Juan Cole - No, America, it wasn’t Russia: You did it to Yourself
The headlines scream, “Secret
CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House” and
“Obama orders review of Russian Hacking during Presidential campaign.” I don’t doubt that the
Russian Federation employs hackers and PR people to influence public opinion
and even election outcomes in other countries. So does the United States of
America. But I am skeptical that anything the Russians did caused Donald Trump
to be president.
It wasn’t like Trump
was a Manchurian Candidate, a stealth plant in the US body politic who would
only be operationalized once elected. Trump was in plain
view. He had all along been in plain view. His hatred for uppity or “nasty”
women, his racism, his prickliness, his narcissism, his rich white boy
arrogance and entitlement (apparently even to strange women and other men’s
wives), his cronyism and his fundamental dishonesty were on display 24/7 during
some 18 months of the campaign, and it wasn’t as though he were an unknown
quantity before that.
Americans voted for
him anyway. Slightly more Americans voted for him than for a respectable person
like Mitt Romney. No Russians were holding a gun to their heads. And they knew,
or should have known, what they were getting. By a “black swan”
fluke, a few tens of thousands of the Trump voters were distributed differently,
state by state, than the McCain and Romney voters; and in some key states like
Michigan Sec. Clinton did not do as well as Obama had, even if she was beloved
in California and New York.
One of the cleverest
things Trump said during the campaign was directed to African-American voters,
asking what they had to lose by challenging the status quo and voting for him.
It was a trick, of course, and they have everything to lose, both because the
Republican Party’s economic policies aim to help rich people at the expense of
workers and most African-Americans are working class, and because the GOP since
Nixon has connived at attracting a white racist constituency, and succeeded.
But despite the
dishonesty of the quip (which did not fool African-Americans one little bit),
that kind of thinking appears to have been widespread. In some states, as
many as 14 percent of the white working class deserted the Democratic
Party compared to the previous two elections, and, worse, 21 percent of white
working class voters who used to vote for Obama just stayed home. They weren’t
being irrational. Things have been bad for them and they haven’t participated
in the recovery after 2008 the way the stock market has. Their death
rates have even increased.
Nor did any Russian
hacking related to Wikileaks, if that is what happened, prove decisive.
Clinton’s own polling people found the big turning point was when she called
Trump voters a “basket of deplorables.” Americans don’t like being talked down
to, and had already gotten rid of Romney for the same sin. The spectacle of
Clinton taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech to the people
who put them out of their homes in 2008-9 also turned many of them off so that
they stayed home, while another section of them decided to take a chance on
Trump. He will screw them over, but from their point of view, they worried that
she might have, as well. Trump was promising to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs
via protectionism, whereas everyone understood that Sec. Clinton’s first
instinct was to do TPP and send more jobs to Asia.
So it was Clinton’s
public persona and public positions that hurt her and depressed Democratic
turnout in places like Detroit and Flint, not anything in Wikileaks (can anyone
name even one news-worthy email?) Or on the other hand it was Neofascist
disinformation campaigns like spirit-cooking and pizzagate. It wasn’t anything
as rational as a Putin sting.
No, America had its
eyes wide open. The Republican Party, the usual 61 million, voted for Trump,
despite his vulgar talk and vulgar style of life. Since the GOP is mostly the
party of Protestant whites plus about 40 million Catholics who think they are
white, nobody over there too much minded the racism against minorities. There
were some defections among the white Protestant married women from the GOP
(either stay-at-homes or aisle-crossers) and there were some defections among
the white working class from the Democratic Party. But those two may well have
just cancelled each other out.
The GOP voted for a
champion of the business classes, which Trump will be, in spades. And that is
what everyone should expect. There is nothing surprising about it. The GOP wins
nationally when it can add to its base of small and large businesspeople and farmers
and exurbanites, and Trump managed to attract a few tens of thousands of other
sorts of people in the districts where it happened to matter.
Russia doesn’t enter
into it.
