In 2007, well before the term Deep State entered the common lexicon, I sketched the interconnected public-private pieces of the Deep State, which I termed the elite maintaining and extending global dominance. This diagram doesn't make all the connections or list all the consequential nodes of influence of course, but you get the idea: elected officials, i.e. "democracy," play a modest role in the entire structure, which displays remarkable continuity regardless of which politicians and parties are currently in power.

That's the whole idea, of course: continuity that can't be disrupted by an election.

What's changed is the emergence of a private-sector Deep State--a.k.a. Big Tech--that has established unprecedented power outside the control of elected officials even as it continues to play ball with the traditional public-sector dominated Deep State of the alphabet federal agencies and informal public-private sector ties.

This private-sector Deep State is free to pursue its own agenda of information-gathering and selling, surveillance, influence and profit-maximizing monopolies while seeming to serve the traditional Deep State as information-collecting and censorship services.