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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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From that Washington Post article:

"Deep state” refers the unsubstantiated idea, frequently invoked by Trump, that a group of bureaucrats is working to undermine elected officials in order to shape government policy.

I'm not sure which annoys me more, that they don't even pretend that an opposing view might be worth hearing out, or that they have stopped bothering with proofreading as well.

It’s a poor definition of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it’s not about undermining the elected government. The deep state is all of the agencies that the elected government has given the power, for all practical purposes, to create legislation to run the state rather than do so itself. So you have OSHA banning chemicals in the workplace or requiring safety equipment rather than making the legislators do it. Or they have the FDA declare pot schedule I and thus illegal rather than them doing so themselves. And so these agencies have taken on a life of their own governing the nation, but without pesky things like elections or balance of power or accountability to hold them back.

I would say the deep state is institutional inertia. It also just so happens that formal and informal barriers to changing direction disfavor one party.

Maybe my memory is faulty, but I thought Trump even encountered legal challenges to him firing employees that weren't effectively implementing his orders. Google and ChatGPT are both failing me, though.