Like a lot of other people, I've been trying to keep abreast of all the news about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. The more you learn, the uglier it gets: the recklessness of the Russians embarking on a course of action that one could argue is tantamount to an attack on our country; the inept FBI response in alerting victims of the hacking; the collective shrug the Republican Party is giving at the news that a foreign power intervened to help their candidate win; questions over whether President Obama acted properly in responding to these Russian attempts, and in alerting the public to them. As with the election as a whole, a dizzying darkness seems to lie over what has transpired, in part because everything seems to be so interconnected and yet so irresolvable; greater knowledge leads not to empowerment, but to a growing sense of helplessness.
One example, the biggie: did Russian intervention tip the election in Donald Trump's favor? From one perspective, it's impossible to know, only to speculate - how could we ever get hard numbers to determine this? We do know that Donald Trump won the electoral college through a very narrow popular vote win in a handful of states, and it's within the realm of possibility that his margin of victory was secured by those voters who chose Trump over Clinton because of the hacked emails. But then what of the effect of James Comey's announcement in late October that new emails had been discovered, or his "clearing" of her just days before the election? There's also evidence that this casting of aspersions on Clinton swayed some voters against her in the election's final days. And what about reports we are seeing about how very badly the Clinton campaign was conducted in upper Midwest states like Michigan - didn't the campaign's leaders make errors that badly hurt Clinton's prospects? And how did Trump become the Republican nominee, anyway - wasn't it in part because of a massive failure of the media to concentrate on the right questions, and because Trump was provided with literally millions of dollars of free advertising through their coverage of him? And let's not forget the whole thing about him losing the popular vote by 3 million votes and just squeaking into an electoral college victory? And of course, another layer of the dizziness is that we knew about the hacking months ago, so that something that was at first only strange and vaguely threatening has gradually grown more nightmarish.
So the Russian factor is dizzying because we're not totally sure if it mattered, even though we can very easily surmise how it could have; and beyond this, there's the basic fact there have already been so many outside-the-box moments in this campaign - how could there be even more at this point? The mind boggles. It's not too much to say that for many of us, our sense of what is normal has been completely upended.
And here's one more aspect of the dizziness that grows out of the the new normal - oh, heck, let's just call it the new reality: this new reality is one that distinctly reveals our own powerlessness every step of the way. Whether it's something simple, like not understanding how our fellow Americans would even consider voting for Donald Trump, to the idea that our election might plausibly be tilted by Russian machinations. At the center of this disorientation is of course Donald Trump himself, a candidate who broke so many norms and basic decencies of American politics and society. And now it's obvious that this breaking of norms is fully embraced by the Republican Party as a whole, as numerous Republican politicians treat Russian meddling in the election as a partisan issue in which the only relevant fact is that it screwed their political opponents - advantage GOP!
And now that Trump's president-elect, the disorientation simply continues, as he fills his cabinet with a rogue's gallery of billionaires, incompetents, and warmongers, and accuses the Democratic Party of massive fraud when he tweets about the millions of illegal voters who cost him the popular vote.
There's much, much more to be said on the subjects of disorientation and this new reality, but for now I offer a couple of observations. First, I think things seem particularly crapulent right now because the Trump presidency exists in a state of pure potential: in a lot of ways, we have a sense that we can't stop him because a) he just won the election despite many people's work towards a different outcome and b) he is not actually president yet and there really are no traditional political levers to oppose him until he is - we are in an unpleasant, threatening limbo state.
Second, learning that the Russians were specifically backing Trump's campaign, and that Donald Trump seems to have no problem with this, doesn't change the fundamental perilous crossroads our country has arrived at. His authoritarian attitudes and undemocratic notions have been on broad display for a very long time at this point; certainly after all his fawning praise of Vladimir Putin, it isn't surprising that he'd welcome that autocrat's interference in the presidential election. There is more than enough evidence to conclude that we're in an unprecedented political situation, in which the Republicans are relying on increasingly undemocratic means to seize and hold power in our country, with the added bonus of a president uniquely unqualified to hold that office. In a very real sense, the Russians could not have had the influence they did if our media and the Republican Party had not been so broken and venal, respectively; instead, both these institutions worked to amplify the meddling. The central question before us remains the same: what do we make of the fact that the ruling party in America is resorting to increasingly authoritarians means, and what do we do to oppose and ultimately defeat it?