Ross Douthat, New York Times, Feb. 21, 2018; see also Masha Gessen, "Russia, the Conspiracy Trap," New York Review of Books
Image from article, with caption: Trump supporters standing for the national anthem at a rally in Ohio in 2026
Excerpt:
[T]he people obsessing about how Russian influence is supposedly driving polarization [JB emphasis] and mistrust risk becoming like J. Edgar Hoover-era G-men convinced that Communist subversives were the root cause of civil rights era protest and unrest. There were Soviet agents bent on encouraging racial conflict, just as there are Russian trolls today. But then as now obsessing over Russian influence can become a way to deny or minimize American realities that are far more important than some provocateur’s Hillary-for-prison meme.
And that is the danger for a liberalism (or an anti-Trump centrism or conservatism) that’s forever wringing its hands over how surely, surely Russian interference might have been enough to shift those crucial 78,000 votes and make Donald Trump the president. Because even if you believe that the interaction between the F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton, the hacking and the WikiLeaks drip-drip did swing those votes (I’m quite sure the memes and fake accounts did not), the proper question should still be: How was it that close to begin with?
A new Cold War is not an answer to that question. (Especially since, for all the talk of Trump-the-traitor, he has moved our military posture somewhat closer to the policies the Russia hawks demand.) Neither is a theory that obsesses over tens of thousands of voters when the Americans who switched from Obama to Trump, in the Midwest and elsewhere, probably number in the millions.
The bottom line is that liberal mandarins in the West — not just in America — face a hard choice when it comes to the populism that gave us Trump, Brexit and right-wing parties and governments in Central and Eastern Europe. Should this re-emergent nationalism be conciliated and co-opted, its economic grievances answered and some compromises made to address its cultural and moral claims? Or is it sufficiently noxious and racist and destructive that it can be only crushed, through gradual demographic weight or ruthless polarized mobilization?
The Russia fixation, at its worst, is a way to make the second choice without admitting that you’re making it — to pretend that in trying to crush your fellow countrymen you’re really fighting traitors and subversives and foreign adversaries, to further otherize the domestic out-group by associating them with far-off Muscovy.
Trump’s election was, indeed, a sudden shock in a long-running conflict. But it does us no good to pretend the real blow came from outside our borders, when it was clearly a uniquely hot moment in our own cold civil war.
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