by Michael Lind
Worst of all, the myth that Russia swung the 2016 US presidential election from Clinton to Trump, and endlessly repeated comparisons of current events to the rise of the Nazis in Germany’s Weimar Republic, provide the managerial overclasses in Atlantic democracies with excuses to increase their near-monopoly of political, economic, and media power by freezing out political challengers and censoring dissident media. If most opponents of neoliberalism are Russian pawns or potential Nazis, then mere disagreement with neoliberal policies on trade, immigration, taxation, or other subjects can be equated with rejection of liberalism or democracy, if not outright treason. Confronted with peaceful challenges via the voting booth to neoliberal orthodoxy from outsiders on both the populist right and the socialist left, the instinctive reflex of many in the besieged establishment is to call for censorship and repression.
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IN THE 1950S, McCarthyism on the right took the form of conservatives accusing establishment liberals of being pawns of Soviet Russia. Today, a new McCarthyism of the center takes the form of establishment neoliberals accusing populists of being pawns of post-Soviet Russia.
If the Russia Scare version of the establishment’s anti-populist story line is to be believed, the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin successfully used Western social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to hypnotize substantial numbers of citizens of North America and Europe into voting against their natural inclinations for Brexit or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in 2016. Even the French yellow vest protests and the gains made by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the British general election of 2017 have been attributed to Russian machinations online.3
The “Russiagate” scandal began before Trump’s election as the Clinton campaign, some anti-Trump Republicans, elements in the Obama administration, and various members of the US law enforcement and national security establishments spread rumors of alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign to the media, including the false story that Trump was being blackmailed by Moscow with a videotape of him consorting with Russian prostitutes. When Trump won, his political enemies in the Democratic and Republican parties claimed that Russia had swung the election against Clinton. Putin had installed his puppet in the White House, it was widely asserted, by one of two methods (or both). One was Russian assistance to the website WikiLeaks, which leaked material damaging to Clinton and her allies. The other method of Russian interference in the 2016 election took the form of propaganda on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms to suppress black voters and encourage some white voters who had voted for Obama in 2012 to vote for Trump in 2016.
In Spring 2019, after a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, leaving many Americans who had believed that the president would be exposed as a traitor disoriented and depressed.4 However, Mueller and his team, in addition to indicting some Trump campaign officials on unrelated charges, did charge a number of Russians with criminal interference in the 2016 election, allowing Trump’s opponents to salvage the thesis that Clinton would have become president of the United States but for Putin’s interference.
Like any effective thriller movie or novel, this narrative seeks to achieve realism by weaving facts into a formulaic conspiracy-based plot. It is a fact that Putin, like many Russians, resents the treatment of Russia by the West after the Cold War, symbolized by the incorporation of former Russian satellites into the European Union and the expansion of NATO. Russian nationalists and many populists in Europe and the US share a common hostility to the transnational European Union as well as contemporary transatlantic social liberalism. In addition, Western intelligence authorities claim that Russian intelligence operatives have engaged in trying to promote conflict in the US and other countries by helping whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden leak stolen or classified information and by bombarding carefully targeted audiences with Internet memes and ads.
