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November 2020: The People Must Repudiate the Deep State
Assuming President Trump survives impeachment his 2020 campaign must focus on a win being a repudiation of the Deep State. If he succeeds in doing so and the win is sufficiently large in the Electoral College, he might, just might, start putting out the fire in this country.
Are we on fire? Yes. It’s like a peat fire burning underground with periodic eruptions above ground that you have to scramble to contain. It is a drain on time and energy that could be more productively put to other uses. And if you don’t attack the eruptions, the whole land will become charred and burned.
Two stories have prompted my thought this morning: (1) “Whistleblower Was Overheard in ’17 Discussing With Ally How to Remove Trump” by Paul Sperry with Real Clear Investigations embedded at Powerline blog under “Paul Sperry: Whistleblower Overheard,” and (2) Mark Levin’s interview of Christoper Caldwell regarding his book Age of Entitlement on the most recent episode of Life, Liberty & Levin. They serve as bookends.
The first describes the effrontery of the “whistleblower,” Eric Ciaramella, and Adam Schiff’s staffer Sean Mikos of discussing the necessity of and how to “take out” Trump just after being briefed in 2017 by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on the new President’s foreign policy agenda. (The new President is not to be permitted to set a direction in foreign policy of which the Deep State does not approve.)
The second describes how the Deep State was created in the 1960s to address legitimate problems. But the tools created for those purposes have had the net effect of making America less democratic — the people less sovereign. And, as Caldwell describes, the Deep State exploits the fact that its machinations confer benefits on some of the people all of the time, so that the people who benefit at any particular time do not object to the loss of sovereignty.
But now we see clearly the danger of the Deep State and the loss of electoral sovereignty. “Normal politics” by which I mean everything that predated President Trump and came after Calvin Coolidge, involved the mutual benefitting alliance between politicians and the Deep State — each propping up each other. And so it was that it took an outsider to reveal the decadence of the politicians and the stranglehold the Deep State had gained over the people.
We thought we had a stark choice in 2016. We have an even starker choice in 2020. President Trump needs to increase the amperage in his re-election and the people need to apply the electrodes to truly tame this beast.
Published in General
Like the Founding Fathers, I find tyranny of government to be the greatest risk. I consider this impeachment a continuation of the Deep State tyranny and will vote accordingly in the fall and in the primaries.
More needs to happen to the Deep State players.
Mr. Durham, we await your report . . .
I for one am rooting for the Deep State. May they crush the Trumpist dream and continue to nobely undermine his authority, legitimacy, and policies. So that I can continue to drink the tears of Trumpers.
It’s good to know someone out there roots for the unaccountable bureaucracy to win over democratic processes and elections. Just like those communist days, eh, comrade?
@valiuth, I have a song for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8EMx7Y16Vo.
Hey the unaccountable bureaucracy is just following the will of the majority that didn’t vote for Trump. What’s more democratic than that? The people do not want Trump and as servants of the real American people (those who contribute to our national greatness rather than being unemployed drug users in the rust belt) they stand athwart him yelling stop!
I don’t think of them as nameless cowards, but brave incognito warriors. Fighting off the infection to the body politic that is Trump and Trumpism. If anything they are being too cautious and restrained. They must heighten the temperature to burn the impure away! Witches must be burned! LET THE WITCH HUNTING BEGIN!
It’s always great until you’re the witch.
Me a witch? But I weigh so much more than a duck. However if you do have witches should you not hunt them down and burn them? And if your are a witch is that not the life you have chosen?
Contradictions must be heightened. You can’t have your revolution without blood and counter revolution. This is the dialectic. I root for violence, chaos, and pain because all should share in my despair. None must go unscathed and no one should be left to walk away. The time for that is passed. You all made a choice to soe the storm with Trump. I now demand that you reap the whirlwind.
Everything must be destroyed because nothing is sacred anymore and there is no truth or God. Just a massive yawning void in which to cast all things to their oblivion.
He turned me into a newt.
I’m hoping for prosecutions.
I’m hoping for executions…pour encourager les autres. But I doubt it will happen.
Pre-dawn SWAT raids, with on-camera perp walks, followed by multiple inditements.
Really, counselor? Is that a misspelling for indictment? Or are you planning on sending them to Siberia to mine minerals?
One would hope. Do unto others as they do unto you, right?
T’would be interesting to get Scooter Libby’s comments on being collateral damage of when certain segments of the Deep State decide to go after higher-ups and take out an underling or two instead.
