December 20, 2016
The incredible group-think
that has seen the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, President Obama, the Clinton campaign
and most of the corporate media braying that Vladimir Putin scandalously
upended American democracy and threw the election to his favored candidate Donald
Trump is based on a ludicrous premise. That premise: that the election went
Trump’s way because several tens of thousands of voters in a few states —
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — switched away from Clinton to Trump
because of an alleged (and factually unproven) Russian “hack” of Democratic
National Committee and of Hillary campaign chair John Podesta’s emails.
According to this conspiracy
theory — and that is what it is — the “Russian” hack, with the results
allegedly passed on to Wikileaks, and the resulting release of emails that
showed that the DNC had conspired to throw the primary election to Clinton, and
that revealed the contents of Clinton’s secret sycophantic
quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street banks, explain those narrow Trump
wins in three key swing states.
What is ludicrous about this
alleged conspiracy is that Sanders supporters already knew the DNC
was in bed with the Clinton campaign. They’d already learned that first hand
from Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who quit in disgust back in
late February, saying that the DNC was undermining Sanders and working for
Clinton. As for the bank speeches, Clinton did all the damage herself by
refusing to disclose what she’d said in those extravagantly paid gigs, and by
getting caught in a lie that she couldn’t release the texts because they were
“under the control” of the banks (she actually owned the copyrights). She also
hurt herself by lying and saying during one debate that she hadn’t asked for
the high fees when in fact her agent had demanded them. This infuriating
information was all out there way before Wikileaks started releasing the
documents in had in its possession.
The truth is that it was
Clinton’s own actions that lost her the support of Sanders voters. Her
repeating lying about Sanders during the campaign, and her gratuitous dissing
of Sanders and his supporters even after it was becoming clearer that she would
win the primary because of the corrupt support she had lined up from the
party’s unelected so-called “super delegates,” and her decision in the fall,
after winning the nomination, to ignore the 13 million Sanders voters from the
primary and instead to pursue the support of what she hoped were disenchanted
Republican voters upset that Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination,
all doomed her in the general election.
The anger among Sanders
backers by the time of the convention at the end of July was palpable and
was demonstrated when over 700 Sanders delegates walked out of the convention
en masse, many tossing their convention credentials over the tall security
fence. Clearly they were not going to back Hillary Clinton in November. And
those delegates represented millions of voters back in their home states. (See:
Jeffrey St. Clair’s Bernie
and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution.)
Hillary Clinton didn’t lose
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and most importantly Florida because a small
percentage of voters switched from her to Trump in those states. She lost those
states because millions of Sanders voters nationally, and hundreds of thousands
of Democrats and independent progressives in those key states decided not to
vote for her because they were disgusted by both her and the Democratic Party.
In other words, even if the
Russians did hack the DNC and Podesta emails, and even if the leaked emails
(all of which by the way were true and accurate, not fake or doctored!), did
manage at the last minute to persuade a few thousand Clinton voters to switch
their votes to Trump, or to simply not vote for Clinton, that only had an
impact because so many hundreds of thousands of more progressive voters had
already written her off as a voting option. The races in those states never
should have been that close in the first place, and wouldn’t have been had the
Clinton campaign not played so dirty in the primary, and then been so
patronizing and vengeful towards the Sanders campaign and Sanders voters after
gaining the nomination.
Leaving aside the reality that
there is no evidence that Russian government hackers did obtain those emails
and handed them over to Wikileaks to release during the last weeks of the
campaign (the evidence
is really that they were obtained by insider leaks, not by Russian hackers,
the truth is that mounting evidence of Clinton corruption and of cheating in
the primaries led millions of furious Sanders backers to decide they would
never vote for Clinton.
The “false news” about
Russians hacking US democracy, pushed by the Clinton campaign, sclerotic
Democratic Party leadership, elements within the intelligence establishment and
the Obama administration and parroted endlessly by the corporate media and by
normally sentient liberals usually quick to condemn “conspiracy thinking,”
doesn’t bode well for any real effort to wrench the Democratic Party away from
its thoroughly discredited corporatist political stance, and raises the
prospect of further Republican gains in the coming off-year Congressional
elections in 2018.
It’s becoming increasingly
clear that the only way forward is going to have to be an abandonment of the
Democratic Party by progressives and its replacement by a genuine progressive
socialist party that is clearly of and for working people, and for those who
cannot find work in this increasingly dystopic America.
Dave Lindorff is a
founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!,
an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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