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Notes -
A motte for the term: The deep state
Without endorsing any particular theories here, perhaps the best way to think about the deep state is that it is simply parts of the government that have developed their own distinct political goals and capabilities, and are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper. In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government. Any government that remains stable for long enough will develop capabilities that do not require a given person at the top, since the leaders change over time. Those abilities will then be put to use in service of whatever political goals unite that part of government.
This becomes more open and more contentious in a democracy when parts of the government revolt against elected leaders.
The "deep state" is a motte-and-bailey where the motte is public choice theory and the bailey is that a cabal of civil servants controls the USG.
This seems true. Because I didn't recognize the term, here's how GPT-4 defines public choice theory.
"Public choice theory studies how government decisions are made and how they can be influenced by individual or group self-interest. It applies economics to political science to analyze government efficiency and policy outcomes."
In the context of your comment, I think it means that government bureaucrats make decisions based on their own ideology and self-interest, not that of the populace. This seems self-evidently true to me.
The problem, of course, is that the people who are attracted to the bureaucracy tend to exhibit traits that make them far more liberal than the general population. In any large bureaucracy, the deep state would always exist. But rarely before (in the United States) has it been so ideologically divergent from the average person.
My point being that when someone says "the deep state sabotage Donald Trump" or words to that effect, they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".
Regarding the partisan lean of government employees, I refer other comments in this thread. I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal (and indeed, certain types skew very conservative for pretty much the same reason in reverse).
I thought they overwhelmingly voted Democrat.
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They probably mean something directionally parallel to this. The more radical ones would claim or at least imply literal conspiracies of this, while more moderates believe in emergent conspiracy ie "The Cathedral", while more moderate still mean literally what you said, with the additional comment that this alone is bad and the ability for unelected civil servants to undermine elected officials is bad and they have too much power.
I'm not entirely sure that the term "The Deep State" alone is a Motte and Bailey just because different people believe different things about how much power it has or should have. It's only when it's used to equivocate between explicit conspiracy and emergent biases that it takes on that role. Maybe it would be more principled for the moderates to use a different term to refer to the biases. But if the actual outcome on politics is identical to the supposed conspiracy the more radicals believe in then I'm not sure the distinction is all that important.
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It’s not hard for me to believe that people who think the best government is local do not choose to work for the federal government. Besides, Washington DC votes 95% democrat. Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group. I thought moving the BLM to Grand Junction was excellent policy in this regard. Why in the world should the BLM, which controls 50% of the land out west, be run by Washington bureaucrats as an absentee landlord totally divorced from the land itself?
More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance? I very much doubt Democrats would be OK with the federal government being located in rural Texas.
It took me a second to realize you weren't talking about black lives mattee
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Capital area Federal employees mostly live in NoVa, and besides which, most Federal employees work elsewhere. The Capital area has a disproportionate share of fed workers, but that's neither particular surprising nor inappropriate (these agencies' leaders are supposed to be available to meet with political leadership and even occasionally each other).
What does 'underrepresented' mean? Conservatives are underrepresented in the civil service; Liberals are underrepresented in law enforcement; Hispanics are underrepresented in the House; Californians are underrepresented in the Senate; Protestants are underrepresented on the Supreme Court.
To make this more explicit: this seems like special pleading for the representation of conservative interests.
A government of, by, and for the people is a good standard by me, no special pleading necessary. Strongly disproportionate representation in the government itself (of unelected officials) runs afoul. The composition of our civil servants isn’t encoded into the constitution, or quite possibly anything, and it can easily be changed. This is in essence the same argument, as you wrote, that Democrats make for the police. They say the police aren’t members of our community, geographically or otherwise, they don’t have our values and therefore don’t serve the community. Those concerns are valid however we address them. I would do so for both the police and our federal bureaucracy.
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I think the accumulation in DC does make government employees skew more liberal, though.
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What do you suppose is an unreasonable theory of "deep state" that people actually believe in?
I'd think that 'The deep state stole the 2020 election for Biden' is a good place to start the discussion.
Or “the deep state is the reason Trump didn’t accomplish _____.” I was at a gun show this weekend and heard that more or less verbatim from the next aisle over.