The people? You keep using that word… I do not think it still means what you think it still means. What about counting all the votes?
Daniel Greenfield comments:
Of course, it’s just Illinois. It couldn’t be the deliberate result of Motor Voter. Or the administrative state.
Fair point. If you truly believed in self-government there would be nothing more important that assuring that only eligible voters were on the rolls and that the ballots had been cast by the persons claiming to be who they are. Efforts to evade that outcome are telling.
Evade? Monica Showalter wrote this for American Thinker in 2018:
“Non-committed voters,” etc. Or voters who technically aren’t, you know. Citizens. but who somehow got registered to vote. You can’t suppress any voters. You must count all the votes.
The movement is already underway to have people they know aren’t citizens vote in local (I think state, too) elections. After all, illegal immigrants have kids in the schools, they have the right to have a say in how the schools are run, don’t they?
Count all the votes.
Believe the women.
Hear all the witnesses.
Are all republicans now whiners and babies? There is no “Deep State”, just people who work in government doing things they believe need to be done.
It’s not new, it wasn’t invented in 1960, it has been with us since government existed. And whether it is the federal government or a Little League board (my own experience) it exists because people exist in the same way they have for years.
Much has been written about the British manipulations in the middle east during and after WWI. And rightly so, for example the Pico-Sykes agreement. But it wasn’t the UK government, it was really 3 competing arms of the same government. In foreign policy, the British has the Foreign Office in London, there was the Cairo office and the India office. Each of these were large groups of people, professionals who knew foreign policy and who had distinct ideas of how the policy was to be crafted and how it was to be executed. And these 3 offices competed with each other. One supported the Sauds (Saudi family), one the Sharif of Mecca (who was tossed out and whose 2 sons were placed as kings over Jordan and Iraq by the Cairo office. And the office in Whitehall advocating and working for a third way. And much of the active opposition to Hitler in Germany was within the various government offices, so it is not all bad. But it always works both ways. Recall that after the infamous Ukraine call, staffers moved the actual call audio to a more secure server, trying to protect the president.
The is no Deep State ruler, no real coordinating meetings, just people doing things in certain ways. How many US ambassadors over the years have told their counterparts in foreign capitals that the “real” policy or situation was x,y,z, different from what the President was saying? And how many aides to ambassadors were giving their own story to other lower level people?
It can be easily handled. From the top down, be as open as possible, and maybe just a bit more than you should. Shine a maximum amount of light on discussions and decisions. And always assume that what you say will come to light, sooner rather than later.
But there is no Deep State to be feared, to cower from. And if this low level person really can take Trump out, then perhaps Trump isn’t in the right job.
Winston Churchill switched parties (crossed the floor) twice. He was disliked, distrusted by many in the political class and the government professional class. But he was always very open about his positions and when push came to shove, he was the right choice (though not the King’s first call, and he had a lot of opposition in his own cabinet early in WWII).
Fair points that beg for clarifying my view of the “Deep State (DS)”. DS is a very natural development reflective of fairly predictable human behaviors. It is not an organized and integrated conspiracy. It is a combination of groupthink and pursuit of individual interests and agendas. In any large organization the leadership must be aware of this phenomena and create structures and policies that minimize it. One such policy is at will employment — where someone can be peremptorily terminated when their conduct is adverse to the interests of the stated purpose of the organization. That is not a feature of government employment. Government employees have some of the strongest employment rights anywhere which makes termination, including “constructive termination” difficult and to be avoided as an incredible distraction from the work that supervisory and management personnel are trying to accomplish. This circumstance enable a lot of private agendas to flourish so long as the individual observes some modicum of restrain to avoid a dead bang case of insubordination.
Then you add in the “whistleblower protections” that make criticism of management actions and strategies protected. Technically the allegation should involve fraud, theft, or clear violation of law. But in practices policy disagreements are the frequent subject of whistleblower complaints.
Into this stew also add the “burrowing in” phenomena: Political appointees have an option to be converted to civil service employment (with the right sponsorship). Political appointees are exactly that — individuals whose ideology is in accord with the current agency leadership that they are brought on board to formulate and implement agency policy consistent with the ideology they favor. So when an administration ends political appointees become civil servants but do not shed their prior allegiances and outlooks.
