[didgetmaster]

In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.

A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.

Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.

[genthree]

> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.

Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.

The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.

If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.

[xethos]

> A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven

What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.

How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.

What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"

[jmyeet]

I'm sorry but no. "Deep state" is nothing more than enemy within propaganda to justify a purge of government departments to replace them with ideologues and to further concentrate power in the hands of the so-called "unitary executive".

The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.

[cosmicgadget]

The deep state, for example, would tell a president that if you bomb Iran and kill its autocratic leader, the country might close the Strait of Hormuz. And that naval escorts through the strait will only get sailors killed.

Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.

And so many of you bought it.