“People can get pressured” or “people can get bribed” or “people sometimes once inside a system discover they are in fact subject to all the same incentives that applied to all the other people inside that system before them” is all you’d get from this, but that’s not evidence for anything like a “deep state” unless you meant that term in such a loose meaning that then it would be a trivial discover.
Yeah, established organizations have internal politics we don’t all know about from the outside. When push comes to shove, the rich donors who have stock in arms sales end up mattering more than Elon Musk or Pete Hegseth.
The term deep state originally came from describing a situation in Turkey, where the democratically elected government was powerless in comparison to military. If a newly elected government is unable to execute it’s agenda, it’s a sign that it’s powerless.
DOGE lead by Elon Musk cutting costs seemed to be a key part of Trumps agenda, that Trump intended to carry out. The 8% figure from Pete Hegseth was also not just a campaign promise but seeme to be actually part of the Trump administrations agenda.
I think Elon Musk spend more on campaign donations to the Trump administration then the combined defense industry. If the influence would just be because rich donors have an interest in certain policy outcomes, why didn’t Elon get more for his money?
To what extend it’s evidence that suggests updating depends on your priors about whether you think DOGE would have actually do anything resembling auditing the Pentagon and whether anything would come out of Hegseth plan to cut the Pentagon budget.
I mean, another option here of course is “those people are full of it, have short attention spans, don’t care that much, and/or are so dramatically incompetent at putting out an actual pragmatic plan that all their words are just hot air”.
But even discarding that, to me the term “deep state” suggests the existence of something that is at least to some extent intentional, clandestine, and has an element of purposeful subversion. If all you mean is “established power structures, interests and practices have inertia and it’s not easy to just take a sledgehammer to them as you please, if only because you suddenly realise it’s a lot more complex to do that without bringing down the house than you foolishly believed”, well, duh.
But even discarding that, to me the term “deep state” suggests the existence of something that is at least to some extent intentional, clandestine, and has an element of purposeful subversion.
It’s also not quite clear what you mean with those words. As far as intentional goes, I would say, that of course there are various people who intended to make Elon fail.
When it comes to “clandestine” you could say that whether someone illegally communicates about government matters in a way that makes their communication not subject to government record keeping is acting clandestine. That seems to be business as usual in the US government, see Hillarys email server, Signal gate and Fauci’s misdeeds as recent examples.
When it comes to “purposeful subversion” would anyone think that people who believe that the Trump administration is bad and work in government don’t try to subvert it and prevent Trump from causing harm? Watching a bit Yes, Minister is useful. It’s reflects the British environments of a few decades ago, but they did a lot of background research to capture subversion dynamics.
It’s also not quite clear what you mean with those words. As far as intentional goes, I would say, that of course there are various people who intended to make Elon fail.
I guess like, a larger organization with some more long term goals? People having friends and associates, exchanging favours or looking out for their own interests is a thing that happens sort of spontaneously. It can lead to some bad outcomes but it’s not a particularly interesting insight (if anything, the fact that some societies and organizations can somewhat depart from that is the strange and interesting exception in the landscape of History).
When it comes to “clandestine” you could say that whether someone illegally communicates about government matters in a way that makes their communication not subject to government record keeping is acting clandestine. That seems to be business as usual in the US government, see Hillarys email server, Signal gate and Fauci’s misdeeds as recent examples.
I think that’s just sloppiness, though. Just like no one in virtually any job environment I’ve ever been actually respects all the safety and data protection rules and norms. In the government obviously the stakes are much higher, but the people are no more infallible and no less lazy than the guy who sets his password to “password”, then writes it on a post-it attached to the screen.
When it comes to “purposeful subversion” would anyone think that people who believe that the Trump administration is bad and work in government don’t try to subvert it and prevent Trump from causing harm? Watching a bit Yes, Minister is useful. It’s reflects the British environments of a few decades ago, but they did a lot of background research to capture subversion dynamics.
Yeah, I mean, obviously people will resist, they will do stuff like malicious compliance or weaponized incompetence to put grist in the gears at every turn if they don’t like it. This happens all the time—where there are Republicans, Republicans do it against Democrats too. Again, you can find this frustrating or whatever (I think while a lot of it is frustrating, “anyone who gets in power gets to enact their agenda no matter how insane without any resistance” is also not a desirable condition), but if this is what you’d call “Deep State”, then the term means nothing interesting or useful.
