There are two reasons The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t quite meet the believability threshold. The first is that it’s about a conspiracy, and, like all conspiracies, the conspiracy in The Manchurian Candidate requires someone to pull it off. That’s why most conspiracies never happen in the first place—they’re too complex, there’s too much room for error. The second reason is less obvious but more important. Even if a Communist agent could have brainwashed an American P.O.W. into assassinating the G.O.P. presidential nominee, and even if a far-right puppet unwittingly working for the Soviet Union could have snaked his way into the Oval Office—even if someone could have pulled off this particular conspiracy—it’s unlikely it would have had the desired effect. For a few weeks, it might have gone undetected, but then The New York Times or I.F. Stone would have published an investigation story about the Soviets hijacking the election; Americans would have subsequently been shocked and outraged; a big, bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives would have introduced articles of impeachment; and, within days, a new president, answerable only to the American people, would have been sworn in.

We should be thankful that, in the real world of 2016, conspiracies are still nearly impossible to pull off. Vladimir Putin did not surreptitiously plot the rise of Donald Trump because he couldn’t have. (Who could have ensured Marco Rubio would stumble so badly in that debate before the New Hampshire primary? Who could have known that Access Hollywood tape wouldn’t cost Trump the election?) But, as recent revelations have suggested, when the opportunity arose to nudge voters a point or two in a particular direction, the Kremlin apparently seized it. This was very different than inserting a Manchurian candidate into the White House. This was simply taking advantage of conditions that no one, including the Russians, could have anticipated.

The most important condition that the Russians almost certainly did not anticipate was that it would be the Republicans—not the Democrats—who offered the best opportunity for subversion. For nearly a century, the Russians have been trying to weasel their way into the American political scene, but their point of entry has always been on the left—the American Communist Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, even the Democratic Party. When Republicans smeared George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, for being a Communist, the smear worked because it sounded just a little plausible. Not only did liberals often come across as hypocritical, watered-down socialists—people who shared a strained but familial relationship with Communists, who believed in mass equality but without the Gulag and bad food—but their liberalism, like all liberalisms, was inherently international, and it made them less tethered, even hostile, to the American volk. They were receptive to criticism of basic American institutions and mythologies because they never felt very connected to them, and that created a mysterious gray space in which ideologues, fellow travelers and useful idiots commingled.

Video: Vladimir Putin’s Impact on the 2016 Election

But during some point in the past quarter-century, the fault lines in America have shifted. Those most susceptible to external programming are no longer Lionel Trilling’s Arthur and Nancy Croom—fashionable, urbane, progressive, well spoken, well traveled—but angry, displaced former assembly-line workers in Youngstown and Macomb County who believe their America has been stolen from them by cosmopolitans in New York, D.C., and Silicon Valley. The conventional wisdom has it that the angry hordes are neanderthals—parochial, unaware of or unconcerned with the world. But that’s not true. Like their liberal, cosmopolitan predecessors, the angry horde is inherently transnational, if not international, and it has compatriots in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and beyond. These people are not bound by a shared politics or program so much as a shared racial identity—a white nationalism born of a loathing for the multiculturalism and complex interdependency embraced by the Davos class. It is a global anti-globalism, and it is reflected in Trump, Brexit, and Marine Le Pen.