'Russiagate' -- a view from the Left

Stephen Cohen is a retired professor of Russian and Soviet history -- he wrote the standard biography of Bukharin -- and is married to the editor of The Nation, the main magazine of the liberal-left.

I thought these comments from him were very interesting:

The full article is here.

I haven't followed the 'Russiagate' investigations closely, but I have noticed the extraordinary inversion of American attitudes to the secret police and intelligence agencies: once, it was the Left who criticized them and tried to restrain them, and the Right who championed them. Now things have been stood on their head.

 

It's just like the global warming/climate change bullshit. Every tree that falls or doesn't fall in the forest proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any day now Adam Schitt will actually answer the question he's been been claiming he knows the answers to for two years but won't say.

 

I think it is odd that anyone should try and attribute this White House spin (and that is what it is), to “the Left” when the author of this piece has been peddling this Trumpster line for quite some time.

 

Odd, or perfectly normal?

On most issues, there is no significant differences between Left & Right. The whole thing is rather a charade. No matter the vote, no matter which party "wins", the status quo is maintained--perpetual war. Most people have not figured that out yet.

 

Government departments are supposed to be politically neutral. The State Dept has always leaned left, but we’re used to that and the damage hasn’t been catastrophic.

But beginning with Obama, departments like the IRS began to actively work for the left and attack conservatives and conservative organizations. The Deep State (the entrenched liberal bureaucracy) has waged a war against the right. Hence the scorn coming from the right.

 

This is a non sequitur. Your argument: the author cannot be of the Left, because he has been arguing this case for quite some time.

This does not follow. You can be of either the Left, or of the Right, and argue your case for a long time, or for a short time. There is no connection between your general political view, and how long you have been making some particular argument.

In any case, here's the first paragraph of the Wiki piece on him:

[ SOURCE ]

Please note: I titled this thread "A view from the Left" not "THE view from the Left". Like the Right, the Left has a diversity of views, including some which are very much in favor of a continuing Cold War posture against what they construe as the "Russian threat". However, in general this attitude is a pretty complete reversal of the way things were during the real Cold War. It's either a continuation of the 'corporate liberal' view -- Hilary Clinton is an example -- or is driven by the belief that Trump has some Russian connection so this is a way to disconcert him.

I posted this because, given the tribal nature of American politics, and the complexity of the world right now, I believe that there is often a general tendency on both sides to simply support the average 'public' position of your side. So people on the Left -- I don't mean way out on the far Left, just liberals/progressives in general -- may have a tendency to simply go along with the 'the-evil-Russians-are-coming' line, because it supposedly makes Trump uncomfortable, or in any case allows the playing of the patriot card, generally not available to the Left, against him. So I wanted people on the Left to see another view.

On the Right, I think there is confusion. The natural posture of the Right is a pro-military, nationally-assertive one. Plus there are probably a few who tend to confuse 'Russian' and 'Communist', because that's what they grew up with. (When I was a teenager, there was a proposal to teach Russian in some of the Houston high schools. Our prominent conservative member of the school board opposed it, on vaguely patriotic and anti-Russian grounds. She couldn't seem to grasp that the idea was that we needed more people who could read the Russians' scientific journals.)

(There has been a tendency on the sinister far Right, to embrace the Russians because the Russian government is restoring religion, cracking down on homosexuals, etc. These people may be dismissed the same way that that section of the Left who were actually just vicarious Russian patriots were dismissed. )

There doesn't seem to be any consistency in Mr Trump's foreign policy, but at some point in the future, it will be reasonable to talk about what foreign policy the American government should have towards Russia. It would be a shame if people on the Left and the Right just had positions which were inherited from a time of totally different circumstances, or a left-over from anti-Trump feeling.

 

This is overstated, but not entirely wrong. There is such a thing as inertia in attitudes, bolstered by the powerful engine of American Keynsianism, military spending.

But there is also debate about what the foreign policy of the US should be. Is it in our interests to try to bring liberal democracy to the Muslim world via military interventions, overt and covert? Or maybe we have learned something over the last 15 years? Did we handle post-Communist Russia correctly? Could a different attitude have lead to a different political leadership there, one which was not so overtly anti-American?

We must not be defeatist and just assume that nothing can change. Such an attitude contributes to nothing changing.

 

I think the term entrenched liberal bureaucracy is a much more descriptive term than deep state and is the reason we need to drastically down scale the federal government. Liquidate Washington DC.
We know that the "deep state" is liberal.
93% of DC voted for Clinton.

 

People having this view need to make a concrete proposal: exactly what part of the federal government needs to be liquidated?
Probably the Cato Institute or a similar think tank has made some concrete proposals somewhere.

