The novelist William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Keep that in mind as you read the latest revelation about Russia’s MAGA-abetted attack on America’s 2016 presidential election. Indeed, as the tinpot despot in exile declared Monday night, April 19, on Sean Hannity’s show, “I liked Putin. And he liked me.”
OK, we knew that. But what we didn’t know, until a US Treasury Department report spelled it out April 15, is that Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort shared “sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” with a “known Russian intelligence services agent” who, in turn, shared the Trump data with Russian Intelligence Services (the GRU, SVR, and FSB) … which, oh so coincidentally, proceeded to pump pro-Trump disinformation into the very same swing states, including Pennsylvania, that Manafort listed in his “sensitive information.”
Don’t yawn, no matter how tempting it is to close the book on the recent past and focus on President Biden’s efforts to protect our fragile democracy. But the latest development connects the dots – proving collusion – beyond anything in the Mueller Report. And this isn’t just a 2016 thing. The Treasury report announced it was slapping sanctions on “16 individuals who attempted to influence the 2020 US presidential election at the direction of the leadership of the Russian Government.” One of those individuals is Konstantin Kliminik, the Russian spy who acted as Manafort’s liaison with Russian intelligence.
How fortunate it was that Putin’s attempt to rig the 2020 election for his White House stooge was foiled by the power of 81 million voters. We’re going to need that power in every election henceforth if democracy is going to survive the Republicans’ relentless and escalating mission to craft home-grown authoritarianism. They’re not as murderously thuggish as Putin, of course – they can’t simply throw critics out the window or lock up the opposition, à la Alexei Navalny – but they are similarly invested, via their nationwide vote-suppression strategy (at last count, 361 bills in 47 states), in making it far more difficult for the opposition to hold power.
Let’s also remember that a bipartisan Senate report, released last year, described Paul Manafort as a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (He was jailed in 2019, and predictably pardoned by Trump in 2020.) Most importantly, what Manafort did for Trump in 2016, and what Republicans are doing now in every corner of the nation, are inextricably connected on the same plot arc. To even suggest anymore that we have a “two-party system” is an exercise in false equivalence – because, as things now stand, one party is trying to ensure that everyone has the right to vote in free and fair elections, while the other “party” is in truth a budding authoritarian cult.
It’s actually worse than that. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently pointed out, “Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans – and so Republicans are working against democracy.”
Bear that in mind the next time a seemingly minor MAGA-Kremlin connection comes to light. If we hew to the delusion that the past is merely past, we may well lose the future.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2021
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