For what my opinion is worth (no one likes it anyway), I think there have been and always will be people, from all belief systems, right to left to everything else you can imagine, who desire that sort of power that people associate with the 'deep state'. There are always people and groups that want to run things....
.....but I believe in the law of increasing incompetence in regards to the government. The more they try to do and control, the more incompetent they become.
Sure there are groups like the Club of Rome, Bilderbergers, Southern Baptist Convention, and Kentucky Fried Chicken who love to sit around, smoke cigars, and dream about plans to run things the way they want- usually not as notorious as most imagine. But the world and human nature is just far too complex and most are far too incompetent to do much beyond raise the price of tinfoil.
I believe there is a hell of a lot more chaos out there, even in the halls of power, than most are comfortable admitting. It is one thing to believe there are secret controllers pulling all the strings, but to many, it is far more frightening to think that it is mostly chaos run by the incompetent which is (and has always through our history) hanging on by a thread.
It is why people cling to conspiracy theories, because frankly, the alternative is more frightening.