics.
The idea of a deep state, or “state within a state,” is that there are undemocratic forces within the permanent bureaucracy, the military, and the intelligence services who pursue their own interests rather than those of the people or the agenda that voters desire.
Depending on the country in question, deep states are not only real, they are sometimes as devious as people fear. At various times in the history of the Soviet Union, the secret police ran the government and the Communist party for its own benefit.