In the meantime, a joke:
A man working in the Department of Agriculture was walking down a corridor, and heard deep sobbing coming from an office. He opened the door, and there was someone sitting behind a desk, crying. "What's wrong?" he asked. The weeping person behind the desk replied, "I just found out that my farmer died."

 

Perhaps, but there are powerful forces fighting to maintain the status quo, and for the most part they are winning.

 

You have to be strategic, as well as tactical.

Look at the long term. Look at the slow, atomic-level changes that are happening below the surface.

From 1945 to 1990, it was inevitable that the US would be a Cold War state -- the very existence of the Soviet Union as a great victor power in WWII, and the fact that the Colonial Revolution was congenial to the USSR, but not to the US, meant that the two would face off against each other. There was little disagreement between mainstream American liberals and mainstream American conservatives on the importance of the US 'containing' Soviet expansionism (as they saw it) everywhere in the world. For years after the end of the Second World War, the US was the only democracy which could match the USSR in strength.
I don't want to argue about American policy then -- there are plenty of things to criticize, even criticize harshly but past is past.

But ... that period is over. The US hoped, as the world's only superpower, to lead all the other countries into a liberal New World Order: free trade everywhere, and the natural spread of liberal democracy, perhaps helped along occasionally by the 82nd Airborne or equivalent.

That didn't happen. I think we monumentally botched up Russia, and our screw up there led to what we see in Russia today. We didn't properly appreciate the rise of China. We didn't understand the growth of Islamism in the Muslim world. Hindsight is always 20/20.

But the key fact is, it is now not in the American interest to try to play the role of Sole World Superpower, with all that implies. The American people, in their majority, instinctively know this. But we still have a Cold War academic/foreign policy establishment who cannot make a leap from the things they have believed for seventy years, plus the Military-Industrial Complex -- the latter has short-term interests of its own. (I am so glad we have a military-industrial complex and wish them all success in developing ever-more-powerful weapons, until the time when we don't need them, which has not come yet.) But we need a new political direction in foreign policy. The fact that opposition to our current foreign policy is voiced most shrilly by America-haters is an enormous handicap, but there we are.

At one point, it looked, grotesquely, like Donald Trump would take us in that direction. He hasn't, so we await someone else, someone with the vision of Richard Nixon who turned American China policy upside down. This means nurturing and supporting potential leaders in both major parties who have the vision to make the American battleship alter course. It also means, at a more basic level, taking part in public discussions, such as this one, where intelligent people from both sides are willing to argue. And arguing that nothing can be done, everything is controlled by shadowy figures behind the scenes, is to help insure that the status quo continues.

 

That is a good post, but American gunship diplomacy is not diplomacy at all. Indeed, the US version of it amounts to threats and military aggression.

Do you suppose the Russian perspective today is influenced by the results of Project Hammer and our installing Yeltsin there? So too, our lies regarding eastward expansion of NATO.

We have been consistently dishonest in our relations with that country, and that generates animosity. The same in South America and elsewhere, even as we are 7 months in to an attempted overthrow of the legitimate government of Maduro.

As Pompeo gleefully claimed a few months back, we lie, we cheat, we steal. He is proud of it, I'm embarrassed by it. The chickens will soon come home to roost.

 

Yes, we are probably in agreement re. Russia.

But I don't take a moralistic, punish-the-bad-guys view of America. "If every man were used according to his deserts, who should 'scape whipping?"
Not Russia in Eastern Europe, not the Chinese in Tibet, and let's not even think about the British and the French -- not any nation at all in pursuit of what its leadership thinks are its national interests.

As for guns and diplomacy. Here I agree with old Clausewitz, that war is the advancement of policy with other means.

Sometimes these means are the best ones, sometimes not.

Political power, as the man said, comes out of the barrel of a gun, but you need people holding that gun. So the best policy is one that cultivates and encourages the growth of the kind of people we can get along with -- rational people, hopefully tolerant and democratic as an added desideratum but not a required one.

 

No, we don't punish the bad guys here in the US, unless the bad guy is not a millionaire. Citizen bad guys are punished severely, as we have the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world, going back many years.

The bad guys who take the country to war under fraud, who plunder the US Treasury, are not punished. More often they received medals of commendation.

 

Much like the completely debunked attempt to get "Spygate" into the American minds last year, there is no such thing as "Russiagate", unless you want to apply it to the collusion between the Trump campaign and various Russian people and groups...

BTW, where is the IG's report on the origins of the investigation that was due in "late May"?? How about Huber??

Crickets....

 

Jeffrey Epstein will be very pleased to hear this.

