All of us trying to pay attention to the Trump-Russia scandal by following the evidence are constantly challenged to be able to do the same thing. I wrote about this a month ago in Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018.
It's also very clear that establishment Democrats are now trying to smear progressives as Russian dupes. This might seem counter-intuive, since the Putin regime has the greatest ideological appeal to rightwing nationalists and white supremacists. But it's happening. Here's Hillary Clinton last fall: "And now that some of the potential 2020 candidates are starting to get public attention, they're getting hit, from both the left and the right, and sometimes, when it comes from the left, you're not sure if it's a Russian pretending to be an American on the left or not." (my emphasis) (Russia-gate, then and now 12/21/2017)
It was the Clinton campaign immediately after the election that took the position of blaming the results of the 2016 Presidential election on Russian interference. And, if anything, establishment Dems are even more insistent on that now. But if the Russian were not only determined to get Trump elected as President but succeeded in doing so, aren't the Hillaryites stepping on their own message by making the left particularly to blame for reflecting Russian propaganda?
But accusing opponents of being suckers for hostile foreign powers is a deeply-ingrained habit in American politics. In some cases, it's even been true. In the case of Russia, the accusation of collaboration and foreign sympathies usually fell onto the left and center-left. Jackson Lears in What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking London Review of Books 40:4 01/04/2018 describes the current round this way:
A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.It seems pretty clear from what's in the public record so far that the Russian government or people working for it hacked the DNC. But the Lears' assertion that the Democrats have been making a clumsy effort effort to suppress criticism - especially "when it comes from the left" in Hilary's words - as being tainted by Russian deception and/or sympathy.
If the corporate Dems weren't so intent of fighting the Democratic left - about the only case in which they show a real willingness to fight - they were drop the Russia-determined-the-election bit and instead treat the Russian collaboration in which the Trump campaign indulged to some degree as one part of the mind-blowing brand of corruption and lawlessness on which the Trump Administration operates. The Trump-Russia collaboration is serious. The Russian direct meddling in the election is serious despite the invalidity of claiming it affected the outcome. Illegal Russian campaign funding is serious. Obstruction of justice is serious. the over-the-top corruption of running the White House as the holding company for the Trump family business.
How many of those serious issues turn out in (further) criminal charges remain to be seen. Nor is the scope of the problems. The point is the real story on all of those things needs to be told on a reliable basis for the public record.
Al Jazeera's Inside Story has an episode discussing the current level of corruption in the Trump Administration, Conflicts of interest in the White House? 03/04/2018. YouTube now dutifully notes below its videos that "Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government." Something I've known from the time I first started hearing about Al Jazeera. But if you're worried a 30-minute video will hypnotize you with subliminal programming that will turn you into a Qatari cutout, I would recommend skipping the video.
Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel make an important point in Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything Buzzfeed 02/28/2018, specifically relating to the social media bots that the Democratic are gnashing their teeth over:
The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund. ...The action of bots - not just Russian ones = is also a legitimate concern. But for people trying to follow the evidence, retaining a critical perspective on the claims is important.
The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.
We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring. (The reasons they give for secrecy include worries that the accounts would then change their behavior and concerns over identifying accounts that are not, in fact, linked to Russian influence efforts, aka making a mistake.)
Jackson Lears takes an obviously different perspective that I'm using here. But he gives numerous reasons for a skeptical and critical approach to claims about Russian interference with reducing his point to a claim of a Deep State plot against Trump. I want to highlight one of his judgments here, "it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society." I worry that writing off the claims about Russian mischief and crimes around Trump and his Presidency campaign as a cynical power play by the "Deep State" risk validating the Republican/FOX News/Breitbart perspective that the whole thing is purely partisan politics. It's not. There are serious national security issues and concerns about the integrity of American elections involved. And those need to be clarified and adjudicated in the courts where appropriate.
The following section in Lears' piece feels to me uncomfortably close to saying that there is nothing especially heinous about the Trump Administration and his demagogic politics:
It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials. [my emphasis]But I can't really argue with that particular comparison. The Cheney-Bush Administration practiced a horrifying degree of lawlessness, from the criminal invasion of Iraq, to the torture program, to the Valerie Plame exposure, and on and on and on. "Halliburton" became a political synonym for stunning levels of corruption. The Iraq Provisional Government, aka, Young Republicans Abroad, was a caricature of incompetence in government. Karl Rove became the poster boy for exceptionally sleazy authoritarian politics.
And the Obama Administration with its self-selected goal of creating Bipartisan harmony gave the Chenyites the one thing they couldn't give themselves: a subsequent Administration of the other party that would refuse to prosecute the most serious crimes of the previous Administration.
This is one point where I'm consciously out of step with the prevailing Democratic attitude, reflected also in the prevailing assumption of mainstream media, that legal action against former officeholders is inappropriate and inherently a symptom of authoritarianism. If people really did commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. The failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush Administration has always been my primary criticism of the Obama Administration. Purely political prosecutions are wrong and illegitimate. But where real and serious crimes were committed, the perpetrators should be held legally accountable. The idea, and too often the reality, of Presidential impunity before the law is a poisonous assumption, incomparable with democracy and the rule of law.
The foreign policy aspect of the anti-Russian rhetoric is also important. From a realist perspective, it should be possible for Russia and the United States to compete in some areas, even on an adversarial basis, and cooperate on others like nuclear arms control and climate change. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time is also a very practical attitude in foreign policy.
The Democratic Party's position toward the Soviet Union suggests a concern that they are making similar mistakes to those the party made in the 1950s. John Kenneth Galbraith in his signature dry, ironic style describes that position in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). The Secretary of State under Eisenhower was John Foster Dulles. Galbraith recalls that Dulles successfully defined the Cold War as a semi-religious mission for the United States, "The Cold War was a moral crusade. It was also a religious crusade. And it came close to being a Christian crusade. There was more than a hint that a strong, even militant policy, so long as it avoided 'brute power,' would have the endorsement of Jesus." (This, by the way, is something to remember when anti-militarists point to Eisenhower as pragmatic advocate of peace.)
Galbraith proceeds to describe the Democratic opposition to Eisenhower's policies:
The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic socie ty, every important action of the state should be subject was almost comple tely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings [Truman's Secretary of State Dean] Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. [my emphasis]Establishment Democrats have already gone a long way down that same reckless road in the current situation.
They should be able to do better.
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