For too many people, recent political events obscure our past when America’s left opposed, if not the entire administrative state, then at least the parts of it that were involved in war making, intelligence collecting, and police power wielding—things that today’s conservatives are inclined, collectively, to label the “deep state.”

David Halberstam, in his 1972 tour de force history of the bungling that led the United States into the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, cited the existence of the deep state: “…the lines between what a democracy could and could not do were more blurred in those years than others. These men, largely private, were functioning on a level different from the public policy of the United States.”

No right-wing zealot pimping conspiracy theories for clicks, Halberstam was a solid, liberal minded journalist; one who cited yet another liberal journalist’s work when he spoke of the “centralized state”:

…when New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan read through the entire documentary history of the [Vietnam] war, that history known as the Pentagon Papers, he would come away with one impression above all, which was that the government of the United States was not what he had thought it was; it was as if there were an inner U.S. government, what he called “a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments—all these are potentially antagonistic.”

How did this centralized state fend off such institutional challenges to its power? Halberstam again cites Sheehan:

“It had survived and perpetuated itself,” Sheehan continued, “often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes. Secrecy was a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments, but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.”

It is not hard to see how today’s deep state has simply substituted “anti-Russia” for “anti-Communist” or to see that this is the way that defense mechanism persists. Still, the deep state’s existence remains hidden from public view—even if it is less perfectly hidden today than it once was. As Halberstam and Sheehan understood, the deep state’s obscurity can also have advantages:

Each succeeding Administration, Sheehan noted, was careful once in office, not to expose the weaknesses of its predecessor. After all, essentially the same people were running the governments, they had continuity to each other, and each succeeding Administration found itself faced with virtually the same enemies. Thus the national security apparatus kept its continuity, and every outgoing President tended to rally to the side of each incumbent President.

Today, we know what happened in 2016 when the outgoing president, Barack Obama, not only refused to rally to the side of an incoming President Trump, but instead helped unleash that deep state against him through the monstrous lie of “Russiagate.” Interestingly, Halberstam thought such sordid deep state machinations would be unlikely to survive exposure to daylight:

Out of this of course came a willingness to use covert operations; it was a necessity of the times, to match the Communists, and what your own population and your own Congress did not know was not particularly important; it was almost better if they did not know—it made it easier for them to accept the privileges and superiority of being a democracy…And a few chosen citizens working discreetly in Washington would do the dirty work for them. A public service.

…[B]ut the Congress of the United States would not know what the United States was up to. Thus in terms of the central state’s attempt to lead and manipulate a potentially resistant society, the covert operations were doubly handy: if no one knew about them, it bothered no one; if they did become public and the Congress would be forced between choosing their own side or the Communist side. A question of patriotism, then.

Sadly, despite all his and Sheehan’s trenchant revelations about the deep state, Halberstam did not account for the fact that it held an even greater card than patriotism to play against its opponents—partisanship.

Move forward from 1972 up to Jan. 3, 2017 when the once and future Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saw fit to announce in an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show that the deep state was already at work on behalf of this sort of partisanship: “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.”

While it is difficult to tell whether Schumer intended his remarks as a warning or a threat to Trump, his casual, matter-of-fact tone in the delivery betrays a certain amount of comfort with an unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic entity subverting—indeed attacking—a duly elected president of the United States. Such familiarity evinces both Schumer’s acquiescence to the deep state’s power over a president and perhaps even his allegiance to it.

In retrospect, it certainly appears that Schumer and his fellow Democrats eagerly abetted the deep state in its various means employed—the “six ways to Sunday”—notably including the Russiagate lie and the first impeachment.

How does the populist left, especially those gracelessly aging “New Left” hippies, square this with their former knowledge of the deep state they once reviled? What has changed? Why do they now embrace what they formerly hated?

The short answer is power. It has done what power does best in corrupting the deep state and its apologists. Over the decades, as the left infiltrated it, the deep state began using its powers to silence all opposition to the left’s radical, extreme, and dangerous agenda. In sum, the deep state now works for them. It constitutes the muscle required to rig the “Our Democracy” they’re always pleading on behalf of. Their democracy is only good when they win—by any means necessary.

In a time when irony abounds but humor has been shoved underground, it’s probably best not to use Halberstam’s bitterly ironic name for the operators of the deep state—“the best and the brightest.” The hubris of these well-credentialled if unaccomplished deep state denizens would ensure the irony would be lost on them. Best we denounce their hypocrisy and elitism openly and directly with an epithet unadorned by irony: “the Rest and the Slightest.”

It is hard to say when, if ever, the populist left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome will abate to the point they may remember how they once, rightly, opposed the deep state. But their leadership isn’t taking any chances.