Depending on the part removed by the underscore that could actually be totally reasonable and plausible. There were multiple instances where Trump said he wanted to do something and then the machinery of government made sure that could not or did not happen.
Usually, though, this ends up being that he was talked out of it by his own advisors, not that some life-tenure civil servant had anything to do with it.
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I'll happily defend what you think is the bailey as my motte. I used to subscribe to "structural" theories providing mundane explanation for dysfunctional behaviors of institutions, and dismiss "conspiracy" theories, but the last few years have utterly discredited the former, and I haven't actually heard a good argument to dismiss the latter.
Personally I started believing conspiracy theories when I found out that the US government actually knew that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, and then my belief was further reinforced with the William Binney leaks which effectively confirmed that all the conspiracy theories regarding government monitoring were 100% true.
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The good argument against it is that it would be something that would likely produce tons of evidence of it's existence, and we have no such evidence, despite tons and tons of scrutiny on the matter? Which is pretty much the standard argument against most conspiracy theories.
Unless you do have evidence you want to cite, in which case, we'll probably disagree on what 'cabal' and 'controls' means. Obviously people have influence over things, and obviously when there's only two political parties some of those people will be political allies with each other, but I think 'cabal' and 'control' are both big stretches for the things that are already part of the public record.
Sure.
Now that's weird, because almost every President has constantly been complaining about exactly this problem to degrees that are extremely well documented. Some even had to build parallel organizations just to allow themselves to pursue an agenda the administration didn't like.
It seems zany to say that there is no evidence of the deep state in a world where we know for a fact the CIA almost succeeded to force Kennedy into a war with Cuba he never wanted. Where Trump had generals disobey his direct, legal and specific orders with zero consequence, and where Eisenhower plainly stated that there was the makings of such a thing and we should be careful not to let it happen.
I won't mention every program that congress and the executive only learn about way after the fact, the list is too long, though honorable mention to the current UAP craziness and the Pentagon's creative accounting that has billions of dollars magically pop in and out of existence on the regular. But the evidence that the administrative state lives its own life unburdened by control from democratic institutions is anything but nonexistent.
Yup, as I predicted, I'm happy characterizing all that as 'various people and organizations having lots of influence over various things', I think calling that 'a cabal controlling the government' is misleading.
But w/e, if we agree on empirical reality and disagree on semantics, that's not always an unimportant distinction, but it's almost always a boring one.
I denounce this distinction as without difference.
Cabals are groups of people having influence. If you wish to place the difference at coordination, we also have clear evidence the factions inside the administration are coordinating. Read for instance the twitter files for a recent example.
It seems to me that you have simply decided to define conspiracy as something impossible and that any sufficiently proven coordinated covert action just gets to be outside the definition because it's no longer impossible.
This isn't a useful way of looking at world. Working oneself backwards from dogma such as "conspiracies never happen" is a strictly worse model than discarding axiomatic categories of things that never happen and conceding that conspiracies are a thing that does happen sometimes. If only because it requires less complexity.
There may well be some number of individual cabals, they may well be influencing some number of things. Conspiracies absolutely exist; as you say we have evidence of many of them, and I happily acknowledge those.
But this is again a motte and bailey thing. Or a thing about being so casual with your language that what you communicate is qualitatively different from what you meant.
'Sometimes some cabals exist in the government and influence some things' is pretty much true.
'The Deep State is a secret cabal that controls the government' is not that.
It implies there's one single unified long-term-stable cabal, not lots of disparate and completely unrelated individual ones that spring up and fall apart in response to specific issues and opportunities.
It implies that this singular eternal cabal controls the entire government, that everything the government does is a reflection of their will and nothing else matters ('controls' is a much stronger claim than 'influences', what else could that word choice mean?).
And these claims are not just slightly different from each other, they produce massively different empirical predictions. Like, if there's a single cabal that controls everything about the government, then it should always have consistent goals in everything it does, it shouldn't break down along artisan lines, there should never be different internal factions bickering and working against each other, who you elect as representatives should never have ab effect on what the government is doing, etc. None of these things are actually true.