I guess like, a larger organization with some more long term goals?
The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it’s budget and preventing it’s budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
I think that’s just sloppiness, though.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
. Again, you can find this frustrating or whatever (I think while a lot of it is frustrating, “anyone who gets in power gets to enact their agenda no matter how insane without any resistance” is also not a desirable condition), but if this is what you’d call “Deep State”, then the term means nothing interesting or useful.
It’s not what “I call Deep State” it’s the criteria you proposed.
The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it’s budget and preventing it’s budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
The Pentagon isn’t deep state, it’s just state.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
It would be interesting, sure. I can imagine some of these examples being cases of clandestine communication—as in, you want to say something that you know is illegal, you say it off the record in some channel that isn’t monitored. I think it will probably vary case by case when that is the reason though, especially given that if you were doing that you’d still want to use secure channels, just private ones, and some of these instead were ridiculously insecure.
It’s not what “I call Deep State” it’s the criteria you proposed.
So what do you call Deep State? If you mean just “all the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus has in fact inertia and internal politics and does not immediately swerve at the whim of a new elected official” I say, yeah, no shit, that is true, it has been true throughout all of recorded history in every state entity to ever exist, and even better, it’s a feature, not a bug, as far as I’m concerned. While the downside is that it’ll slow down policies I’d like, it also has a healthy dampening effect against take-over risks. If that wasn’t the case then installing a dictatorship would be a lot easier.
With Clinton’s email server motivations are pretty unclear. If we take Signalgate, using Signal is one choice you can make because you are lazy. Setting the chat to auto-delete after a few weeks is a choice that suggests the intention to avoid the communication becoming a problem later.
New evidence suggests that Dr. Fauci may have used his personal email account to communicate about official government business during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an email from Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor — Dr. David Morens — to disgraced EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. Morens states “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work…He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” In a separate email, Dr. Morens references a “secret back channel” that he would use to communicate with Dr. Fauci outside the public eye. When asked about Dr. Fauci’s use of personal email to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Dr. Morens concerningly testified “I may have.” This new evidence raises additional, serious concerns about public health officials purposefully concealing information and behaving as if they are unaccountable to the American people they serve.
[...]
Earlier this year, the Select Subcommittee released evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senior Advisor at NIAID — Dr. David Morens — deleted federal COVID-19 records and used his personal email account to evade FOIA. Dr. Morens wrote from his personal email account on two separate occasions that, “I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs” and “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear.” This email correspondence appears to implicate Ms. Moore in Dr. Morens’ unlawful actions and raises serious questions about her involvement in a potentially larger conspiracy to hide information from the American people.
Morens was stupid enough to write his motivations down, but I would expect that many US government departments run in similar ways.
The term deep state was originally used to speak about Turkey’s military (and the associated power center). That’s what it was coined to describe. There’s political power in the military that’s separated from the democratically legitimated power.
In this case, we did have an administration that had the intention to cut the military budget and audit the Pentagon but the Pentagon was powerful enough to stop that and to instead get their budget increased. It needed a lot more than just inertia and internal politics to accomplish that goal.
I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.
I think it definitely is evidence for a deep state (if people couldn’t get pressured or bribed, that looks to me like evidence against a deep state), the question is just how much.
That people can get pressured or bribed is the normal state of things we all know about; if that’s all the “Deep State” claim boils down to then it’s not particularly interesting. You need to operationalize it to something more useful and also falsifiable if you want to take it seriously.
Now, if the claim is that these efforts are somehow coordinated and organized on a larger scale than that of interpersonal and/or business relationships, that would be interesting, and a proper conspiracy. But I don’t think “people got bribed” is evidence of any kind for that. It’s like seeing bank robberies and suggesting there must be a secret society of robbers who all agree to hit banks, rather than banks being the obvious target simply because they’re where the money is.
The notion of evidence as rationalists use it is very expansive. B is evidnece for A if and only if P(A|B)>P(A). Or equivalently, if and only if P(A|¬B)<P(A). If people never got bribed (¬B), that sure seems to me like it would lower the probability of a deep state (A). Hence P(A|¬B)<P(A) and therefore P(A|B)>P(A), which means people getting bribed is, in fact, evidence for a deep state.
(This is the same with people saying “correlation isn’t evidence of causation”. Incorrect; correlation is always evidence for causation, because lack of correlation is evidence against causation.)
