In Lofgren’s analysis, the purpose of the Deep State is to maintain the “Washington consensus” – hawkish neoconservatism in foreign policy, economic-libertarian neoliberalism in domestic policy. All other options are pushed outside the Overton Window, ruled out of serious discussion.
Meanwhile, if you go on Amazon and search for “deep state,” you get results like this: The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda
The phrase “deep state” has its origins in a Turkish context, and perhaps there’s actually something there, there – in that case, the deep state would be the military, which tends to overthrow the civil government whenever they perceive it as betraying Ataturk’s legacy. Probably the only country in history where a military coup ever has beneficial results.
What is called “The Deep State” is simply career government employees doing their jobs, in many case for far less than people with their talents could earn in private sector. These folks aren’t about red or blue, they’re about red, white, and blue.
I’ll give you a better debate topic: how could we possibly have a country that did not have a so-called “deep state”? Because IMO, we can’t. No one can. It’s ridiculous.
Reread the OP. We’re talking about something other than the “permanent government,” i.e., the civil service that does not change from one admin to the next – think Sir Humphrey Applebee always butting heads with Jim Hacker – Applebee is the “permanent government,” but he does not always get his way. Deep State would be if Applebee could keep bills off the floor of the Commons.
First, it’s a myth that most government employees could make more in the private sector. Show me the high science teacher that went to a pharmaceutical company or other high tech company seamlessly.
Government employees are overcompensated to gain their fervent loyalty to the Deep State. Talk with any government employee and within ten minutes they bring up their precious pensions and how valuable they think they are to society.
Look at Lois Lerner who is retired with a 200,000 dollars a year pension. She should be in jail for obstruction of justice, but she was protected by the Deep State because she was a loyal foot soldier.
The quote in the OP points to career * private* employees (contractors) who outnumber* career federal employees.
*Depending on where you draw the box. I’m excluding people with grants, active-duty military, postal service.
Although I don’t see anything nefarious here and don’t find Lofgen’s argument compelling. I live in this world and just giggled a bit when I read the quote. But I need to click the links to see if there’s better reasoning than that presented by the OP.
If the US government is concerned with policy issues that are beyond the scope and attention of 98% of the public, then of course there’s going to be an “Establishment” that makes policy. The public usually only gets involved when policy issues intrude into the public’s limited attention span. For example, in the 1960s when the government’s Cold War policies suddenly meant that young men could be drafted to fight and die in a foreign war that seemingly nobody but 1000 Washington insiders wanted.
Literally nobody is saying that, and it’s frankly a stupid line of argument. No more than someone might argue that a restaurant busboy in the private sector might make $19,000, but if he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he could make $200,000, SO ThEReFORe TEH GOveRNMUnT PAYZ MOOOORE.
One could just as easily say:
“the purpose of the Washington is to maintain the “Washington consensus” – hawkish neoconservatism in foreign policy, economic-libertarian neoliberalism in domestic policy. All other options are pushed outside the Overton Window, ruled out of serious discussion.”
Of course, it is not what Trump says it is, NOTHING is what Trump says it is! However, he has used the term as an effective amorphous boogie-man, similar to the well-worn “Washington insiders” or “the swamp” to paint any criticism as a nefarious plot against him. He kinda paranoid that way, y’know.
This shows an ignorance of how the Government works. Politicians only know how to get elected. They leave the actual policy creation to the experts. These experts generally work in academia, non-profits, and occasionally government.
The reason the Washington consensus is powerful is because neo-liberalism is the consensus of elite economists. This is because neo-liberalism obviously works much better than any other alternative.
In foreign policy, the experts are more likely to work in government but they still have not come up with a better alternative.
Actual government workers are 90% people who implement policy and very few have any influence over the policies chosen. For the most part those who implement policy come and go with each administration and are the ones who cycle between government, academia, think tanks, and lobbying.
I always understood the “deep state” to be more of an emergent behavior that happens when career bureaucrats and business leaders do their thing- there’s no organization to it, and no direction. It’s just the aggregate of how the infrastructure of the Federal government works at levels below the elected officials.
So Congress or a President might want something, but it’s perceived as asinine by the top level bureaucrats assigned to implement it. So they slow-walk it in any number of ways, or put it out to pasture, or whatever, because it runs counter to them getting their jobs done, or promises massive disruption, or whatever other negative that they perceive. Similarly, I suspect they probably have opinions that come out in the stuff they DON’T slow-walk, and the like. That’s not to say that corruption probably doesn’t play a major role- I don’t doubt it does.
But it’s not some shadowy cabal of the “real” decision-makers running things from behind the scenes. It’s probably much more a combination of institutional inertia combined with a sort of collective viewpoint on the part of the people who self-select to work in the Federal bureaucracies and in business.
The present Admin clearly pays very little attention to experts, and Congress not much more. Yet the power of the Deep State over policy – that is, over limiting the range of acceptable policy discussion – remains undiminished.
Looking around the world, it manifestly works considerably less well than West-Euro-style social democracy – which, thanks to the Deep State, is off the table here. As for “elite economists,” their present consensus tends toward not neoliberalism but post-Keynesianism.
Complete and utter BS. Of course most high school science teacher can’t go and work for a Pharmaceutical company. They have a teaching degree not a PhD in chemistry, or biology. Many could, however, work for a charter or private school no problem. On the other hand, there is a lot of cross pollination between pharmaceutical companies and NIH. Some of my colleagues where formerly in the private sector, and decided to work for the government, while other went the other way. I periodically get hit up by corporate head hunters looking for some bioinformatical expertise they can poach.
Also your claim that government employees are useless yet are over paid, also doesn’t pass the smell test. If that is the case then why don’t all these private workers go to the public sector and live like kings. The truth is that at the higher levels, pay is usually better in the private sector. But its also more confining. Since the public sector is only interested in profit, there is less ability to do basic research or to research and more ability to make the findings public rather than kept as propitiatory secrets. There is also pressure to make sure the studies reach the profitable conclusion rather than the factually correct conclusion. Basically public employees are just like everyone else. Some are lazy but most are hard working. The main difference to me seems to be that private employees seem to be more motivated by money, while public employees are more motivated by accomplishment.