To me it just sounds like a straw man. Every human organization, including a conspiracy, has factions and internal politics. And all the factions of permanents government are not shy about acting in their common interests and coordinate.
To take a normal feature of any group and say that because this group has it, it's not real means that you are assuming your conclusion.
I repeat myself but to you a conspiracy is not a real object and any real large scale collusion can't be a conspiracy because it must somehow imply unreal features like perfect cooperation between all agents.
If you're not willing to call the bolcheviks a conspiracy against the provisional government, you don't have a serious definition of conspiracy.
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That's not a good argument, that's a terrible argument!
First of all, you surely heard of survivorship bias, well there's also it's opposite. Just because you shot down all those airplanes doesn't mean there aren't some that evaded your fire. There might even be stealth airplanes you never saw coming.
Secondly, there are conspiracy theories that did end up getting backed by evidence - see Epstein's Island and his prostitution ponzi scheme.
Indeed, that has been my experience. You can drop the craziest idea like "the global elites are deliberately coordinating to spread LGBT ideology around the world", and everybody calls it a conspiracy theory and demands evidence. When you provide evidence, it magically doesn't count, because you have evidence.
This refutes the idea that the Deep State boils down to public choice theory.
Well, you can just not use these words when you're criticizing conspiracy theorists.
Yes, the "deep" modifier of "the deep state" suggests such layered institutional presence that "the deep state" controls what counts as "evidence," making it therefore impossible to prove its existence within deep state-controlled venues.
That's not true. "Deep" suggests a parallel power structure within the official government one, as in: "a state within a state".
Also, I was talking about all conspiracy theories, not just this one.
And you can't say "if it's true there would be evidence" and "if there's evidence, it's not true". The latter is nonsensical on it's own terms, but together it's just a plain contradiction.
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Editing this out because I missed the last portion of your sentence somehow, and that means my objection is meaningless. Preserving it as a quote in case someone is working on a reply already.
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I think nothing demonstrates this better than the case of Alexander Vindman. Let's assume his whistleblowing was not a premeditated impeachment trap for Trump as I don't think there was any evidence to that. His whistleblowing was based on that public servant's impression that the POTUS was undermining US Foreign Policy, which when you think about it with in mind who is supposed to set US Foreign Policy, is a really odd thing to say.
I don't think it's accurate to call Vindman a whistleblower given that his "whistleblowing" was nothing other than testifying in response to a congressional subpoena. It would be one thing if he leaked the call to the media shortly after it happened, but it isn't reasonable to expect every Federal employee to fall on their sword for whoever is in power.
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Ding ding ding.
If you think that the President is, e.g. the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, then literally any action he takes in that capacity when commanding a particular military action should, by definition, be obeyed without question, and refusal should be some form of treason or, bare minimum, dereliction of duty.
So when you have military personnel ignoring orders or claiming he's unfit to command, that's literally upending the actual chain of command as delineated in the basic structure of government.
A General making decisions that contradict those handed down from the Executive is evidence of exactly the sort of 'deep state' conspiracy that suggests that the President and Congress aren't actually the ones with the authority over the government.
Obviously the ur-example of this would be the military couping the President on flimsy grounds, but that's never really been the claim. The claim is that a coup is unneeded because the power isn't actually there in the first place, there's no need to take out the President when you can just ignore him.
This is completely wrong.
"Disobeying the President is treason" implies that the President is the United States. This is the very reason why many believe that Trump (and certain would-be Imperial Presidents before him) broke American norms, because the loyalty is supposed to be to the office of the President, not the man.
Of course military officers (and federal civilians, though the rules aren't quite the same for them - the worst you can do to them for insubordination is fire them) are obligated to obey lawful orders. Key word: lawful. You seem to also be claiming that a Presidential order is by definition lawful, when in fact anyone would be obligated to disobey an unlawful order.
Now of course there's the sticky problem of a subordinate claiming an order from the President was unlawful when the President doesn't think it was. That might only be decidable by the Supreme Court. You'd better be pretty damn sure you want to die on that hill if you disobey a direct order. But a President can't just order his generals to invade anyone or launch missiles anywhere he likes and expect those orders to be obeyed without question.