 

He is already aware of it. He completed a pretty cush sentence in the Palm Beach County Jail, spending nights only.

 

You're absolutely right. I hope he's not counting on that happening again. (Actually, I do hope he's counting on it.)

Of course you are correct that the more money you have, the better things are for you, including in the legal system. Even if you're otherwise a horrible human being, at least you can hire good legal talent. That's a difficult advantage to do away with, unless we want to go to a random-selection system.

The horrible Leona Helmsley spent a year and half in prison, a consequence of her belief that "only little people pay taxes", despite being sentenced to sixteen years.

A Yale college kid caught with drugs, will be unlikely to see the inside of a jail. Not so if he's a Black kid in an urban ghetto.

However, it's wrong to equate liberal democracies, with all their flaws, to outright rule-by-the-wealthy systems. It encourages people to be apathetic, which is exactly what the people who wrongly benefit from the system want.

 

To which liberal democracy are you referring?

 

All of them.
From the really truly liberal democracies, all the way through to the less liberal democracies, and even including ones where the rule of law is strong although respect for political rights is not, like Singapore.

As a rough rule of thumb: where there are periodic elections in which any political party can stand, and where newspapers can print what they like without getting closed down, or their editors and journalists a bullet in the back.

(An interesting discussion could be had around the 'illiberal democracies', like Iran and Russia.)

It's important to realize that no system contrived by homo sapiens, the hairless tailless ape, is going to be perfect. Don't make the best the enemy of the good.

And it's even more important to realize that everything is always changing, usually below the visible surface. Few people positively enjoy living in a system which is not 'fair' as they see it -- 'fairness' apparently being one of the few human universals -- and the course of economic growth -- where the grandchildren of illiterate peasants become website designers -- is in the direction of empowering ordinary people. That's why the world is getting better.

 

Good! For a moment I thought you were describing the US as a liberal democracy.

 

Of course the US is a liberal democracy. Here I agree with Noam Chomsky, that in protecting that critical component of liberal democracy, free speech, the US has achieved very high standards. These are now under sustained attack from the Left.

 

This is not true.

Attempts to use Federal agencies as political weapons was one of the articles against Richard Nixon.

Disputes several GOP led investigations, and a blanket of right wing media noise, no evidence exists to suggest that Barack Obama, or senior people in the Administration were involved in actively working for the left, or attacking conservative organizations.

Indeed, since the effort was directed at a sudden flood of applicants for a very specific and very obscure tax status triggered the investigations. That particular obscure status allowed the applicants to hide where their money was coming from.

The architects of the Tea Party campaign (and it was a campaign, not a grass roots movement), knew that they wouldn’t succeed unless they convinced the angry white mobs that showed up at Sarah Palin rallies, that this was a “grass roots” movement./

So, it was necessary to hide the fact that the money to fund the instant Tea Party groups that sprouted within weeks, and get all the material printed, the instant websites set up, the mailing lists bought and sold (very important, that part), the rake offs put in place (see mailing lists). They didn’t want the dittoheads to know that the money came from K Street and Wall Street, and the pockets of secretive billionaires.

This was the direct result of Citizen’s United, which allowed operatives to use the tax code to hide behind, keep the real power behind a curtain, and peddle BS to the dittoheads.

And, because 501c4 tax status allowed the organization to operate as a “declared entity”, while its application is pending, no tea party group was prevented from doing business in any way.

But the lie is firmly fixed in the Trumpster and reactionary mind, thanks to the endless repetition by the noise machine.

No one in the Obama Adminstration was ever rebuked for violating the Hatch Act.

But Kelly Ann Conway has.

And George W Bush’s Attorney General (Alberto Gonzales) and his deputy Monica Golding were forced to resign over it.

 

I don’t recall anyone from the left calling for censorship of the press, or for revoking broadcast licenses because the President does not like the content.

 

Fortunately, Mr Trump cannot see his illiberal impulses acted into law, since even his own supporters don't take him seriously most of the time.

The attack on Free Speech is not so blatant as an outright call for press censorship, or for revoking broadcast licenses because the current President doesn't like them.

It takes this form: certain speech is designated 'Hate Speech'. This doesn't mean speech which is intended to incite immediate violence. It means speech which hurts the feelings, or might hurt the feelings, of some protected group. And, at the moment (it will come, but not yet) this speech is suppressed by physical attacks on the speaker, or by removal of books which don't meet the approval of the Left from Amazon, or closing down social media accounts, or by firing employees who do not have progressive views and who let that be known.

You always have to take into account the logic of a position -- if Charles Murray must not be allowed to speak on campus, then why should be allowed to speak at all? -- and the direction of motion.

For myself, I agree with Van Jones.