Paul Krugman: Useful Idiots Galore

"There were a lot of useful idiots this year, and they made the election hack a success":

Useful Idiots Galore, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a “useful idiot” serving Russian interests. That may not be exactly right. After all, useful idiots are supposed to be unaware of how they’re being used, but Mr. Trump probably knows very well how much he owes to Vladimir Putin. ...

But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story..., bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media. ...

The pro-Putin tilt of Mr. Trump and his advisers was obvious months before the election... By midsummer the close relationship between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence was also obvious, as was the site’s growing alignment with white nationalists.

Did Republican politicians, so big on flag waving and impugning their rivals’ patriotism, reject this foreign aid to their cause? No...

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It has long been obvious ... that the modern G.O.P. is a radical institution that is ready to violate democratic norms in the pursuit of power. ...

The bigger surprise was the behavior of the news media, and I don’t mean fake news; I mean big, prestigious organizations. Leaked emails ... were breathlessly reported as shocking revelations, even when they mostly revealed nothing more than the fact that Democrats are people.

Meanwhile, the news media dutifully played up the Clinton server story, which never involved any evidence of wrongdoing...

And then there was the Comey letter. The F.B.I. literally found nothing at all. But the letter dominated front pages and TV coverage, and that coverage — by news organizations that surely knew that they were being used as political weapons — was almost certainly decisive on Election Day.

So as I said, there were a lot of useful idiots this year, and they made the election hack a success.

Now what? If we’re going to have any hope of redemption, people will have to stop letting themselves be used... And the first step is to admit the awful reality of what just happened. ...

And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements. It might be more comfortable to pretend that things are O.K., that American democracy isn’t on the edge. But that would be taking useful idiocy to the next level.