You know, I used deliberate phrasing to make my point:
and
Almost like there's a spectrum for the varying levels of disobedience/insubordination.
Yes, if the President ordered generals to launch a nuke against the U.S. civilian population without some obvious need for it to defend the nation, then you're probably right.
But I assume you'd agree that if the President ordered a General to, e.g. withdraw troops from a foreign country with all haste (i.e. Afghanistan) and that General, rather than obey, decided to send troops to surround the White House in order to prevent any further action...
THAT'D BE A LITTLE TREASONOUS, no?
Just as an example of a clearly lawful order and a clearly unjustifiable resistance.
Sure. But the military chain of command isn't going to wait on a Supreme Court ruling to take some action.
Add on the fact that the Executive tends to have full authority remove officers and appointed officials at will, and what will likely happen is he can simply fire the ones who are causing him trouble until he finds ones that will meet his standards.
Yes but there's a whole massive world of theoretical orders that are supposed to be followed, and there is nobody higher in the chain of command to run them by. So refusal to follow the order will have to, in this case, be based on something outside of the 'authority' of the authority vested in the office.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii/clauses/345#commander-in-chief-clause-ramsey-and-vladeck
Yes, but treason isn't even on the spectrum.
Yes, that would be treason, but disobeying or slow-rolling an order would be the smallest part of that.
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The article you linked to doesn't cite any instances of any generals disobeying orders. It lists three names—Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly—none of whom were active military at the time and only one of whom, Mattis, was in any position to carry out orders; McMaster and Kelly's positions were purely advisory. Now, Mattis did ignore Trump's orders on a number of occasions, but as a civilian he isn't subject to military law regarding insubordination. As a political appointee, if he refuses an order Trump's remedy is to fire him, which he declined to do.
As to whether it's treason, luckily, the constitution is pretty clear on this:
Simply disregarding an order can hardly be described as levying war against the country, and it's not clear which enemies Mattis would have been giving aid or comfort to. Furthermore, the language of the clause implies that an overt act is required, not simply failure to act. Indeed, there are only a few instances in criminal law where one can be liable for failure to act, so the general presumption is that the law requires an overt act unless otherwise specified.
More importantly, I don't see how this really applies to discussion about a so-called Deep State. These were all people Trump picked himself to serve in high-level advisory positions. They weren't military lifers he was stuck with and couldn't fire. This whole situation, if nothing else, is emblematic of Trump's lack of fitness for the office. He said in 2016 that his lack of experience wouldn't be an issue because he would find the "best people" to advise him. Then he didn't like what the best people had to say, so he got rid of them and replaced them with other people whom he didn't want to listen to, either. If your own hand-selected panel of experts tells you something is a bad idea, and this happens multiple times, maybe the problem isn't with the experts.
The point is that if your Country's founding document, deriving it's authority from consent of the governed (or whatever you're going with), vests the portion of that authority regarding military command in a particular person who holds a particular office, you expect that person to have the broadest, highest possible control over the military chain of command. His authority isn't total, but is pretty much total within the world of lawful orders he could theoretically issue.
The grounds for disobeying the President's order, then, will have to come from a justification outside of that authority, since there's literally nobody higher up the chain of command to countermand the order.
So the point would be that undermining the authority of the Commander in Chief is evidence that the authority is not in fact vested where it 'ought' to be.
As I stated very clearly:
If military officers feel safe disobeying presidential orders that would, under most reasonable interpretations, be lawful and authorized, then this simply demonstrates that the "Commander in Chief" role is not in fact resting with the office of the President.
Which is to say that if electing a President doesn't actually vest that person with all the rights, duties, and authority that the office is supposed to have, we should begin to question where all that authority has gone.
And in this case, there were rumblings of needing to simply disregard Trump's orders BEFORE HE WAS EVEN ELECTED:
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-the-military-disobey-orders-issued-by-a-president-
and here is the conclusion regarding Constitutionality of disobedience, which I largely endorse:
So the 'Deep State', in this context, is the parts of our governmental structure that surreptitiously override the civilian control of the military whenever it runs counter to those interests they deem more important.
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