Again, it’s the magnitude of the evidence that you can dispute. If you think people will get bribed regardless, then people getting bribed is only very weak evidence for a deep state. But it’s still evidence. Just like seeing bank robbers is evidence for a large society of bank robbers. (Because seeing no bank robbers would be evidence against such a society.)
It feels to me that “evidence of X” as colloquially used might be a stronger phrase than “evidence for X”, and almost as strong as “proof of X”. So maybe correlation is evidence for causation, but isn’t evidence of causation :-)
If something would be equally certain in two cases it can fundamentally constitute no evidence at all, even in the Bayesian sense. Suppose the three alternatives are Honest administrators, business as Usual, and Deep state. We observe some Bribes. Then P(B|U)=P(B|D)=1 and P(B|H)=0. Given appropriate priors then, P(B)=P(U)+P(D). And therefore
P(D|B)=P(D)P(D)+P(U)
We haven’t really updated at all our odds of Deep state being the explanation instead of business as Usual. We have ruled out the Honest hypothesis but I didn’t have many illusions about that. It’s a fairly extreme perspective—you could get a tiny update if you posited that P(B|U) is slightly lower than 1 or whatever—but I think for all practical matters it does round up to this calculation.
Yes, if you assume that the probability of seeing an observation was 100% under your favorite model then seeing it doesn’t update you away from that model, but that assumption is obviously not true. (And I already conceded that the update is marginal!)
“People can get pressured” or “people can get bribed” or “people sometimes once inside a system discover they are in fact subject to all the same incentives that applied to all the other people inside that system before them” is all you’d get from this, but that’s not evidence for anything like a “deep state” unless you meant that term in such a loose meaning that then it would be a trivial discover.
Yeah, established organizations have internal politics we don’t all know about from the outside. When push comes to shove, the rich donors who have stock in arms sales end up mattering more than Elon Musk or Pete Hegseth.
The term deep state originally came from describing a situation in Turkey, where the democratically elected government was powerless in comparison to military. If a newly elected government is unable to execute it’s agenda, it’s a sign that it’s powerless.
DOGE lead by Elon Musk cutting costs seemed to be a key part of Trumps agenda, that Trump intended to carry out. The 8% figure from Pete Hegseth was also not just a campaign promise but seeme to be actually part of the Trump administrations agenda.
I think Elon Musk spend more on campaign donations to the Trump administration then the combined defense industry. If the influence would just be because rich donors have an interest in certain policy outcomes, why didn’t Elon get more for his money?
To what extend it’s evidence that suggests updating depends on your priors about whether you think DOGE would have actually do anything resembling auditing the Pentagon and whether anything would come out of Hegseth plan to cut the Pentagon budget.
I mean, another option here of course is “those people are full of it, have short attention spans, don’t care that much, and/or are so dramatically incompetent at putting out an actual pragmatic plan that all their words are just hot air”.
But even discarding that, to me the term “deep state” suggests the existence of something that is at least to some extent intentional, clandestine, and has an element of purposeful subversion. If all you mean is “established power structures, interests and practices have inertia and it’s not easy to just take a sledgehammer to them as you please, if only because you suddenly realise it’s a lot more complex to do that without bringing down the house than you foolishly believed”, well, duh.
I guess like, a larger organization with some more long term goals? People having friends and associates, exchanging favours or looking out for their own interests is a thing that happens sort of spontaneously. It can lead to some bad outcomes but it’s not a particularly interesting insight (if anything, the fact that some societies and organizations can somewhat depart from that is the strange and interesting exception in the landscape of History).
I think that’s just sloppiness, though. Just like no one in virtually any job environment I’ve ever been actually respects all the safety and data protection rules and norms. In the government obviously the stakes are much higher, but the people are no more infallible and no less lazy than the guy who sets his password to “password”, then writes it on a post-it attached to the screen.
Yeah, I mean, obviously people will resist, they will do stuff like malicious compliance or weaponized incompetence to put grist in the gears at every turn if they don’t like it. This happens all the time—where there are Republicans, Republicans do it against Democrats too. Again, you can find this frustrating or whatever (I think while a lot of it is frustrating, “anyone who gets in power gets to enact their agenda no matter how insane without any resistance” is also not a desirable condition), but if this is what you’d call “Deep State”, then the term means nothing interesting or useful.
The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it’s budget and preventing it’s budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
It’s not what “I call Deep State” it’s the criteria you proposed.
