Election Reflection on “Interference”

Outrage is a commodity, one that gets hotter with the increasing polarization of metropolitan politics in our faltering neoliberal epoch. Somewhere between those poles lies MSNBC as a neoliberal bastion now cobbling together the neocons of the Weekly Standard (their arch enemies when they supported Republican Bush II) with the neoliberals of the Democratic Party establishment. I want to rename them MSNeoBC; and I find myself watching them several times a day now, like a soap opera junkie, in a psychic state somewhere between weird fascination and slapstick mirth. I am convinced they are issued cocaine before each broadcast to maintain the machinegun pace of their chatter. “Russia,” they say, “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Robert Mueller plods through witness after witness, Russian “electoral interference” as the ostensible goal of that investigation, we see every day more clearly that the Russian government has taken a page from the US playbook on electoral interference. Will it stick? Who knows? It’s like a clown show, but the clowns are all drunk. What will get Agent Orange in the end? Maybe something as pedestrian as money laundering or (It’s a trap!) obstruction of justice. If the blue tsunami fails to emerge in the midterms, all bets are off, and the vandalism continues. If the wave materializes, Donnie is in very deep shit.

Few American voters know anything about the ways the US fixes foreign elections, because we are so insecure, overworked, busy, and distracted by a semiosphere bubbling in bullshit that we are left at the end of the day with only the hope of sleep and the attention span of a grass fly. And as Chomsky pointed out recently, the settler state of Israel interferes in US elections so effectively that very justifiable anti-Zionism is almost a third rail. The emerging social democratic left in the US has a problem with this that it needs to solve, but that’s only an intermediate point here.

In a recent New Yorker article, Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, breathlessly acclaimed on MSNeoBC, that the issue is essentially settled—whether or not “the Russians” exercised enough influence on the 2016 General Election to swing it into Trump’s column. Settled because Communications Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson said so. Jamieson’s hagiography in Mayer’s article, subtly entitled “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump,” takes many paragraphs in a blatant appeal to authority. Jamieson proves, says Mayer, that Russia’s meddling (no one denies there was some element of this, but as a veteran of US foreign policy in Latin America, what surprised me was how surprised anyone else was) was decisive in a close election where the tactical accumulation of states trumped (irresistible pun) the popular vote.

And again, duh. But more than duh, because this inferential case cobbled together using indirect data is architecturally unstable, built as it is on the sand of complex cause-and-effect. I can dip out a bucket of water from the mouth of a river, and there are certainly upstream origins for each molecule of that water, but I challenge anyone to figure them out. Everything that contributed—seen and unseen—to the outcome of the 2016 election was decisive in the larger scheme of things. The preoccupation with this one thing—Russian interference—is an ideological and tactical choice already aimed at one thing: taking down Donald Trump. I approve of that goal wholeheartedly, but selective “honesty” now for tactical advantage will likely come back to bite us in the ass later.

So we’ll see this thing through, the blue tsunami (let it be so, God!) seems our last best hope for the time being of at least slowing the bleeding, so yeah . . . get everyone you know to the polls. And bring on that outrage.

But what about the left? What’s next?

If the Mueller investigation yields results (let’s hope it’s half as decisive as MSNeoBC think it will be for the election), then we are left with a teaching opportunity about US electoral interference abroad, as well as dealing with AIPAC, BDS, and the intentionally convoluted issue of Zionism, and agents of the Israeli government with full time jobs trying to sway US elections, that still holds sway within a sector of the emergent social democratic left. There is work to do to persuade more and more people. Make that hay while the sun shines.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’m going to watch the “Bobby and Donnie Show” on MSNBC.