On the Deep State; or the American Retrospective
We have a Republican Senate, a conservative Supreme Court, and a Republican Executive Branch. Conservatives are in control. And yet, I think we’d all agree there’s dysfunction.
One way conservatives explain the dysfunction is to support the idea of a Deep State; a clandestine group of entrenched liberals that continually seeks to undermine the conservative establishment. We have to believe that most Republicans aren’t part of the Deep State. Those who are, are disloyal. With this mental model, we can deflect blame from Trump and, indeed, all conservatives in power, and place it on those working to thwart them.
The power asymmetry one has to believe in here is astounding. Liberals have risen to possess profound, unbalanced influence with this view. They can get a lab in China to start a pandemic in an election year, for example. They can trigger racial unrest in an election year, as another (yes, popular theories maintain that the Deep State is behind all of this). Republicans stand there, bewildered, by the tactics liberals have employed to undermine our freedom.
I find all of this incredulous. Republicans do not own patriotism. I’m a patriot.
As patriots, we must allow ourselves to be critical of our country so that we might improve it. The retrospective — the process of evaluating, critiquing, and improving a system — is seminal to the cultures of our most valuable American companies. Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft expect their employees to be critical of them so they might improve. And they do improve.
Let’s embrace the American retrospective so we can improve.
And yet, many conservatives hold that liberal criticism is an attempt to undermine our country. It’s unpatriotic. With that view, it’s hard to see how conservatives would be open to listening. It’s hard to see how they’d be open to acknowledging American vices when they think liberal motives are insincere.
We need to listen to and trust each other. We need to acknowledge what is good, and what is bad, and improve our country together.
