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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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