Vanity Fair: Why Angry White America Fell For Putin

Vanity Fair isn’t doing much soul-searching here:

“The most important condition that the Russians almost certainly did not anticipate was that it would be the Republicans—not the Democrats—who offered the best opportunity for subversion. For nearly a century, the Russians have been trying to weasel their way into the American political scene, but their point of entry has always been on the left—the American Communist Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, even the Democratic Party. …

But during some point in the past quarter-century, the fault lines in America have shifted. Those most susceptible to external programming are no longer Lionel Trilling’s Arthur and Nancy Croom—fashionable, urbane, progressive, well spoken, well traveled—but angry, displaced former assembly-line workers in Youngstown and Macomb County who believe their America has been stolen from them by cosmopolitans in New York, D.C., and Silicon Valley. …

In the future, one hopes, we’ll look back on the Age of Trump and wonder how so many Americans could have been so blinded by their politics or racialism that they were willing to look the other way when another country—the same country right-wingers once loved to hate—intervened in our democratic process. We’ll shake our heads and wonder aloud at the mindlessness, the treachery, and we’ll applaud ourselves for being better now, for knowing that this is not how a truly democratic people acts. …”

This is really pretty simple:

1.) First, the Cold War ended in 1991 and with it the Soviet Union’s crusade to spread communism around the world. For generations, the Russians had been associated with subversive anti-racism and internationalism and for that reason never had any entry point on the Right, but right-leaning Millennials don’t remember the Cold War.

2.) Second, Western liberalism has grown increasingly cancerous and has become openly hostile toward White America. The same is true in Western Europe. White people are now the villains of American history on the Left. They’re indicted as a racial group by progressives on the grounds of racism, sexism, classism, nativism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia and, of course, white privilege.

What happens when you decouple Western liberalism from the European founding stock of the United States and other Western nations? The result is that the demonized and beleaguered White majority starts to turn toward illiberalism.

Who is really to blame for this? It’s not Vladimir Putin’s fault that the Left is constantly boasting about The End of White Christian America. When liberal democracy comes mean the dispossession of your racial and cultural group by a hostile elite, you shouldn’t be surprised when those people cease to care about liberal democracy.

Note: Has it ever occurred to the Left that trying to get their political opponents fired from their jobs only further radicalizes them and gives them more time to engage in revolutionary political activity?