We have states actively purging voters from voting rolls, yet paranoid and frequently incomprehensible nonsense about our elections having been infiltrated by wily ex-Soviets dominates our conversations.
Democracy in the United States is dysfunctional in many ways. Dubious accounts of foreign interference, mostly put forward by the kind of person who uses "cyber" as a noun, rank low on any reasonable list of those concerns. Nothing has come to light so far that materially affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election or that even approaches a level of malfeasance that would justify hysterical cries of "treason."
This is what comes of watching too much television.
Sorry for the PowerPoint-esque bullet points, but I had a lot of thoughts about your post, a few critical, some less so, but I wanted to probe you on some things and add to other points of yours that I 100% agree with.
a) Dubious accounts? Which ones? How are they so dubious?
b) Why does foreign electoral and political interference (however extensive or negligible) from countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and their lobbyists and operatives (many of whom are in fact elite, well-connected and well-compensated
Americans - and I'm not just talking about the Trump campaign, by any means), etc. rank low on "any reasonable list" of election-integrity (and "democracy-integrity", I guess) concerns within the US?
c) If anything, the above, as manifested in the Trump 2016 campaign and his election,
should be properly understood as but one real-life example of just how easy it is (to oversimplify) for an "open" system of legalized/quasi-legal corruption and elite malfeasance (the US political system) to be exploited by any number of transparently illiberal, undemocratic foreign powers (not just Putin and Russian oligarchs and spooks and paid trolls or whatever), but also including, say, Saudi Arabia (have they ever been held accountable for 9/11 btw?
), the United Arab Emirates, hell even Israel (the Netanyahu-Kushner axis with the Crown Princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi is a critical yet curiously underreported or not-as-much talked about part of the "Collusion" story re: Trump compared to Russia...I guess they have better lobbyists and more access to the Beltway-sanctioned Bubble.
Oh, while we're at it, how about the wealthy "MEK" (an actual State Department-listed terrorist group) that consists of Iranian exiles, who have Congresspeople from both parties on their payroll? Might the US government's dangerously
insane policy toward Iran not be so insane if they treated such people (or agents of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and yes, Israel) and their friends in power within the US like they (rightly) treat agents of Russia or China?
d) To wrap this admittedly meandering post up, I agree with you that the "Russia Freakout" is a distraction as it stands, if only because it's almost completely treated in isolation, rather than as
an all-too-easy-to-"call out" example of a much, much larger phenomenon of corruption, mendacity, and - dare I say it - collusion with agents and oligarchs connected to all manner of oligarchs and criminals both foreign and domestic (how's THAT for "globalism?"). And that much larger conversation is something that scarcely anyone close to any elite, "mainstream" center of power in the US - private or public, government or media - wants to touch with a 10,000 foot-pole.
