Aaron Mate: For more than three years, US audiences have been flooded with fearmongering about a supposed “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign, and even more intense speculation—since shown by Robert Mueller to be baseless—that the Trump camp conspired with it. A core goal has been to help US elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, avoid challenging the corrupt system that gave rise to Trump’s presidency. Such a challenge would threaten their own status and power inside that system. For national security state officials, it doubled as a means to undermine Trump’s calls for better cooperation with Russia and stigmatize the appeal of his campaign-trail promises, however insincere they were, of ending regime change wars abroad.
The Russiagate playbook has been a mirror image of what its adherents ascribe to Russia: to “sow chaos” and “undermine confidence in American election systems” by spreading disinformation and hyberbolic warnings. The Russians, via their “dark arts,” are all-powerful, able not to just install a president in the White House, but to hack into voting systems, cut off heat during frigid temperatures, and help “convince blacks not to vote in Michigan.”
Embedded in this playbook is an elitist condescension toward the public targeted by it. Critical issues that affect regular people’s lives are relegated to the margins, replaced by breathless panic that presupposes them to be malleable enough to be duped by Russian memes and bots. It also has no relationship to the reality of what this supposed Russian operation actually amounted to: juvenile posts on social media that few people actually saw and that seldom mentioned the 2016 election. Contrary to claims that the campaign was “Russian intelligence-backed,” the Russian social media ads were the product of a private firm with no established ties to the Russian government, as Mueller’s prosecutors have conceded in court. If Russian intelligence indeed stole Democratic Party e-mails (and I do not think that has been proven to date), then that would mean it is guilty of a cyber-crime that exposed accurate information about Democratic National Committee corruption—not fabricated propaganda.
The fact that this cynical playbook is now being used against Sanders and his presidential campaign should be no surprise. Sanders’s policy agenda is a threat to the same forces behind Russiagate. In fact, he is a far more dangerous threat than Trump ever was.
A politics rooted in real issues and real people is far more powerful than the cynical methods that brought us Russiagate. More here.