Just in time for the end of a mostly low-key Pride Month, various lefties came out of the closet to publicly announce their unabashed love of the Deep State after their four-year dalliance with Muh Democracy™.
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Maybe they were just born that way.
Two recent events inspired this Statist Stonewall — Presidentish Joe Biden’s sundowner performance in Thursday night’s debate against Donald Trump and the Supreme Court eliminating the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine in Friday’s Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo mashup decision.
Former constitutional scholar — he still teaches Harvard Law but years ago gave up any pretense at being a scholar — Laurence Tribe had a typical lefty take on the end of Chevron.
Chevron is now overruled. The administrative state just died. The imperial judiciary joins the imperial presidency, relegating Congress to a secondary role except when it legislates with unrealistic specificity and foresight.
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 28, 2024
Eliminating arbitrary executive branch powers and restoring the lawmaking role to Congress is imperial because… I dunno… drugs?
Most lefties, however, couched their defense of Chevron in anti-fascist terms. The “biggest power grab in modern U.S. history,” is how Lisa Needham put it for Public Notice. Maybe she forgot it was Pride Month and she was free to let her fascist flag fly.
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(I’ll take Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis who said, “They want to have rule by unelected, unaccountable, bureaucratic, so-called ‘Experts’ —that’s who they think should govern society.”)
On now to Biden’s debate performance, where it’s going to be nearly impossible to top Sohrab Ahmari, who did his best Rip Taylor, throwing glitter confetti in celebration of the Deep State.
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“The deep state gets a bad rap these days,” he wrote for The New Statesman within hours of the debate, “especially on the American right.” Is the Deep State “such a bad thing, when the elected leader in question is an 81-year-old mired in the shadowy bogs of semi-senescence?”
We should all be grateful to the federal bureaucracy, a marvel of social organisation whose arms reach far beyond the continental nation to embrace the planet. Staffed by 5 million people if you include the military, it structures most global finance and guarantees freedom of navigation – its most important functions as a commercial imperium – and thus orders the experience of billions of people to a degree few of them consciously recognise. You wouldn’t want this leviathan to falter.
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Ahmari is a man of such little imagination — or such uncritical devotion — that he cannot see that the proper place to put the period in that last sentence is after the word “leviathan.”
In Hobbes’s view of the Leviathan, a sovereign government, once established cannot be fundamentally altered, and going further, according to Samuel Mintz, “cannot be destroyed or divided… theirs is the dominion of power.” Ahmari says as much, comforting his readers that “few of liberals’ worst fears are likely to come to pass as Trump smashes his way past a dazed Biden to become, once more, the titular head of the leviathan.”
The Deep State trudges on, all-powerful and impervious to the will of the people as expressed through democratic elections in our constitutional republic.
