America isn’t facing up to the totality of what has happened and what we’re really up against.
We know that Russia interfered in the election in order to elect Donald Trump (and with him a strong Republican majority — this part of the equation isn’t discussed much, but the Russians undoubtedly knew it was part of the package).
We know that Russia is an adversary who is always actively working to weaken America’s global influence and dismantle Americans’ standard of living.
What Americans aren’t discussing is what this says about Trump and the GOP’s legislative, military, and other policy agendas. What the media isn’t discussing is the bigger picture about what the Russian conspiracy to undermine our democracy says about not just Trump’s inner circle but more importantly the entire modern Republican party. What we aren’t discussing is the reality that both the Russians and the modern Libertarian Republican party are dead set on (to paraphrase Norquist) “drowning our government in the bathtub.”
The Russians know the modern Republican party’s agenda plays right into their hands and the hands of kleptocratic oligarch’s like Trump, Tillerson, and Putin’s corporate cronies in the energy and defense industries… worldwide.
Why did Russia hate Obama and Hillary so much more than Republicans?
We’re told it’s because Hillary worked to undermine Putin and promote protests in 2011. This is a contrived and intentionally limited window into the full scope of what Russia has done and is doing, and why they’re doing it. It’s contrived in order to protect the legitimacy of one of the parties in our two party system, a party that at this point has more in common with Russia’s cynical hopes for America than the majority of our citizens’ hopes for America. The reason Russia was dead set on preventing a continuation of Obama’s legacy is because his policy agenda strengthened America, repaired the damage done by Republican deregulation and the economic meltdown, and would continue weakening Russia’s global power, particularly in the fossil fuel industry.
In 2008, Republicans undoubtedly left America weaker than it had been in decades. And over the next 8 years, Obama undoubtedly made America stronger than anyone thought possible. In the view of the reality-based community, Obama did more to increase the health and prosperity of average Americans than any other modern president.
Russia couldn’t let that continue. Russia couldn’t allow the stability in our society and in our economy that bank regulations and accessible healthcare was creating. Neither could conservative Libertarians.
It’s time to stop tiptoeing around the full scope of what we should have learned by now about what the Russian hack of our election says about the modern Republican party. If we’re going to prevent Russia’s vision for America’s downfall from coming to fruition, we must face the reality that Russia and men like Paul Ryan (and probably your cousins in flyover country, for example) have the same plan for our country: dismantle our government until our society collapses on itself like it almost did in 2008… and then let rightwing elites rebuild the world in their own diseased image. Just ask the alt-right. They’ll openly admit it, so let’s not pretend conservative Libertarians are naive.
Those who vote for Republicans might as well be voting for Putin’s vision for America. They’re literally on the same page, only America’s in some kind of collective denial. There is no evidence that the Republican party has more than one or two token members who care more about America’s national security than drowning our government. In a reality-based society, this would clearly signal the deathnail in the legitimacy of our two party system. A two party system can’t have one party dedicated to that country’s downfall, or repeated events like 2008 will eventually bring it down. Nevertheless, it’s our modern reality, and we must face all of it, not just the contrived peepholes into this story that we’re looking through thanks to the media’s cliff note version of what has happened.
Putin didn’t do this merely because of Hillary Clinton and as retribution for 2011. If you believe that fairy tale, then we’ve already lost to Russia, because it would mean that only our intelligence agencies are willing to face reality. If our people can’t face what we’re up against, our intelligence agencies can’t protect us forever. We know this to be true after the 2016 election. If there isn’t the political will to face this, then our intelligence agencies will be hamstrung and made ineffectual.
America must face the fact that one of our political parties is working to weaken our government in the same way (and likely in collusion with) our international adversaries. The goal is to entirely hand over the world’s governments to corporate oligarchs. In a country where shell corporations are people, it was inevitable. It should have been clear to all Americans, but for the contrived diversion of phony wedge issues. The conservatives in our SCOTUS and throughout our country knew what they were doing to weaken our democracy. And all the while, our enemies greedily waited for an administration like Trump that would weaken it to the point of total collapse.
If America doesn’t have the courage to face the sickness in our political system, we can’t heal ourselves and the disease will continue to rot… until one day, and maybe sooner than we realize… there will be no going back.