The Pentagon isn’t deep state, it’s just state.
It would be interesting, sure. I can imagine some of these examples being cases of clandestine communication—as in, you want to say something that you know is illegal, you say it off the record in some channel that isn’t monitored. I think it will probably vary case by case when that is the reason though, especially given that if you were doing that you’d still want to use secure channels, just private ones, and some of these instead were ridiculously insecure.
So what do you call Deep State? If you mean just “all the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus has in fact inertia and internal politics and does not immediately swerve at the whim of a new elected official” I say, yeah, no shit, that is true, it has been true throughout all of recorded history in every state entity to ever exist, and even better, it’s a feature, not a bug, as far as I’m concerned. While the downside is that it’ll slow down policies I’d like, it also has a healthy dampening effect against take-over risks. If that wasn’t the case then installing a dictatorship would be a lot easier.
With Clinton’s email server motivations are pretty unclear. If we take Signalgate, using Signal is one choice you can make because you are lazy. Setting the chat to auto-delete after a few weeks is a choice that suggests the intention to avoid the communication becoming a problem later.
From what happened at Fauci’s NIAID:
Morens was stupid enough to write his motivations down, but I would expect that many US government departments run in similar ways.
The term deep state was originally used to speak about Turkey’s military (and the associated power center). That’s what it was coined to describe. There’s political power in the military that’s separated from the democratically legitimated power.
In this case, we did have an administration that had the intention to cut the military budget and audit the Pentagon but the Pentagon was powerful enough to stop that and to instead get their budget increased. It needed a lot more than just inertia and internal politics to accomplish that goal.
I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.
I think it definitely is evidence for a deep state (if people couldn’t get pressured or bribed, that looks to me like evidence against a deep state), the question is just how much.
That people can get pressured or bribed is the normal state of things we all know about; if that’s all the “Deep State” claim boils down to then it’s not particularly interesting. You need to operationalize it to something more useful and also falsifiable if you want to take it seriously.
Now, if the claim is that these efforts are somehow coordinated and organized on a larger scale than that of interpersonal and/or business relationships, that would be interesting, and a proper conspiracy. But I don’t think “people got bribed” is evidence of any kind for that. It’s like seeing bank robberies and suggesting there must be a secret society of robbers who all agree to hit banks, rather than banks being the obvious target simply because they’re where the money is.
The notion of evidence as rationalists use it is very expansive. B is evidnece for A if and only if P(A|B)>P(A). Or equivalently, if and only if P(A|¬B)<P(A). If people never got bribed (¬B), that sure seems to me like it would lower the probability of a deep state (A). Hence P(A|¬B)<P(A) and therefore P(A|B)>P(A), which means people getting bribed is, in fact, evidence for a deep state.
(This is the same with people saying “correlation isn’t evidence of causation”. Incorrect; correlation is always evidence for causation, because lack of correlation is evidence against causation.)
Again, it’s the magnitude of the evidence that you can dispute. If you think people will get bribed regardless, then people getting bribed is only very weak evidence for a deep state. But it’s still evidence. Just like seeing bank robbers is evidence for a large society of bank robbers. (Because seeing no bank robbers would be evidence against such a society.)
It feels to me that “evidence of X” as colloquially used might be a stronger phrase than “evidence for X”, and almost as strong as “proof of X”. So maybe correlation is evidence for causation, but isn’t evidence of causation :-)
If something would be equally certain in two cases it can fundamentally constitute no evidence at all, even in the Bayesian sense. Suppose the three alternatives are Honest administrators, business as Usual, and Deep state. We observe some Bribes. Then P(B|U)=P(B|D)=1 and P(B|H)=0. Given appropriate priors then, P(B)=P(U)+P(D). And therefore
P(D|B)=P(D)P(D)+P(U)
We haven’t really updated at all our odds of Deep state being the explanation instead of business as Usual. We have ruled out the Honest hypothesis but I didn’t have many illusions about that. It’s a fairly extreme perspective—you could get a tiny update if you posited that P(B|U) is slightly lower than 1 or whatever—but I think for all practical matters it does round up to this calculation.
Yes, if you assume that the probability of seeing an observation was 100% under your favorite model then seeing it doesn’t update you away from that model, but that assumption is obviously not true. (And I already conceded that the update is marginal!)
I’d say the probability of seeing some resistance or corruption in virtually any administration is damn close to 100%.