Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Sebby, when you talk about Trump and Russia, you have this weird myopia. You are only interested in Russia's impact on the 2016 election, and you are only interested in saying it's not interesting. IMO, whether the Russia had a material effect on the result of the 2016 election is only a close question because the election was so narrowly decided that a great many things could have been material -- in that sense, the result was overdetermined.
There are a number of questions about Trump and Russia that are more interesting to me, that you just ignore, including:
- How much has Trump's business depending on Russian money?
- How much money laundering has Trump's business been doing for Russians?
- Why was Russia trying to help Trump during the 2016 election?
- Why has Trump been so incredibly solicitous of Putin and Russia since getting elected President? (Also true of a small number of people close to him, such as Jarod Kushner and Michael Flynn.)
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When did I say it's not interesting? It's enormously interesting. Because, as you suggest, Russian marketing may have been one of a number of small factors that gifted Trump a thin margin of voters that put him over the top.
But this requires us to examine the rest of why Trump got elected - the overwhelming majority of the reasons Trump was elected.
Those - which number many multiples of the impact of Russian marketing - lie at the feet of the policies favored by the people who are trying to focus exclusively on Russia as the cause of his election.
It's simple deflection - a refusal to take responsibility, a scapegoat on which people can blame his election without having to examine the fact that We Own His Election at 50X the Level any Russians Do.
And when I say "We," I mean the Left, the Right, the Middle -- everybody who's watched the trends emerging over the past few decades that have created a really angry 1/2 of the country that wants to burn things down, but figured, "They'll never get traction... Never acquire power."
Well, they did. And now, rather than reflect on how we all contributed to this, a huge portion of our country has chosen to embrace a bullshit narrative that this was all Russian meddling.*
There was Russian meddling. And maybe that was the last yard Trump needed to win in 2016. We can discuss that. But how about we first discuss what drove him the other 80 or so yards down the field? How about instead of trying to deflect, we examine what our domestic policies did to cause his election. Then, after we examine all of that - which is voluminous - we can spend a bit of time analyzing the minimal portion attributable to Putin.
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* I think there's an unsaid strategy among non-populists that the best way to deal with populists is by ignoring their demands, discrediting them as an aberration, and using flawed and false narratives to do so if necessary. This has never worked in history. In fact, it's counterproductive, causing the anger that led to the populism to increase. Flagging the Big Lies, the Establishment Narratives, is what drives populism. The forces aligned against populism have worked their ass off to drive anti-populist narratives since 2016. Trump has frustrated it all with two words: Fake News.
