There is a lot of that thinking going around in the policy community, such that my aversion to scandalizing it as the 'deep state' is getting harder to justify.
My take is that three years ago it was a bit overwrought to talk about a "deep state." We had the banal issue of a bureaucracy defending its turf through the usual ability to exploit inertia against undesired (by them) change. At some level I used that reality and other factors to try to reassure Democrats that their turn-it-to-11 panic was really unjustified.
Although despite my worries about the partisanship of the bureaucracy I didn't expect the shameful extent and duration that has rejected the once-deeply held notion that who won has consequences. The injection of politics from the Democrats in the bureaucracy has since then begun to create a Deep State as the partisans married the power of the bureaucracies to their partisan politics. The Deep State became self aware, so to speak, sometime in the last three years.
And by February I was already getting alarmed at that development:
The federal bureaucracy won't let a little thing like an election tell them what to do. Liberalism today . . . liberalism tomorrow . . . liberalism forever. Trump, perhaps with the help of Congress, needs a vertical chop of entire uncooperative sections of some departments that avoids civil service protections by eliminating the funding for an entire entity. Eliminating the position is different than firing someone, right? A Roman decimation was always intended to affect the 90% who remain standing, after all. I expect that bureaucracies will drag their feet on policies they don't like. But there should be limits to how brazen it can be given that they are supposed to be nonpartisan employees of all Americans and not just Democrats.
This change has grown enough that some Democrats are starting to celebrate the Deep State they once denied existed. Some people in that new Deep State need to be fired and lose their pensions to nip this in the bud.
Trump may very well be an assault on language and decorum. I have not learned to like him. But the Democrats are an assault on rule of law. I have learned to fear them. We can survive the former while the latter is very serious, indeed.
