Whatever Russia did or didn’t do, the idea that its interference is what
cost Hillary Clinton the election is utterly ludicrous and absolutely
false. What cost Hillary Clinton the election can be summed up by a
single line from Sen. Chuck Schumer,
soon to be the country’s highest-ranking Democrat: “For every
blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up
two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can
repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” As it turned out, he
was fatally wrong. It wasn’t the Russians who told the Democratic Party
to abandon the working-class people of all races who used to form its
electoral base. It wasn’t the Russians who decided to run a presidential
campaign that offered people nothing but blackmail—“vote for us or
Dangerous Donald wins.” The Russians didn’t come up with awful tin-eared
catchphrases like “I’m with her” or “America is already great.” The
Russians never ordered the DNC to run one of the most widely despised
people in the country, simply because she thought it was her turn. The
Democrats did that all by themselves.
-- Sam Kriss, "The Rise of the Alt-Center" (SLATE).