This is long, but it's an excellent summary of the current issues with the
Democratic Party and an explanation of Russia-Gate.
Miriam
What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking
Published on
Friday, December 22, 2017
by
London Review of Books
What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking
It appeared that the party might learn something from Clintons defeat. Then
everything changed.
by
Jackson Lears
Donald Trump greets the crowd during a rally in New Orleans at the Lakefront
Airport on Friday, March 4, 2016. (Photo: Michael DeMocker/ The
Times-Picayune)
American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The
repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so
is the Democratic Party leaderships failure to take in the significance of
the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanderss challenge to Hillary Clinton,
combined with Trumps triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at
politics as usual the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and
interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.
Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth;
interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil
in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for
most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a
social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns
underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about
a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more
capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn
something from Clintons defeat. Then everything changed.
A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect
resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into
the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing
emails that damaged Clintons chances. With stunning speed, a new
centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and
the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted
hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its
capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion
in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of
anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.
The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief
that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering
his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story
became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are
perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins
and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility
for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets.
Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story
have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate
popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a
creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in
casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt
hostility even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling
to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers,
Kool-Aid) have come to mind.
Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends
not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of
authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is
a confused and largely fact-free assessment produced last January by a
small number of hand-picked analysts as James Clapper, the director of
National Intelligence, described them from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA.
The claims of the last were made with only moderate confidence. The label
Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of
unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies
contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this
crucial admission: Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof
that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected
information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic,
argumentation and precedents. Yet the assessment has passed into the media
imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume
what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the
intelligence agencies, or at least for those hand-picked analysts.
It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role.
When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable
source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in
legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Husseins putative
weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of
disinformation (a.k.a. fake news) as a tactic for advancing one
administration or anothers political agenda. Once again, the established
press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the
national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He
perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had
wittingly spied on Americans a lie for which he has never been held to
account. In May 2017, he told NBCs Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly
likely to have colluded with Trumps campaign because they are almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a
typical Russian technique. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers
from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians above all
Putin as uniquely, almost genetically diabolical.
Its hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt
scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and
the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is
that Trumps election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal
imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and
unprecedented. Its true that Trumps menace is viscerally real. But the
menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage
done by Bush and Cheney who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture
and expanded unconstitutional executive power was truly unprecedented, and
probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented
immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary.
But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at
home with Paul Ryans austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of
wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other
Republican to repealing Obamas Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he
posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military
intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting
unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with
impeccable interventionist credentials.
Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors lavish funding of the
already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a
blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albrights indispensable
nation. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be
able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because its the
greatest country in the world, Albright because its an exceptional force
for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trumps desire
for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position
of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive
style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to
appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has
licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This
is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the
anti-Russian mania.
Besides Trumps supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind
the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably
occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies.
The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me
problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and
may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that
if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it
and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and
methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA probably knows
quite well who the invaders were. And yet it has not presented any
evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not?
I
suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six
or seven groups at work. The NSAs capacity to follow hacking to its source
is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and
successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry
installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they
originated, a Peoples Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That
information was published in the New York Times but, this time, the NSAs
failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The
Intercept published a story about the NSAs alleged discovery that Russian
military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election
systems, the agencys undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of
the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became
treated as such in the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including
much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and
the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director
who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some
compelling evidence of contacts between Trumps people and various Russians.
It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a
dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what
is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian
interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility
that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for
lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one
point Trumps campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing
to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian
government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this
occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy
adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his
bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trumps people and the Russian
government an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Muellers most
recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly
Trumps national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to
the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December weeks after the
election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs
during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign
of collusion.
So far, after months of bombshells that turn out to be duds, there is
still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference
in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the
technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it
is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from
outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US
intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking
Colin Powells claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN.
(There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS reports conclusions,
but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The
VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News
which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all.
Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory
(apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial
issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any
critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of
people with professional credentials and a solid track record.
Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta,
a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian
hackers called Fancy Bear also known among the technically inclined as
APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief
technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to
investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the
Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report
Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those
responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were
affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on,
the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned.
When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was
refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the
Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract
another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance
systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British
International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim,
and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and
even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.
The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were
it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous
adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief,
Attorney General Jeff Sessionss meetings with Russians in September 2016
would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials.
Flynns post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear
unremarkable. Trumps cronies attempts to do business in Russia would
become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jrs meeting at Trump Tower with the
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama
of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors with the candidates son expecting
to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya
only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of
Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just
another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.
Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din
of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report
that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are
published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes like the stories about
Russian interference in the French and German elections they are not
retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been
thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue
to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the
Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by
California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a
mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The
rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new
normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point:
the false accusation has done its work.
*
The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything.
Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more
power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say
this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of
contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains:
sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common
interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special
privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what
Gramsci called the common sense of an entire society. Even if much of that
society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it
still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries
of responsible opinion. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few
Republicans) and the major media outlets have made Russian meddling the
common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this
common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call
(with characteristic originality) Russiagate?
The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be
blamed for Trumps ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the
blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any
of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even
style themselves dissenters #the resistance was the label Clintonites
appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have
begun to use the word progressive to apply to a platform that amounts to
little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income
equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to
say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy,
reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended
foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest
egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies
are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with
foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money
and power of the Democratic leadership the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy
Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way
to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanderss
supporters.
For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses
attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents
revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a
sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that many
of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to
undermine Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign. Further evidence of
collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a
memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie
Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile
describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified
(she writes)
that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would
control the partys finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her
campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications
director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC
also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing,
budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.
Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC which had
been close to insolvency had been bought by the Clinton campaign.
Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry
into Trumps supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when
the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any
connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of
cash for trash, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS
eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British
MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from
anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story
emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald
Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day
and serve the Kremlins interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a
preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this
one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever
providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established
media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic
circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash
rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele
dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to
the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration,
James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After
Comeys briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the
dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington
establishment.
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The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence,
disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider
system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the
intelligence community: the tree of smoke that, for the novelist Denis
Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself
in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US
navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads the existence
of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later
honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator
System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly
non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex
and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a
full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community or at least the
part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure
there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic
establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the partys base,
believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting
about treason like a reconstituted John Birch Society.
I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of
a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black
American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and
agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black
militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the
paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag,
accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past a Klansman in full
regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a
dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary
racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black
men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black
prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the
pretensions of the land of the free with the practices of the national
security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew
their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some
nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.
The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more
ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and
neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may
be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new
anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more
humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any
possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void
quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her
exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a
desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their
keyboards, and the rest of the world apart from a few bad guys is filled
with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic,
democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when
it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in
the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral
imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement
that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US
policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing
more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics one that defines
the national interest as global and virtually limitless.
Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that
inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to
the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by
association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening
covertly and overtly in other nations affairs. Yet there is a more humane
realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright,
which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power
requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime
change under the guise of democracy promotion, which despite its abysmal
failures in Iraq and Libya retains a baffling legitimacy in official
Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.
*
We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats fixation on Russia by
asking what they arent talking about when they talk about Russian hacking.
For a start, they arent talking about interference of other sorts in the
election, such as the Republican Partys many means of disenfranchising
minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence
budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other
urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the
American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate,
and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear
war a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by Americas
combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and
removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has
created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats,
allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of
many politicians far more skilful in Washingtons ways than their president
will ever be.
It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives
to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak
the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil
fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of
the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of
militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are
threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane
populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the
outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian
directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of
America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They
recognise that there are far more urgent and genuine reasons to oppose
Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an
overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic
arrogance that led to Clintons defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that
the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are
seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as
opposed to #theresistance.
On certain important issues such as broadening support for single-payer
healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented
immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation these insurgents
are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal
miners daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary
for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who
stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated
capital. Swearengins opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times
has compared to Doug Jones, another very conservative Democrat who
recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a
Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old
girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective
Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the partys persistent commitment to
politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of
their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo
ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar
formulas. Jess King a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a
local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania put it this way: We see a changing political
landscape right now that isnt measured by traditional left to right
politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places
around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise,
pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed
so many in our country.
Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the
imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted
disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for
Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of
open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even
more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus
aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian
hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on
the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and
maintenance of American empire.
This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page
document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based
insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. The Democratic Partys claims of fighting
for working families have been undermined by its refusal to directly
challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the
people, Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive
critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics
and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often
seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet
the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, the wisdom of
continual war what Clinton calls global leadership
was far clearer to the partys standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to
people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries
and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare,
research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaigns
hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities
hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston
University analysed election results in three key states Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin and Michigan and found that even controlling in a statistical
model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a
significant and meaningful relationship between a communitys rate of
military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Clintons record of
uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both
ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of
protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may
want to re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase
Trumps electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15
years of war. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin
to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may
finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where
American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is
an outcome devoutly to be wished. Its a long shot, but there is something
happening out there.