The Deep State

Comrade Nunes has promised to investigate five or six more departments in the federal government, looking for “the deep state,” I suppose. As near as I can tell, the deep state consists of anyone in government who bases her analyses on facts and rational thought. 

Someone once jokingly said that “reality has a liberal bias.”  There’s a sense in which that’s true. Studies have shown that people on the right often tend to regard scientific facts as lies by liberals. The right often (not always) puts its faith in its gut instincts, not reason. People on the left tend to argue in terms of facts, science and logic (not always), which more often correspond to reality than gut intuitions do. 

There are, of course, sensible, intelligent conservatives like David Frum. I don’t want to be too positive about Frum—he apparently invented the bigoted term “axis of evil.” His love of Israel is unconditional, beyond fairness or reason. On the other hand, he absolutely rejected Donald Trump, and Frum is probably more rational than I am. He might (in the big picture) be a kind of right wing liberal, given his fact-based viewpoint.