These Things I Believe
By I think this is correct:
"Deep state" has become a term people use to imply conspiracy theories w/o articulating those theories in detail that might be embarrassing
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) March 6, 2017
It is, of course, true that there are many unelected officials within a large government, who individually and as a group have their own interests and norms. Sometimes the federal bureaucracy can act as a legitimate constraint on the power of elected officials and sometimes as an illegitimate ones. Sometimes unelected officials grossly abuse their powers, like James Comey did in 2016. I don’t really see what analytic value the term “deep state” has in describing these well-known facts about the world; as Burns says, it tends to obscure more than it clarifies. And that goes triple given the tendency for the “deep state” to refer to “parts of the bureaucracy that I don’t like.”
In related news, see this Greg Sargent post about Trump’s anger that the federal government can’t be managed like a business.