Here's the thing about the "foreign interference" narrative that bugs me: it seems undeniable that Russian state elements (and quasi-state elements like "patriotic hackers") interfered in the 2016 election

It's also a matter of undisputed historic record that the USA has been doing this for decades (often with consequences that were worse than Trump - imposing Pinochet on Chile; deposing an elected Iranian leader and giving rise to the Ayatollah)

Indeed, both of the Cold War powers have a long history of interfering in the elections of weak, vulnerable states to bring them more firmly into their spheres of influence and/or to neutralize the other superpower's own client states

Leaving aside the (indisputably terrible) ethics of this, let's focus for a moment instead on the practicalities. When the US or the USSR targeted their de facto colonies for electoral manipulation, they succeeded because those democracies were so fragile

Riven, corrupt, with states that had been starved and looted to the advantage of political elites, who could be bought easily or neutralized if necessary.

The most disturbing thing about a foreign power playing a dispositive role in a US election is that it implies that the US's own political apparatus is as brittle as, say, the Allende-era Chile, a country that had been looted for decades

That had been subjected to decades of misinformation and bad policy from crony-capitalist strongmen, leaving the population in disarray and the institutions weak and unable to resist

The 2016 US election was so close that anything could be described as the "decisive winning factor" - when you're within a couple points of either outcome, then you can blame any factor that moves the needle by a point or two

So sure, the Russians potentially gave us Trump, but so did (for example) the GOP establishment's cowardly endorsement of Trump as preferable to a Democratic administration (other factors also can be blamed)

But the disturbing thing isn't so much that the Russian interference in the 2016 election happened -- it's that it WORKED. The US electoral process has been weakened by looting, gerrymandering, voter suppression

It's been undermined by an ideology that says that states are intrinsically incompetent (and must be replaced by private contractors), an ideology that is well-served by being as incompetent as possible while in office to prove your point

The US electoral process has been weakened by triangulation politics whose union-bashing, banker-coddling and race-baiting was based on the cynical idea that racialized and progressive people will vote for whatever the Dems give them

It's been weakened by establishment politics whose two tactics are:

1. Get out the vote for your own despicable hack candidates by warning your base about the apocalyptic consequences of letting the opposing despicable hack get into office

2. Suppress the vote for your opponent by reminding THEIR base of what a bungling sellout looter their guy is, and demoralizing them so they stay at home.

These weren't invented by Russian election-meddlers - they were invented by the GOP and Dem establishments

Their calculus was that it was acceptable to use this tactic though it made the US electoral process brittle and exploitable, because they only included each other in their calculus of entities who might try to influence electoral outcomes at home

They thought of themselves as electioneers in a superpower, not in a degraded, looted, hollowed, weakened state ripe for being disrupted by a power. So Russia -- a failing basket-case autocracy that itself has been looted to the bone -- was able to act on the US elections

If you want to get fired up about the problems with the 2016 election, the most important place to start is with how manipulation-prone US politics are -- not who manipulated them.

Getting to the bottom of Russian Facebook ads is important, but it's not going to save the next election. Creating a resilient, robust US electoral politics will.