Heather Cox Richardson on Russia, disinformation, and American democracy

U.S.and foreign authoritarian rulers began to form alliances over money, influence, and designs to come to power.Since the 1980s, authoritarian governments realized that they could get financial help from the United States by claiming to be fighting against the communists. Political consultants Charles Black, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, who came together in 1980 to work on Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, recruited clients by pointing out connections to the Reagan and George Bush Sr. administrations.They represented so many authoritarian governments - in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, among others - that a 1992 report by the Center for Public Integrity called their firm the “Torture Lobby.” They combined the functions of lobbying, political consulting and PR. It was an innovative approach: they helped their clients get elected and then helped other clients lobby them.As oligarchs took over the former Soviet republics, the links between oligarchic methods and the American political system grew stronger. OligarchssearchedPlaces for parking illegally earned money in Western democracies, where the rule of law protected their investments, and they preferred Republicans who defended their hierarchical view of the world. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two concepts go hand in hand.

The destruction of the liberal consensus and the attack on the Democrats

Domestically, Republicans have embarked on a complete destruction of the liberal consensus. As anti-tax fighter Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “For 40 years, conservatives have fought a two-front war against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone, and conservatives can relocate. And this time, the other team has no nuclear weapons.”In the 1990s, a movement of conservatives who wanted to eliminate the liberal state that had existed since 1933 and rely instead on market forces turned their attention to those they saw as insufficiently committed to free enterprise. Their enemies were traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide basic social protections, develop infrastructure, and protect civil rights.Their first public victim was President George H. W. Bush, who came to power from the traditional wing of the Republican Party and in due course set about repairing the fabric of the country that the Reagan economy had torn apart.Bush was willing to raise taxes to deal with the $2.1 trillion debt accumulated during Reagan's eight years in office.

Those tax increases drew the ire of a movement of conservatives who called him and other traditional Republicans “Republicans in name only,” claiming they were helping to bring “socialism to thehouseformer Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. James Johnson, the Arkansas judge who stood against the 1957 integration of Little Rock Central High School, called Clinton “a homosexual, a knave, an adulterer, a child murderer, a draft dodger, a drug-tolerant, lying, duplicitous, country-altering activist.” Such a man could not be a legitimate president. In 1996, Fox News Channel debuted Clinton on cable television, joining right-wing radio hosts to espouse the idea that their political opponents were socialists trying to destroy the country.Clinton irritated right-wing ideologues not only with his domestic positions, but also because they felt he did not advocate strongly enough for American ideology abroad after the Cold War. In 1997, political commentator William Kristol and scholar Robert Kagan brought together Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neoconservatives to insist that the United States should significantly increase defense spending and lead the world.An important part of their organization, called the Project for a New American Century, was to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because they believed he was destabilizing the Middle East. Iraq had allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and when it invaded its smaller neighbor Kuwait in 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher persuaded Bush to assemble an international coalition of 39 countries to impose sanctions on Iraq and prevent it from being invaded by the United States.New Yorkand in the Pentagon beyondWashingtonand were on their way to strike the CapitolU.S.before passengers on the plane crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania.Neoconservatives saw this attack as an opportunity to “hit” Saddam, even though he was not involved. Fifteen of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon and one from Egypt; they were operating from Afghanistan, where the ruling extremist Islamic government, the Taliban, had allowed al Qaeda to have a base.President George W. Bush launched missile attacks against the Taliban government, successfully toppling it before the end of the year. The administration then set about rebuilding the Middle East into a model of American society. In 2002, it announced the Bush Doctrine, declaring that theWashingtonwould undertake preventive strikes against countries suspected of planning attacks against the United States. Then in 2003, after establishing a pro-government regime in Afghanistan, the administration invaded Iraq.However, the war in Iraq was not popular at home, and its unpopularity led the administration to link Republican support to defending the country from Islamic terrorists. This rhetorical strategy allowed them to consolidate the president's power over Congress, especially on the issue of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” better known as torture, which the administration began using against suspected terrorists in 2002.Although the United States had traditionally considered torture illegal, the administration now argued that any limitation on the president's war powers was unconstitutional. When news of the program became public in 2004, Congress banned it, but Bush issued a statement rejecting any restriction on the “single executive branch.”Meanwhile