One thing has become abundantly clear over the past year – there is, in fact a Deep State. Government employees who are not elected by anyone are limiting the ability of our elected officials to control our elections, our pandemic response, and even our military.
Thank God.
I am not talking about the distorted view of the Deep State peddled by conspiracy theorists, in which control is exercised by shadowy flavor-of-the-month evildoers – central bankers, Jews, Zionists, liberals, Jews, socialists, cannibals, creatures from another planet, Jews, etc., etc., etc. I am talking about the actual Deep State – men and women who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution and to serve the public to the best of their ability.
To learn more about the real Deep State, don’t look to the monsters of conspiracy theorist’s acid trips. Look to the actual people who make up the Deep State, some of whom are profiled in Chuck Rosenberg’s podcast “The Oath.” Or run the tape on Joe Biden’s introduction of his national security team, and listen to their stories and their beliefs. Occasionally, members of the Deep State make the news, like Alexander Vindman or Christopher Krebs. More often, despite pressure from elected officials to tip the scales of justice, they quietly continue to do their work, faithful to the oath that they took. Sometimes they are fired or forced to resign for doing so.
Remember when we thought that politicians could not be trusted? Now Deep State scaremongers are trying to convince us that politicians are the only ones who can be trusted.
The reality is that we need a Deep State when government has to be large enough to fight a war against powerful enemies, or control a pandemic, or stabilize an economy on the brink of collapse. We should not be able to turn the ship of state on a dime. A whipsaw change from free trade to tariffs, from nation building to isolationism, or from public health measures to reliance on herd immunity can be destructive to the economy, our foreign policy, and our lives. Because the ship of state takes time to turn, we have to make sure before setting course that there are no icebergs ahead.
The Deep State is essentially conservative in nature – it makes it hard to change the status quo. It is resented by both progressives and regressives for that reason. It serves as a bulwark against authoritarianism. It forces those who would take extreme positions to seek consensus. It empowers lower level employees of the executive branch to pull a hand brake on an authoritarian president.
The administrative state has become part of the executive branch in a way that the Founders did not envision. But they clearly did see the threat of an overreaching executive. The Deep State is the sort of check and balance that the Founders would have appreciated, a shield against the demagogue who aspires to the powers of a monarch. Yes, it is anti-democratic. But so is the Senate. When the legislative branch is unwilling to exercise oversight over the President, and when a President can drag out judicial resolution for years -sometimes beyond the length of his or her term – and can hand pick the Supreme Court Justices who will eventually hear the case, the Deep State may be the only effective check on runaway executive power.
If anything is clear from the past four years, it is that our democracy needs a Deep State filled with patriots who will defend our government from anarchists who would sabotage it from above or from within. They exposed Donald Trump’s efforts to collude with Russia in the 2016 election, but waited until after the election was over to do so. They thwarted his efforts to get Ukraine to interfere with the 2020 election. They put guard rails on his ham-fisted efforts to make America more like the autocratic regimes he admires.
Most recently, the Deep State, both on the federal and state levels, put the lie to Trump’s claims that we could not trust the results of the election. Some people will continue to believe the lies, but without the Deep State, there would be many more doubts, and more serious damage to our democracy.
