Freivalds: The Deep State: It's been around long before Donald Trump

Yet again President Donald Trump and his pundits railed against the “Deep State” and how it only arose during his administration to overthrow him. To Trump, anyone who disagrees with him is “treasonous” and part of the “Deep State” conspiracy against him which now even includes the military. But in Trump’s case, the “Deep State” goes beyond mere “treasonous” as anyone who has knowledge and expertise and works for the government is part of the “Deep State.” He deprecates these people by calling them “so-called” experts, judges, et.al.

History keeps creeping into this narrative as the past is never dead. Goodness, “treasonous” is the same term that King Henry the Eighth (1491-1547) used to describe his opponents whom he beheaded. This is not unlike the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin who had people shot and deported those who wore glasses to frigid Siberia. To wear glasses meant they could read, think, and thus be a threat. How do I know this? We fled Latvia when the Soviets invaded; my father was targeted by Stalin — he was a journalist and wore glasses.

Having grown up in Washington, D.C., the son of someone who later became a “Deep State” conspirator with the Voice of America and having gone to high school and college at Georgetown and George Washington Universities, where most of my classmates went into the federal government, I have a different view. Surprise, the “Deep State” has been and will be around for a long time; it’s human if not bureaucratic nature. Wikipedia defines it as “collusion and cronyism that exists within a political system and constitutes a hidden government.” The term was actually first used by Turkey in the 1990s (derin deviet-deep polity) but the concept has been around for centuries.

And the “Deep State” has existed in all forms of government from monarchies to democracies. During colonial Spanish America the phrase “Obedzco pero no cumplo” (English: Obey but do not comply) describes the attitude of colonial officials toward the rules of the Spanish King. Then there is the famous anecdote about former President John F. Kennedy. He once gave an order and was later surprised when it wasn’t carried out. So he summoned some 17 bureaucrats responsible for carrying out the order to find out why they failed to carry it out.

I have gone to many reunions of my graduating class in high school and Georgetown. Most ended up in the federal government doing things like: supervising embassy construction overseas, regulating commodity trading, working on huge dam projects, developing programs to eliminate juvenile deficiency, building levees on the Trinity River near Dallas and even becoming the commandant of the Marine Corps. Though the years they all worked under Republican and Democratic presidents, made the country operate and grow, and had a universal disdain for political appointees who often headed their departments. “Temporary irritants” was a term often used to describe them.

Many appointees of both political parties (there are approximately 5,000 in the government) take jobs for which they were not qualified in order to get a position later as a lobbyist where the real money is in Washington. So imagine a country where there would be no “Deep State” and every position filled by an appointee. The poster child of what would happen is of course “Brownie” (a.k.a. Michael Brown). He headed FEMA and the disastrous lack of human response to Hurricane Katrina. His previous background was running horse shows.

We have a president with many fascist tendencies who doesn’t get what this country is about. But fortunately we have our constitution, legal system and, yes, even the “Deep State” to protect us from the worst of his tendencies.

 Here is what the people are saying!