June 25, 2017
On Friday, The Washington Post published a mammoth story detailing how and when the Obama Administration learned that Vladimir Putin had directed a cyber-attack of our election systems with the explicit goal of hurting Hilary Clinton and helping to elect Trump. The article, exhaustively reported by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous, citing three dozen sources, fills in the details of a story whose broad outlines we already knew. In August 2016, the CIA became aware that on orders from Putin, Russia had embarked on a campaign to wreak havoc on our presidential race. Hackers breached the servers of the DNC, state election officials and a key vendor of voting software, while others seeded social networks with fake news stories that were damaging to Clinton.
The Washington Post story describes the agonizing deliberations that took place at the highest levels of the Obama administration on how best to respond and how much to reveal to the American public on the eve of an election. We learned that the seemingly tepid response of the Obama administration was driven by the antagonistic reaction of Republican officials to the intelligence. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell threatened to treat any public disclosure as a partisan effort to swing the election in Hilary’s favor. At the state level, Republican election officials rejected Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s offer of resources to secure their voting systems as an unwarranted federal incursion on state sovereignty. The reaction was the apotheosis of the Republican determination to maintain power at any cost, even if the cost was American self-determination and sovereignty.
These hacks revealed profound weaknesses in our system. The Democratic Party was beset by internecine fighting over the false choice between identity and class. We didn’t convincingly articulate what we were running for, just what we were running against. We didn’t sketch a vision of a country that offered a path to prosperity for everyone. The media was all too happy to focus on the gossipy details revealed in the DNC e-mails, substituting soap opera level drama for a sober analysis of the policies, character and conflicts of interests of the candidates.
If we are being honest, we know that Putin did not create this existential threat to our democracy. He merely exposed and exploited one that was already there. Trump never should have even been close enough to win. The awful truth is that, for a significant minority of Americans, racism and sexism blinded them to his manifest unfitness for office. These people didn’t care (and still don’t) if Trump enriches himself while in office, as long as he promises to let them reap the unearned benefits that white supremacy offers, whether that is a monopoly on economic opportunity or merely the ability to murder people of color and escape punishment.
The path to vanquishing that threat does not lie in abandoning progressive values in order to appeal to the mythical white working class Trump voter. It requires recruiting candidates from overlooked constituencies, like Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, or Stacey Abrams in Georgia, with the potential to appeal to a wide spectrum of voters. It requires fighting voter suppression tooth and nail to make sure that every one of our citizens can vote. It requires recognizing that we may be fighting political opponents unafraid of taking the unprecedented and unpatriotic step of aligning with a hostile foreign power to subjugate American citizens. Sadly this isn’t a Tom Clancy novel, it is our life.