Someone asked me once whether the Philippines had the equivalent of a ‘deep state.’ I told him I didn’t think so, not least because my impression of the bureaucracy is one of rent-maximizing machines with no coherent agenda, let alone one which could work to depose a sitting government. What we do have is what I would call an infrastructure of liberal democratic norms fully embedded in civil society, in part funded by and therefore implicated in the global liberal order. The latter may refer to big United Nations programs, for example the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are locally implemented. These are the non-governmental organizations who often advocate on specific policy issues – be it the environment, freedom of press or disaster management.