Yes.
I noticed earlier today that, any time I read the comments on my Republican Congreswoman's social media accounts, at least one third of them contain slightly crankish references to Russian hacking.
Democrats have created a monster. The dumbest, most conspiratorial version of their claims is the one that seems to explain the most in the most easily understood terms, so of course that is what has gone viral among the marginally informed.
Everyone who tried to tell me that it really was worth carrying on about this was wrong. You may have had a nuanced and plausible account of what "Russian interference" meant, however tendentious and thinly sourced, but that's not what has spread. The street finds its own use for things, including ideas that purport to explain the unexplainable.
The Russian hacking story is more fundamental than Russia, hacking, or the election. It strikes at the very heart of our system of government, which is what the identity of this country is built on.
Since a core difference between autocracies and democracies is that in the latter, an opposition is allowed, it means there are always tolerated political differences within democratic societies. Obviously this leaves open the possibility that these differences can be exploited by third party autocracies to advance its own interests at the expense of the democracy, by pitting some factions against others. This leaves the democracy less able to defend its own interests as a whole. It is a fundamental, structural weakness of any system of government that tolerates opposition,
unless there is some ironclad consensus within the democracy that "politics stops at the water's edge" or some version of that.
It means that, for instance, Thomas Dewey would not have passed intelligence to German troops in 1944 in order to bring about failure of D-Day to help him win the 1944 election. And that if there were serious allegations he or people in his campaign did, people would care and it would be taken seriously, and that the investigation would not be slow-rolled for partisan purposes. It sounds absurd, but this is the question being opened up, when factionalism causes American politicians to side with autocracies other the opposite party.
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