Let us stipulate that this is all true. It was also true in the 1950s that there really were a small number of communists in the US, including a few high-ranking government officials, who spied for the Soviet Union, as well as many more Soviet sympathizers. There were also genuine Soviet disinformation campaigns in the Cold War West. But only the lunatic fringe of the anticommunist right during the Cold War drew the conclusion that the president was a Soviet agent or that mainstream politicians were secret communists. In contrast, influential members of today’s American establishment, not only marginal conspiracy theorists, in order to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for losing the 2016 election, have promoted the claim that the forty-fifth US president was installed by a foreign government and does its bidding. A Gallup poll in August 2018 showed that 78 percent of Democrats believed not only that Russia interfered in the election but also that it changed the outcome, denying Hillary Clinton the presidency.5
It is not enough to demonstrate that Putin hoped that Hillary Clinton would be defeated. Great numbers of Americans hoped that she would be defeated as well. It is necessary therefore to demonstrate that the Internet activity of Russian trolls, rather than purely domestic opposition to her candidacy, was the decisive factor in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
In the context of election-year advertising, the quantity of Russian memes was negligible. According to Facebook, only 1 in 23,000 pieces of content on its platform could be traced to Russian sources. Facebook ads linked to Russia cost $46,000, or 0.05 percent of the $81 million that the Clinton and Trump campaigns themselves spent on Facebook ads.6
Is it possible that the Russian memes, although mere drops in the ocean of advertising by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, were disproportionately effective in influencing American voters because of their unique sophistication? One anti-Clinton ad on Facebook attributed to Russian trolls showed a photo of Bernie Sanders with the words: “Bernie Sanders: The Clinton Foundation is a ‘Problem.’” A pro-Trump meme, presumably targeting religious conservatives, showed Satan wrestling with Jesus. Satan: “If I win Clinton wins!” Jesus: “Not if I can help it!”7
To believe the Russia Scare theory of the 2016 US presidential election, we must believe that the staff of Russia’s government-linked Internet Research Agency and other Russian saboteurs understood how to influence the psychology of black American voters and white working-class voters in the Midwest far better than did the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns. The Russians knew which memes or leaked memos would cause black Democrats to vote in lower numbers for Clinton in 2016 than they had voted for Obama for president in 2008 and 2012 and also knew exactly what material would motivate a significant minority of white working-class Obama voters to vote for Trump. In addition to being very flattering to the intelligence of Russian Internet trolls, this is very condescending to those two groups of voters, to say the least.
As it happens, the US election results can be explained with no need to posit the ability of the Russian government to alter the outcomes of US elections by brainwashing American voters, even if it sought to do so. In December 2015, the progressive documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told Business Insider: “Donald Trump is absolutely going to be the Republican candidate for president of the United States.”8 In July 2016, after Trump won the nomination to become the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Moore wrote an essay on his website, “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.”
Russian meme warfare on the Internet was not one of Moore’s five reasons. According to Moore, who had achieved fame by documenting the industrial decline of the Midwest, the most important reason why Trump would defeat Clinton was the regional economy:
Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes—Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally D
emocratic states—but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). . . . Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. . . . From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England—broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. . . . What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. . . . And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.9
Moore was not the only observer who pointed out that Trump had a possible path to victory in the electoral college. In February 2016, the progressive political analyst Ruy Teixeira told MSNBC that even if Trump alienated black and Latino voters, he might win by sweeping the upper Midwest: “You could see a situation where someone like Trump could carry Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, maybe Pennsylvania.”10 In the event, Trump got a higher share of the black vote and the Latino vote than Romney in 2012.11
For what it is worth, on May 24, 2016, at a forum in Los Angeles on “Populism Past and Present” hosted by Ian Masters that featured me and the historian Michael Kazin, I was asked if I thought Trump could win. I replied, “I think it’s possible. I wouldn’t bet on it.” I noted that sometimes “a big chunk of the former electoral college presidential majority migrates to the other party.” I said that I doubted there would be a “big enough chunk of people who formerly voted Democratic moving over to put Trump in the White House” but I hedged my bets by saying, “I may look foolish in November.”12
The political scientist Alan I. Abramowitz has observed that Trump actually performed less well than might have been expected in 2016 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, given shifts already under way from the Democrats to the Republicans in those states: “There is no evidence here that Russian interference, to the extent that it occurred, did anything to help Trump in these three states.”13
In 2018, Hillary Clinton told Britain’s Channel Four News: “The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania–that is really the nub of the question.”14 No, the real question is why so much of the US and European establishment accepted and promulgated Clinton’s alibi for her failure to follow her husband into the office of president of the United States. A Clinton or a Bush was president, vice president, or secretary of state in every year between 1981 and 2013, an era in which working-class incomes stagnated, offshoring devastated US and European manufacturing, the world suffered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the US plunged into multiple disastrous wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Trump became president by running against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. The desire of many American voters to disrupt the quarter-century cycle of nearly identical versions of technocratic neoliberalism under alternating Bushes and Clintons is quite sufficient to explain the presidential election of 2016.
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THE RUSSIA SCARE STORY is only one of the two narratives that embattled members of the Western establishment are using to explain the rise of transatlantic populism in a way that demonizes populist voters and politicians. The narrative of the post-2016 Brown Scare might be called the Weimar Republic scenario. In this account, contemporary citizens in Europe and North America who voted for Brexit, Trump, and other populist causes are just like the voters who brought Hitler and his National Socialist Party to power in Germany in 1933.
