Never never land

Today, Sean Hannity is tweeting:

Question of the Day: Who do you believe? Julian Assange or President Obama and Hillary Clinton

Sarah Palin has apologized to Assange, the Wikileaks guru, for criticizing him in the past and is recommending Oliver Stone’s film about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked some of its most tightly held secrets. President-elect Trump has in the meanwhile quietly cancelled providing the information he said he had on the hacking of the Democrats during the election campaign.

We have somehow entered never never land, where some Republicans (conservatives?) are unwilling to accept the considered judgments of the intelligence community that the Russians were not only responsible for the hacking but also did it to favor Trump’s election. Opposition to President Obama and Hillary Clinton has driven people who used to wear American flag lapel pins into the arms of an autocratic president of Russia and his collaborators in unveiling and publishing private emails and government secrets.

We used to call people like this “traitors” when they were on the left. You don’t have to think Russia has somehow re-inflated itself to the Soviet Union to realize that Putin, Assange, and Snowden are out to weaken the United States and help Moscow regain its great power status. Of course Snowden and Assange have no choice: the former has taken refuge in Russia and the latter in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Both will be prosecuted if the US government ever gets their hands on them. The one virtue of the burst of Republican enthusiasm for Snowden is that it will end any idle chatter about a pardon for him from President Obama. I wonder about Trump though.

Hannity, Palin, and Trump are not under constraints that force them to favor Moscow. They are choosing to align themselves with Putin and his enmity to the US. A significant portion of the Republican electorate has also turned in that direction. Why? My own suspicion is that the ethnic nationalists–white supremacists in the language of my youth–recognize in Putin (as well as Netanyahu, by the way) a Russian analogue: someone who believes profoundly in the superiority and rights of his ethnic group and gender, to the exclusion of others. In other words, it is racism and misogyny that have brought us to never never land.

Many Republicans in Congress are not following Trump in his Russophile direction. Publication within the next couple of weeks of the Obama Administration’s findings on the email hacking will be a moment of truth: will Senate Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham follow through on their many sound bites and take up the cudgels against Trump’s unrealistic attitude toward Moscow during Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State, or will they let things slide, allowing the new administration to end the sanctions on Russia and recognize the annexation of Crimea?

If the latter, there are real risks that partition efforts elsewhere will be encouraged. Re-establishing Ukrainian sovereignty over Donbas would become even more difficult. Russia might well annex Transnistria (in Moldova) as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia (in Georgia). In the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and possibly even Serbia would find their efforts to establish Europe-eligible multi-ethnic democracies undermined. Instability and possibly worse would ensue. The sooner we get out of never never land, the better.