Here in Canada, the Official Term is “evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet. (Sorry.)”
Exactly, which is why they have to be rooted out, being loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump is the definition of “deep state”.
What I want to know is where were Hercules and Samson when Thor was fighting the Dark Elves all by himself?
Which reminds me of a thought I had: you want a deep (notice lowercase) state. A deep state means a Stable State. Yes, it prevents you from quickly acting to bring forth innovative ways of fixing things but it’s also what prevents the machinery of the republic from going into runaway mode or being shaken apart by wild control inputs, keeps the lights on and the doors secured during shutdowns, deadlocks and twitstorms, and in case of catastrophe means someone who knows what’s up and what they’re doing is around to step in as Acting boss(*).
Where you have a problem with a (capitals) Deep State is when some part of the deep state is allowed to reframe its own mission as not the policy duly passed by the elected branches, not enforcing the rule of the Law, not the safeguarding of the Constitution, but its own empowerment, when it stops seeing itself as accountable to anyone and stops disregarding the consequences of its action/inaction.
And for a long time the rhetoric has been one of heavy derision of the (useful) deep state (All those tropes about someone who could not just do what they knew to be righteous and good because “some bureaucrat would quote a regulation”?) and stirring up the fear of the nefarious power of the Deep State (CT’s about some Dark Ops that were kept even secret from the President; or why don’t they already release the proof that So-and-So is a traitor?). The land was plowed and seeded; Trump & Co only needed to water and cultivate it.
(*I’ve lived in a jurisdiction where the implied expectation is that every 4 or 8 years you’ll just plain and simply will throw away every policy implemented the prior 4, freeze and renegotiate every contract, replace every post of responsibility down to assistant chief mechanic of the regional motor pool, etc., and if the bureaucrats say “this is not how it’s done”, well, just EO or legislate how that bureaucratic office is no longer in charge of anything, and this new one created and staffed by us will deal with this, and that is right because “the people spoke”. It does not provide good results.)
Republican efforts to place Republican judges in the court system are essentially an effort to create a Deep State. They want to use the court system to maintain Republican control over the government even if they get voted out of office. So Republicans are clearly not opposed to the idea of having a Deep State; they just object when they don’t own it.
Great post overall. Excellent analysis. Ref this snip:
Underlining mine. Is that the word you meant there? ISTM that “starts” fits better.
Which is pretty much exactly their attitude to “activist judges.” It’s only activism if it’s change the way I don’t want it. Change the other way is simply “good jurisprudence”.
Yes, it should have said “starts” (
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In other words: Donald Trump IS the Deep State!
How does the “swamp”, which Trump has supposedly very effectively drained, differ from the “deep state”? Are they two separate power houses? Why is the swamp so easy to tackle vs the deep state? Does anyone have diagrams of these structures?
It’s an interesting strategy, I’ll give it that. Who would’ve thought that a sitting President would find a way run against his own administration, and that people would buy it ?
Trump is still complaining about Deep State but he’s stopped talking about the Swamp.
From all the commentary I’ve seen about the “swamp” over the past four years, it seems most commenters interpret that to mean the lobbying industry, not the government bureaucracy. (Although that doesn’t necessarily tell us what Trump thinks he means by “the swamp”.)
There is a kernel of truth in the deep state narrative. Most federal government workers are democrats who hate Trump. They don’t have the power to set policy for the most part but they can delay implementation. Doing anything in government takes forever, there are lots of people who need to sign off, mandatory comment periods, layers of lawyers who need to sign off, etc. Getting anything done takes patience and focus. It is like a constructing a building, years of nothing visible happening while paperwork is being done, then months of moving dirt around, and then suddenly the building starts going up.
Cite?
Ah, that explains Trump’s success the last four years.
With due respect, I second this cite request.
Also, I think a lot of Trumps edicts took effect much faster that we usually think of bureaucrats acting. When, on Day 2, he ordered his first Muslim ban, that took effect immediately and threw airports all over the world into chaos and bedlam. When he ordered the arrest of all asylum seekers, leading to the separation of all those children, it went into effect before anyone had time to work out all the protocols and documentation procedures, which is exactly why we now have 524 leftover children whose parents can’t be found.
In 2016 of the 2 million dollars in donations to candidates, Hillary received 95% of the funds.
Quora is probably not the best of sources, but one states that 12-13 million (out of 18 million) federal employees are Democrats.
Refer to my prior post. OF COURSE a good governmen bureaucrat will want to have every i dotted and every t crossed and the proper forms filled in the proper order and That Is A Good Thing. It is not an act of spite, it is doing their jobs.
And considering 40 years of Republicans preaching that government work other than military/security is just the worst most useless thing there is, I would not be surprised fewer Republicans during that time have bothered applying for any opening that does not involve getting issued weapons.
Assuming that those numbers are true, (I’ve never heard of your cite, but we’ll take it for now), there are two things that it may be misleading on, from a perspective of proving that most federal employees are Democrats. The first is that unions give money to democrats, and I would say that sounds about right, as Republicans are pretty hostile to unions. And the second is that it does not say what percentage of federal employees contribute anything to any political campaigns.
Add to that the employees may have been nervous about publicly supporting Trump when he was thought to be sure to lose, and it really stops being very indicative of much on about the makeup of the employees on an individual level.
But, given all this, if we assume for the sake of argument that the majority of federal employees are Democrats, that doesn’t mean that they hate Trump. Would you say that the Republican employees of the government hated Obama from 2008 to 2016?
Yeah, it’s not the best of sources. No citation, no nothing. Linking to a post on SDMB as a cite is probably more valid.