Good thriller fiction is not necessarily good history. Far from being antiestablishment populists, opposed by most of the college-educated, prosperous elites of their nations, Mussolini and Hitler enjoyed substantial support from military, bureaucratic, and business elites in Italy and Germany who feared the working class and viewed fascism as a bulwark against communism, socialism, and liberal democracy. The myth that fascism was brought to power by less-educated members of the working class is nevertheless useful for managerial elites in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin as they seek to delegitimate populist challenges to their political, economic, and cultural hegemony.
Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, in a book entitled Fascism: A Warning, has declared that Donald Trump is the first “anti-democratic” president.15 Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, lumps Trump in with Hitler, genocidal mass murders in Rwanda, the Confederates, and the government of Myanmar.16 “A leading Holocaust historian just compared the US to Nazi Germany” shrieked a headline on the neoliberal website Vox in October 2018.17 The article referred to an essay in the New York Review of Books by the historian Christopher Browning. In addition to making the usual comparison of Trump to Hitler, Browning displayed his supercilious erudition by comparing Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to Hitler’s predecessor and enabler German president Paul von Hindenburg.18
But even Browning’s clever comparison of McConnell to von Hindenburg draws from the stock of trite Nazi equivalence arguments. Surely other enterprising academics could draw parallels between contemporary politicians they despise and fascists less well-known than Hitler and Mussolini. Why not ransack interwar European history to declare that Boris Johnson is the new Miklós Horthy (Hungary) or that Matteo Salvini is the new Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (Portugal)? Granted, asserting that Donald Trump is the new Engelbert Dollfuss (Austria) does not make him seem very frightening.
The most frequently cited evidence that Trump is a crypto-Nazi would-be dictator relied on his statements following violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. A riot was provoked by neo-Nazis and other far-right groups who had gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, a decision that had been made in the aftermath of the earlier mass murders committed by a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, at an African American church in Charlottesville on June 17. During the turmoil, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing a young woman.
In his initial statement following the riot, made in an impromptu press conference while he was on vacation, Trump did what most chief executives would do, condemning bigotry and calling for an end to violence. Many of Trump’s detractors made the far-fetched claim that by not explicitly condemning white supremacy in his initial remarks, he was secretly signaling his approval of white nationalism. The transcripts of his initial remarks, and those of subsequent official statements and press conferences, in which he condemned white nationalism explicitly, provide no evidence for this conspiracy theory. August 12: “But we’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. . . . Above all else, we must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first.”19 August 14: “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”20 August 15: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”21
Trump’s critics tendentiously claimed that in denouncing violence on all sides he was asserting a moral equivalence between racism and antiracism. According to the Washington
Post, among other news outlets, there was indeed “violence on many sides,” as far-left counterprotesters belonging to groups like Antifa engaged in “swinging sticks, punching and spraying chemicals. Others threw balloons filled with paint or ink at the white nationalists. Everywhere, it seemed violence was exploding. The police did not move to break up the fights.”22
Was Trump correct that many Americans who were not white supremacists opposed the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville and elsewhere? Polls following the incident showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of removing Confederate statues.23 According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll of August 17, 2017, when given the choice between allowing Confederate statues to “remain as a historical symbol” or “be removed because they are offensive to some people,” the only two political factions in the American population in which majorities said that the statutes should be removed were those who identified themselves as “very liberal–Liberal” (57 percent) or “strong Democrats” (57 percent). Strikingly, even 34 percent of these “strong Democrats” and 31 percent of “very liberal–Liberal” respondents opposed removal. A majority of “soft Democrats” favored leaving the statues in place (52–33, with 15 percent undecided). Among African American respondents, more favored leaving Confederate statues in place as historical symbols (44 percent) than removing them as offensive (40 percent); 16 percent were unsure.24
Trump had a history of making bigoted and inflammatory remarks. But no impartial historian who read the transcripts of Trump’s statements would conclude that the president of the United States was secretly sending coded messages of approval for the very white supremacists whom he overtly and explicitly denounced. Phrases from his remarks were taken out of context, recombined and misconstrued so they could fit into the Trump-is-Hitler narrative peddled by many Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans—a narrative as deranged as the conspiracy theory that Trump was installed in the White House by Putin to serve as a Russian agent of influence.