Doesn’t understand? I get it. When she spoke about a “vast right-wing conspiracy”, I laughed in derision…because I didn’t understand yet, either.
I spent YEARS digging into Jim Crow, segregation, & related historical matters, and I couldn’t make sense of HOW things went the way they did, or WHY. The fault, in short, was mine…because I kept looking for an explanation of how ‘good-faith politics’ drove it.
Even after years of living in the old confederacy, I kept making real efforts to see it all as ‘honest failures’, ‘conservatives’ as well-meaning but wrong-headed/misguided patriots, and Birch Society fantasies as the cringiest part of the fringe. Once I discovered the intentional rebellious response to desegregation - the timeline that led from Brown v Board through the red scare & the civil-rights movement, through the ginned-up hysteria over Roe & the continual demonization of ‘liberals’ as “fundamentally unAmerican”, through the Reagan “revolution” the rise of militias & the ‘tea’ party, through Gingrich’s contract on America - to the establishment of DHS, “Patriot Act”, *active*, wholesale internet surveillance, Bush’s wars, the rise of Paul Ryan and the anti-public “public choice” economists to the all-in GOP support for the tools and loopholes and useful idiots that crystallized around president Napoleon XIV - it became abundantly clear that the so-called ‘right’ had been gaslighting the world, the nation, and their own base of support, weaponizing the machinery of national government.
In short, that it was NEVER an honest, good-faith participation in government or in governance. It has been - continuously - an effort to return the nation to the era of Dred Scott…and to the Articles of Confederation: to steal the nation through deceit, deception, and a frankly Leninist imposition of Karl Rove’s “permanent Republican majority”…’the will of the people’ be damned.
TL;DR = we didn’t get here by way of a malfunction re: national security, or “carelessness” in handling NatSec documents, but by deliberate weakening of public understanding on the one hand, and weaponization of party and machinery for use against the nation.
IOW we didn’t fail - we were pushed, hard, intentionally, and continuously