Here’s Why the Left Can’t Quit the Deep State

The Deep State is sinking, and the Left has decided to go down with the ship.

That’s one of the realities that’s perplexing some political commentators in the early days of the second Trump White House stint.

One would think that after an electoral shellacking combined with the popularity of Trump’s policies in the early days of his presidency, Democrats would pivot away from the message that bloated unaccountable government and wasteful spending are cornerstones of “our democracy.”

A handful of Democrat heretics have argued, really pleaded, with the party to stop defending federal agencies and corrupt bureaucrats so unquestioningly.

Ruy Texiera, a political scientist and perhaps former Democratic strategist, delivered a word of warning to the Democrat Party in a recent article for The Free Press called “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”

He wrote that foreign aid has always been unpopular, so arguing that USAID is somehow untouchable is already a hard road to take. But Democrats planting their flag with federal agencies that have been spending countless taxpayer dollars on what most Americans would describe as “crap” is politically catastrophic.

“Trump occupies the high ground in this fight, which is probably why he and [entrepreneur Elon] Musk picked it,” Texiera wrote. “If voters dislike anything, it’s bureaucracy and foreign aid. And USAID is a 10,000-employee bureaucracy—housed in a palatial building on prime downtown real estate—that spends $40 billion a year on other countries.”

Good point. Nevertheless, they persisted.

What began with protests featuring a couple dozen federal workers led by prominent Democrat politicians swelled to more workday protests involving several dozen federal workers. Perhaps they have been protesting on their lunch break. Or perhaps they’ve been out to lunch the whole time and think you should pay for it. Who knows.

One way or another the protests hardly sell the idea that these are essential workers holding up the ship of state like Atlas holding the world up on his mighty shoulders. It seems there may be a bit of dead weight ripe to be cut.

Democrats—erm, our outraged “nonpartisan” civil servants—seem to think that the following is going to ignite the passions of the American people to flock to their side.

Oof.

I don’t think I’m saying anything insightful when I suggest that this “movement” isn’t going to trigger mass public opinion to shift their direction. Their only hope right now of stopping the Trump administration from draining the Deep State is getting judges to issue more injunctions.

It’s a serious problem, to be sure, and might slow things down, but it will hardly win over the public toward their views.

Texiera wrote in another article that the Democrat Party is “leaderless, rudderless, and more unpopular than at any time in modern American history.”

I agree, but the question is why can’t they pivot, why are they so keen on taking up these broadly unappealing causes? Why are Democrats and their administrative state hordes so unwilling to acknowledge that spending millions of dollars on, say, giving transgender hormones to animals or creating DEI musicals in Ireland isn’t the best use of government resources?

While folks like Texiera are right to warn Democrats that backing USAID and other unpopular government programs isn’t a political winner, they are wrong to suggest that the Left can suddenly eject or shift tactics.

Every bit of corruption or misuse of resources or act of tyranny uncovered in the administrative state implicates them and the entire progressive project.

So what’s being threatened is the Regime in its entirety. The tools with which the Left wields power, funds its activists, and ensures its policies are law—regardless of popularity and regardless of who is elected—are being exposed by a president and administration that, thanks to #Resistance 1.0, knows their enemy.

I actually agree with those on the Left who say they face an existential crisis. That was overblown in Trump’s first term. Trump governed more like a conventional Republican with additional emphasis on the border and less commitment to free trade.

But this time, Trump is truly leading a counterrevolution in Washington. He’s attacking the Left’s power at its source and the institutional Left is starting to realize that it’s in trouble like it hasn’t been in a very long time, maybe ever.

You have organizations like the ACLU insisting that the right of federal bureaucrats to rule is sacred due to the “historic check that the career civil service has had on curbing abuses by the executive branch.”

I don’t recall reading that in the Federalist Papers. It is, however, the foundation of the Left’s legal and political revolutions of the past century that have transformed American government from the limited, constitutional republic of the Founders into the unlimited Leviathan dreamed up by Woodrow Wilson and expanded upon by his political heirs.

The permanent state they’ve long commandeered may actually give way to popular self-government. Any exposure of its corruption, its abuse of power, its tyranny, and its uselessness threatens to drain the well of power they’ve so long enjoyed.

Without this power they will have to go to the American people and argue that things like DEI and affirmative action and net zero and all other kinds of loathed policies are good. And they’ll have to do it in a media environment they no longer control.

People who’ve become so accustomed to getting their way are often only capable of throwing tantrums when they don’t. Expect the Left’s tantrums to continue.

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