I don’t know what your experience with federal government policy makers is, @billnelson, by mine is that there is this great ideological accretion over time that results in a particular “agency way” that any political leadership of the agency has to spend tremendous time, energy and focus to modify one or two “big” things over the course of a typical 3-4 year stint. Continued in another comment…
Heh. A Deep State advocate would say that.
Deep State advocates insist there’s a Deep State. And they love it.
This is nonsense, of course. They’re not committed to the Constitution or the Rule of Law. They’re committed to the expansion of the Deep State.
Continued…
You say ” if this low level person really can take Trump out, then perhaps Trump isn’t in the right job.” That is very clever statement, but it is a caricature of what is/has happened. No one at a “low level” is involved. The actors in the coup are or were at various levels in government, but it has legs because of the interests that it serves movers and shakers in the progressive movement. So to fob this off as a “low level” person taking Trump out is disingenuous. The reported overheard discussion between two then NSC staff (the whistleblower and the current Adam Schiff staff member) in 2017 about the need to take out Trump, is indicative that the two individuals involved believed they had a network of like-minded individuals with the power to do so. And, as things have developed, the network was capable of doing so.
The realities of government employment and agency evolution are ready made to be used by persons of ambition and ideology. The question then is how to deal with the persons who have come to see government as this opportunity for themselves. The DS is not itself a conspiracy, but it is an environment where conspiracy can flourish with the connections to Congress and media.
And the DS has zero, nada, zilch, elected individuals whom the voters can banish. The only way the DS can support democracy is when it truly follows the policies of the elected Executive. No, the DS is not authorized to engage in criminal behavior at the behest of the President, but there has been no evidence that that is what has been going on except in the fetid imaginations of the conspirators. The President directing change in foreign policy is not a criminal act. The President deciding to follow a course other than that laid out by civil servants over the last several years even decades, is not a criminal act. The President deciding not to pursue policies of the prior President for whom current civil servants may have strong feelings and support, is not a criminal act.
The American people can remind the DS that it is sovereign by re-electing President Trump. If they do not do so, the message to the DS is that they are in charge ready to be manipulated by any group who knows how to use the natural inclinations of large organizations.
If the Deep State is as important as Bill Nelson believes and must be protected at all costs, then what’s the point of having elections? We’ll just have these unelected bureaucrats running the show in perpetuity.
Just to pick a bit of a nit, I would argue that, for those paying attention, “normal politics” actually ended about three seconds after the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Much of the next decade and a half was We the People in retreat behind (variously) overwhelmed, faulty, or fraudulent leadership. Trump just marks the point where We the People finally engaging in the battle.
I have spent the last 30 years dealing with NASA and the FAA. And there are many in both organizations who pursue their own interests, and not that of the mission of the agency.
It is the use of the scare phrase “Deep State” that I object to.
If the president dramatically shifts the relationship to a specific nation, they must realize that a number of people assigned to those missions, both abroad and at home, will object and work to blunt the change. Most will do so because their “experience” convinces them they are correct. As an example, Reagan’s shift in policy with the USSR was opposed by many in the foreign service because their vast experience convinced them that it would lead to conflict. Reagan was told that by the State Department.
I think the question then becomes if you have principled objections to the new administration’s policies, what do you do about it? You can choose to resign in protest, or sit tight and hope that either the administration will come to see the error of their ways, or that they’ll be voted out in four years. Where it would seem to cross the line is if you actively work to discredit the administration or at the extreme end, force the president out of office through deceptive means.
The latter part is mainly things only the relatively higher ups in the bureaucracy would be capable of doing, but the combination of Civil Service and JFK’s allowing federal workers to unionize has created a situation where goverment workers who significantly disagree with the Executive Branch both can’t be forced out, and in the case of a Republican administration, have a significant interest in seeing it fail for whatever reason, because of the rebates Democrats get from the SEIU and AFSME in political contributions from union dues going to federal workers, whose salaries are set by the President and Congress. That can create shared partisanship, even without a written-out conspiracy plan.
This is the part most concerning. And the part where maximizing transparency will have the greatest effect.
Let’s use a current example, the sacking of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. The Latest is the taped conversation of Trump saying “take her out”. Now, this is a taped dinner conversation (dinner with the guy Trump doesn’t know), so it looks real bad.
But consider if Trump had come out, in a press conference, and said that “we are removing the Ambassador as she is not fulfilling the policy directives which we are providing, and is actually telling the Ukrainian government information that is not per policy”. Done, no discussion. And if you wish to add “inappropriate discussions of US political issues”. Even better.