by
Paul Street
Did the
Russian government make some efforts to intervene on Donald Trump’s
behalf in the 2016 United States presidential election? Has Trump’s
behavior toward Russia been odd, to say the least, for a U.S.
president? Has Trump had significant financial ties to Russian
oligarchs linked to Vladimir Putin? Does Putin very possibly have
something on Trump?
The
answer to all these questions is yes. But so what? There is no
evidence, only supposition, that Russia’s stabs made any real
difference in the election’s outcome. Whatever impact Russia had
was negligible compared to the longstanding and ongoing interference
of the United States’ homegrown corporate and financial oligarchy
in America’s supposedly democratic elections. The depressing,
demobilizing, and corporate-imperial Hillary Clinton campaign and the
dismal neoliberal record of the Wall Street-captive Barack Obama
presidency were by far and away the leading factors behind Trump’s
terrible victory.
Wealthy
U.S. election investors and lobbyists kept Hillary’s miserable
campaign pathetically centrist and dull – a deadly problem in an
anti-establishment election. A hard-right wing of the nation’s
financial plutocracy contributed significantly to the
reactionary-populist Trump’s surge after the 2016 Republican
National Convention. The corporate operatives atop the Democratic
Party fixed the primary contest against the progressive-populist
Bernie Sanders, who ran in accord with majority-progressive opinion
and would have beaten Trump.
Russia’s
“interference” in the 2016 US election was nothing compared to
the United States’ regular and ongoing intervention in other
nations’ politics, including their elections Israeli intervention
in U.S. politics “vastly overwhelms” anything Russia has done, as
Noam Chomsky observed last year.
The
laughable charge that Russia electorally installed a vicious and
corrupt gangster atop the US government in 2016 is one of history’s
greatest example of the pot calling the kettle black. Washington
intervened powerfully to ensconce the despicable drunken oligarch
Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin in Russia’s 1996 presidential
election.
Why have
the Clinton-Obama-Schumer-Pelosi-MSNBC-CNN-Washington Post–New York
Times-CIA-FBI Democrats run so hard with the unprovable Russia-Trump
collusion narrative over the last two years? One goal was to keep the
fires burning on their cherished NATO-expansionist “new” Cold War
with Russia. Accusing Moscow of having turned the election and placed
their “asset” Trump in the White House was a way both to stoke
hatred of Russia and to compel the new president to continue
Washington’s aggressive posture towards Moscow.
Another
intention was about domestic politics. Saying that “Russia did it”
was a “dog ate our homework” excuse for the dismal,
dollar-drenched corporate Democrats’ failure to mobilize their
party’s popular base against Trump in 2016. At the same time,
saying that Trump colluded with Russia was a way of delegitimizing
his presidency by tarring him as a traitor.
Russiagate
also provided a way for the corporate Democrats to pretend to be
mounting a serious popular “Resistance” to Trump, Trumpism, the
Republicans, and the nation’s ongoing drift into creeping fascist
corporate totalitarianism. The establishment Democrats represent no
such peoples’ opposition. They are willing partners in the making
of U.S.-American “neoliberal fascism.” It is their job to set and
police the fatally narrow, not-so leftmost parameters of acceptable
political and policy debate. Their role in the American corporate
state is (among other things) to contain, confine, and coopt serious
grassroots movements against the nation’s unelected and
interrelated dictatorships of wealth and empire.
Russigate
has been a critical tool in their service to the nation’s
capitalist and imperial masters. Every hour of CNN and MSDNC
broadcast time given to Moscow-mad Rachel Maddow’s collusion and
conspiracy cargo cult has been an hour of widely viewed political
news and commentary spent avoiding numerous bigger problems around
which the aspiring fascist leader Trump has behaved in profoundly
dangerous ways: sexism, racism, nativism, gun-violence, voter
suppression, white-nationalist terrorism, classism, plutocracy,
civil rights violations, civil liberties rollbacks, militarism,
hyper-masculinism, and, last but not least – the biggest issue of
our or any time – the unfolding capitalogenic climate catastrophe.
Trump has been making all these things worse, with no small help from
the Inauthentic Opposition party (as Sheldon Wolin usefully labeled
the Democrats in 2008).
No less
of a Putin- and Trump-critic than the Russian dissident Masha Gessen
tried without success to warn the U.S. liberal establishment off the
“Russia Conspiracy Trap” in the spring of 2017. Russiagate,
Gessen prophesied, “will not bring down Trump. He may sacrifice
more of his people, as he sacrificed Flynn, as further leaks
discredit them. Various investigations may drag on for months,
drowning out other, far more urgent issues.”
Other,
far more urgent issues like capitalism’s war on livable ecology,
which now raises the real specter of human extinction, with the
American-as-Apple-Pie eco-fascist Donald Trump and the United States
in the vanguard of the effort to turn the planet into a giant
Greenhouse Gas Chamber.
Gessen
has been born out in spades.
But it’s
worse than just diversion. By putting all their eggs into the legally
and political non-viable Russia collusion basket, the dismal Dems not
only diverted public discussion and attention from the issues that
matter most. They also created a deadly exoneration moment for a
creeping fascist president they can’t or won’t oppose on
authentically democratic and popular grounds. Watch the orange
monstrosity’s approval numbers climb in the wake of the March 2019
Mueller Absolution. As Jonathan Cook wrote on CounterPunch last
weekend:
“Russiagate
has been two years of wasted energy by the left, energy that could
have been spent both targeting Trump for what he is really doing
rather than what it is imagined he has done, and targeting the
Democratic leadership for its own, equally corrupt practices…But
it’s far worse than that. It is not just that the left wasted two
years of political energy on Russiagate. At the same time, they
empowered Trump, breathing life into his phony arguments that he is
the anti-establishment president, a people’s president the elites
are determined to destroy”
There
are so many good and important reasons to loathe Trump and to fight
against him and the ever more fascistic, climate change-denying
Republican Party. Russiagate has focused public attention on the
president’s dreamed-of sins rather than his actual crimes. It now
threatens to politically strengthen him in the deadly execution of
his many creeping-fascist and eco-cidal transgressions.
Thank
the Inauthentic Opposition.
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