Like all modern democracies, the U.S. needs a deep state, because it is crucial to fighting corruption and upholding the rule of law, argues Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute and the author of “Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy” .
Constitutional government depends on the existence of a professional, expert, nonpartisan civil service, he writes for The Wall Street Journal. Hard as it is to imagine in this moment of extreme partisan polarization, government cannot function without public servants whose primary loyalty is not to the political boss who appointed them but to the Constitution and to a higher sense of the public interest, adds Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Washington-based democracy assistance group. RTWT
