This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each electi…
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
I should add that in the past, norm breaking has been limited by fears of being punished at the ballot box. Though I think Trump has been punished at the ballot box for norm breaking, the punishment has been smaller than most expected. The point at which things really fly out of control, however, is when his opponents start to perceive benefit at the ballot box for their own norm breaking in opposition. We saw a little of that in 2017-2021, but I expect it to be much worse this time around.
This may not be the best venue to communicate about this, but I’ll try clarifying a couple of items and see if it helps.
First, the “deep state” can have many meanings, but insofar as it has a meaning that refers to something big and powerful, it refers to all the people implementing government policy who are not replaced with each election, and the processes they have built up to do that. Amongst other things, it is where our laws and norms take concrete shape in the world, and in so doing establish their practical meaning. If we don’t like something or want the government to do something else, the particular things the deep state is doing now is the point of reference and provides some kind of stable meaning to the critique. Amongst other things, tearing this down wholesale leads to complete chaos and confusion. But Trump et al. don’t really want to tear it down wholesale so much as break the parts of it that resist the deep state becoming a tool wielded by the specific political group in power. Most of the folks involved want to break this because it prevents the executive from implementing whatever policies and actions it prefers, but of course if you have a very vindictive person at the top then the interest is in using the deep state against that person’s rivals.
A lot of rules about what US intelligence is and is not allowed to do with US persons arose after Watergate, and folks have had good reason to worry about the potential for abuse targeting rivals in the wake of the Patriot Act and so on. Happily, the “deep state” intelligence community of today has grown up in the post-Watergate, post-COINTELPRO era. While the potential for abuse has grown, there’s still a lot of institutional resistance to naked abuse. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been abused, but the scale and nature of that abuse has been limited by laws and norms that have been generally respected by senior figures, which in turn has limited what political appointees can get away with asking the intelligence services to do on behalf of anyone’s political interests.
I mention this because I spent a fair bit of time in the intelligence community and so experienced it directly, but the same dynamic is true across the full breadth of domains where the government is active. Basically, the “deep state” is what gives teeth to Constitutional limits on power. Which isn’t to say that the deep state always follows the Constitution or anything; we have a whole process for determining in what ways it’s not following the Constitution and ordering changes, and that too is a deep state element.
So when we’re talking about making much more of the leadership of the various agencies political appointees or at least subject to replacement at the whim of the president, we’re talking about removing much of what makes the government an entity that respects laws and shared understandings as opposed to the tool of a specific person. That is, it’s what makes the nation a republic rather than a monarchy (elective or not).
Finally, the critical other element is that it wouldn’t be a matter of Trump and allies acting in a norm-breaking way and everyone else trying to hold on to the old norms. That’s largely what 2017-2021 looked like, but there was some reciprocal norm breaking on display as well. If the norm breaking goes much deeper this time, reaching down much further into the federal government, then the reciprocal norm breaking from the left and perhaps even the center will also escalate. Frustration with the limits of constitutional pluralist democracy is common everywhere and left populists would also like to break the deep state where it blocks their policy priorities. I’m not particularly worried about a single “fascist” group taking over the country because I think it would fly apart into different camps long before we got there. But I still think that would be a disaster.
I should add that in the past, norm breaking has been limited by fears of being punished at the ballot box. Though I think Trump has been punished at the ballot box for norm breaking, the punishment has been smaller than most expected. The point at which things really fly out of control, however, is when his opponents start to perceive benefit at the ballot box for their own norm breaking in opposition. We saw a little of that in 2017-2021, but I expect it to be much worse this time around.