“Russiagate” rides again?

4 12 2024

With Trump’s re-election and his cabinet nominations of right-wing propagandists like Kash Patel, we are certain to be hearing a lot more (again) about “Russiagate” or the “Russia hoax,” how it was fabricated by the Democrats to attack Trump, and how the “mainstream media” colluded with them in it. That narrative has remained alive in the right-wing media ecosystem, as it suited Trump’s electoral ambitions and now suits his desire for vengeance against his critics. Its resonance in parts of the political left is perhaps more surprising, and it’s what I want to address here.

The following provides a synopsis of what’s at stake in this re-emergence of “Russiagate” and some resources to help us make sense of it. This is by no means a comprehensive account; it represents thinking-in-progress.

There are two important issues at stake in the anticipated re-emergence of “Russiagate” as a point of contention. The first concerns what it says about the US; the second, about the world.

Issue 1: What does it indicate about US politics and media?

Were Trump and/or people in his orbit in collusion with the Russian government, or with Russian state interests more broadly? Conversely, did the Democrats engineer a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” with mainstream media eagerly or “obediently” following along?

It’s not my goal here to answer these questions, but I think that the following things are more or less established: (1) that there were contacts between Trump’s people and people known to be associated with the Russian state, and a deeper history of co-operation involving go-betweens like Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, Oleg Deripaska, and others; (2) that Democrats promoted the more extreme versions of this “collusion” (and paid for the infamous “Steele dossier”) because it suited their interests; and (3) that media sometimes played up the more sensational of the claims (such as the Steele dossier), not always walking them back sufficiently when the claims were left unverified.

Regarding the second point: Democrats’ promotion of the more sensational claims should hardly surprise anyone, and is certainly nothing that sets them apart from Republicans. And regarding the third: media practices surrounding the Trump-Russia connections also did not depart dramatically from typical media practice, in which economically pressured media professionals over-rely on the prompts of governing parties (as Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model” pointed out long ago, and was again demonstrated in the run-up to the Iraq War) and/or on “spectacular” political actors, as has been the case through the Trump era (Trump being the most spectacular of them). In this case, this over-reliance happened to support the Democrats’ strategy of discrediting Trump. But the mass media’s overfocus on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in the immediate run-up to the 2016 presidential election showed that media actors, no matter how “liberal” they might seem to be, can be quite non-partisan in their gullibility. (See Benkler et al’s Network Propaganda on that, and on the much worse record, for many years now, of right-wing media as opposed to the center-left “mainstream.”)

On the first point, however, things are rather more unusual. Contacts between US political actors, with an interest in electing a specific candidate to the presidency, and Russian government representatives whose interest was in pursuing certain territorial and geopolitical ambitions, have arguably never been as close as the Russiagate evidence suggests them to have become with the Trump campaign (and since). It’s that that makes “Russiagate” something less than a “hoax” and more of a genuine phenomenon. Aside from that, it’s not clear to me that Russiagate says anything dramatically new about US politics or the US media landscape.

So let’s look at the bigger, global context.

Issue 2: What does it show about Russia and the emergent multipolar world dis/order?

This second set of stakes is, to my mind, more interesting. These concern Russian involvement in US and world affairs. This, too, has a much longer history. Both Cold War superpowers spied on each other, and the US has no less of a history of meddling in other countries, supporting military coups, and the like, than the USSR did. If anything, that history is still more alive today, since the USSR collapsed and the US, NATO, and “the West” has not. (Whether it’s in the process of collapsing is a different question.)

What is new today, however, and what I think analysts are still struggling to come to terms with, is the evolution of digital informational and “hybrid” warfare techniques, such as those used by Russia over the last decade, alongside what we may call the “cleaving” or “calving” of political elites (a.k.a. polarization) — and the accompanying cleaving of public sentiment — in the US and the West more broadly. I’m suggesting that these two processes, if considered together, will give us new insights.

There are other developments they need to be contextualized within as well: for instance, such as China’s enormous growth in political and economic power; the emergence of transnational economic formations like the BRICS+ alliance; the resurgence of a socially conservative “illiberalism” in the most socially liberal countries of the world; and the increasing pressure of climate related conflict, and ensuing migration, on national economies and political priorities. Considered together, all of these developments suggest something radically new is arising, which, for lack of an established term, I will call an emergent multipolar world dis/order.

Making sense of this dis/order requires understanding the way in which the emergence of neo-imperial states like Russia and China play into global “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes” (to use Arjun Appadurai’s terms), and how this in turn shapes the conditions for political realignments such as those we are seeing in countries around the world.

The western left has long been critical of the global political-economic status quo. As I’ve often pointed out on this blog, this has sometimes meant that it’s been overly sympathetic to, and easily influenced by, Russian and other perspectives. If the US is perceived to be an imperialist power, and in fact the only imperialist power, then other imperial forces are invisible and even unthinkable; this is a selective “anti-imperialism” that takes its bearings from a time that is rapidly passing.

The writing on “Russiagate” shows these influences clearly. For instance, among the voices on the US left that have consistently favored pro-Russian narratives, The Nation is (in)famous for its Russophilia, a legacy of publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel’s and her late husband Stephen Cohen’s long relationship with Russia (see Dancan Campbell’s investigative writing on this, noted below). Critiques of “Russiagate” can also be found among left-wing academics, including in the fields of media studies and political science, where scholars like Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Richard Sakwa, and Glenn Diesen churn out book after book in which they selectively emphasize the “facts” as uncovered by journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jeff Gerth, and Aaron Maté, and disregard the deconstructions of those “facts” by others like Duncan Campbell, David Corn, Marcy Wheeler, Andrew Prokop, and others (see below).

To help readers sift through some of these debates and enable a more lucid understanding of them, I’m offering the following reading list, which I believe provides sufficient context for the conclusion that Russian state media actors have successfully influenced US politics in ways that contribute to the “cleaving” that I mentioned, a cleaving that is affecting not just the political spectrum as a whole, where polarization is well established, but is also affecting the political left. In the process, those parts of the political left come into ever closer proximity with the emergent “illiberal” and authoritarian right.

The implications of this go well beyond the US-Russia relationship. They point to an increasing multipolarity and an increasing instability in global affairs. Within this context, digital technological strategies are employed in non-transparent ways by actors whose motivations are unclear and whose allegiances are unknown. This is no longer the “unipolar” world order to which the US-led West seemed to be leading us after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The potentials for a convergence between state and corporate interests around a kind of neoliberal “surveillance capitalism” — the kind of thing that analysts like Hardt and Negri presciently, but rather prematurely, called “Empire” — are countered here by the possibilities for multiple surveillances and multiple (rival) capitalisms. Each of them pursues its own interests through informational strategies that make use of surveillance-security technologies which, in turn, shape lives on the ground — in war zones, at borders, in databases used to provide or deny lines or credit, renew or refuse to renew work contracts, and so on, as much as they target media users with tailored information and the echo chambers that enable that information to spread and linger.

Resisting these formations requires not simply taking sides with one power as against another — with the US versus Russia or vice versa, with TikTok or against it, etc. It requires taking sides with the movement for media democratization, open-sourcing, and public accountability. That’s a movement that ought to transcend nation-states and regional powers. Aligning with it, however, means being ready to focus one’s critical gaze not only on one’s own national elite or favored “empire” (as Chomsky, Hedges, Sachs, Benjamin, et al do all too eagerly), but others as well.

Some resources on the “Russiagate” debate and its imprint on left-liberal media (these are listed in chronological order)

General resources on Russian state media and its international influence

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