A Game of Russian Roulette
BY
CHIP GIBBONS
Couching opposition to Trump in anti-Russia language will only end up benefiting the Right.
Trump enters the White House after running a campaign infused with bigotry and fear mongering, while promising to bring back torture, surveil Muslims, and undermine what little progress has been made in restraining police brutality. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they want defund Planned Parenthood, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and go after Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. All of these are very pressing dangers.
Yet earlier this month, at Donald Trump’s first press conference in six months, he was not
asked a single question about Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
Worse yet, in some cases it appears the Russia fixation is not merely a distraction, but a deliberate cudgel to use against those who oppose attacks on the welfare state or civil liberties.
Eric Garland, the Twitter game theorist
who dazzled some in the media,
praisedSanders’s opposition to “economic inequality, ” but argued that such a problem would take years to fix. In the immediate future, he insisted, Sanders needed to weigh in on the “greatest crisis”: Russian interference.
In a similar vein, after Trump came under fire for nominating former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin to his cabinet, the neoconservative David Frum took to
Twitter to complain that many “patriotic” people worked at Goldman Sachs and it was “[w]eird to be more alarmed by [Goldman Sach’s] influence than, say, Vladimir Putin’s.”
Thus, not only are wide sectors of the media and political class focusing on Russia to the exclusion of actual issues, those who do focus on actual issues are chastised for not forming a popular front with people like Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham — two men who have yet to locate a country on a map they didn’t wish to bomb.
For the “never Trump” conservative crowd, Russia plays a convenient role. It lets them cling to the delusion that Trump is somehow
not truly conservative or the outgrowth of the Republican Party’s decades-long strategy of exploiting racism. Castigating Trump as tantamount to a foreign adversary is one way they can argue Trump isn’t one of them.
It is less clear what liberal Democrats have to gain from hopping on this bandwagon, other than a talking point against Trump. One possibility: as Doug Henwood has
pointed out, fixating on Russia allows establishment Democrats to avoid asking any hard questions about why Hillary Clinton lost. Not only can they ascribe Clinton’s loss to Russian hacking — instead of her ties to Wall Street or her tone deafness to populist outrage — they can argue that focusing on anything
but Russia distracts us from the most pressing issue: the Kremlin’s hijacking of our democracy.
The Russia framing helps them justify staying the course rather than finding fault with the party. Sanders, though now formally independent, is currently leading the only meaningful opposition to Trump among federally elected Democrats. He is doing so by hitting Trump on the same themes that drew millions to his campaign in the first place.
But while defending the most popular pillars of the actually existing US welfare state is one of the best ways for the Democrats to attack Trump, the party is fundamentally a capitalist one with deep ties to Wall Street. Populist mobilizations are anathema to its class interest.
So expect more histrionics about Russia.
