Living Through Another Democratic Party Conspiracy Theory

Every year around August I am reminded of the differences between journalism and the social sciences, which I teach. I always begin my introductory Sociology class by having my students watch Louis Theroux’s BBC 2 documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church, The Most Hated Family in America. After students have watched it I point out to them how Louis’s portrayal of the Westboro Baptist Church is sensationalistic and the questions he asks are meant to portray the Church as weird and abnormal. Sociologists, on the other hand, try to hold their values at arms length by exploring groups like the Westboro Baptist Church through the causal frames of economics, politics, culture, geography, and demography.

I was reminded in August of 2017 of the difference between journalism and the social sciences while listening to journalist and former public servant Bill Moyers and Steven Harper, an adjunct in the Northwestern University Pritzger School of Law, talk about their timeline of Russian interference in the US election on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC. What stood out to me while watching this news report was that in academia it is generally (or should be) de rigueur to explore contrary evidence and different interpretations while in journalism journalists tend to ignore contrary evidence and interpretations in their reporting.

A number of red flags were raised for me as I made my way through Moyers’ and Harper’s timeline of Russian interference in the American election. First, I remembered that Moyers has long had Democrat sympathies and that while Moyers, like Robert Reich, another Democrat civil servant, has been critical of neoliberal Democrats he is still a Democrat and Democrats have recently been obsessed with Russia’s supposed role in the 2016 US presidential election. I learned that Lawrence O"Donnell, the host of the programme that Moyers and Harper appeared on to talk about their timeline, says he is a European style socialist but he has, during his career, been more sympathetic toward Democrats than Republicans. I learned when I made my way through Harper's timeline on Moyers's blog that there wasn’t any reference to or empirical criticism of those experts who have raised questions about the supposed hard evidence of Russian manipulation of the US election in 2016. Harper's timeline, then, which seems to assume, mistakenly, that quantity is quality, is hardly dispassionate and balanced as a consequence.

There were other things Iearned during my adventures in HarperLand. I learned once again that, politically and culturally speaking, scapegoating is a common practise among human beings and has been so almost as long as their have been human beings. Democratic scapegoating of those evil Russkies, is akin to the scapegoating of anarchists, socialists, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons in America’s historical past. I learned that apparently Democrats are unable to accept that they got beat in the presidential election of 2016 by a near fascist moron of the lowest order. I learned that American Democrats cannot and do not take note of America’s interference in foreign elections. Ironically, it was Democrats who interfered, in the Russian election between Boris Yeltsen and Yevgeny Zhuganov in 1996. I learned, given the reaction of the military-industrial complex and the deep state to the election of Trump, who was favourably disposed to America’s long time evil other Russia, that America’s military-industrial complex and its deep state might be uncomfortable with candidate Trump’s unconventional foreign policies and might be using disinformation to undermine Trump’s foreign policy reset.