When it comes to possible collusion with Russia, Donald Trump’s most interesting defenders don’t reside on the political right. They reside on the political left. [...]
For left-wing defenders like Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald, by contrast, ideology is king. Blumenthal and Greenwald loathe Trump. But they loathe hawkish foreign policy more. So they minimize Russia’s election meddling to oppose what they see as a new Cold War. [...]
Blumenthal is right that Democrats don’t have “a big economic message.” But that’s not primarily because of the Russia scandal. Parties that are out of power rarely have a clear agenda. It’s hard to develop a clear message when you don’t have a clear leader. Narratives emerge during presidential campaigns. And the early evidence is that the progressive themes Bernie Sanders pushed last year—single-payer health care, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage—will carry more weight inside the Democratic Party in 2020 than they did in 2016. [...]
But the problem with downplaying Russian election meddling because you’re afraid it will fuel militarism is that it evades the central question: How worrisome is the meddling itself? When it comes to Russian’s interference in the 2016 election, progressives like Blumenthal are behaving the way many conservatives behave on climate change. Conservatives fear that progressives will use climate change to impose new regulations on the economy. And because they oppose the solution, they claim there’s no problem. [...]
Blumenthal and Greenwald have an ideological problem. On foreign policy, they are anti-interventionists, or what Walter Russell Mead calls “Jeffersonians.” They believe that America’s empire threatens not only peace and justice abroad, but liberty at home. They want the United States to stop defending its “imperial” borders in Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East, because they believe such efforts cost Americans money, cost American lives, and create a pretext for surveillance that makes Americans less free.
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