US democracy was undermined from within, not from without, long before Donald Trump’s election victory. But an alleged conspiracy by the Russian government to help him reach the White House continues to motivate hypocritical lamentations for the republic on the part of US media, congressional Democrats and even some Republicans.

In early January, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency released a declassified account of accusations against the Russian government and intelligence services. Charges had been made from the middle of 2016, but this was the first time that Office of the Director of National Intelligence had put them publicly.

The assessment’s major finding was that Vladimir Putin sought to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency”. The means used included hacking the Democratic National Committee and members of the Democratic Party and releasing material into the public domain; paying trolls to make unfavourable social media comments about Clinton; and funding and spreading media reports undermining the Democratic candidate’s credibility.

Republican senator John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in December that Russia’s role in the election amounted to an “act of war”.

Allegations regarding conspiracy have now also surfaced, forcing the resignation of Trump security adviser Michael Flynn after he admitted withholding details of conversations he had had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. There may be more revelations to come. According to a New York Times investigation:

“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contact with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election … The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the FBI is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr Trump’s associates and the Russian government.”

All of this has prompted a stream of angst-laden hyperbole. According to Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the liberal American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, allegations of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign to ensure the defeat of Clinton in the 9 November general election are of such a serious nature as to constitute “something entirely unprecedented in American history – a coup d’état, perpetrated not just by a foreign power, but by America’s principal geopolitical adversary and threat, with the collusion of the new president”.

However, the National Intelligence Council was far more conservative in its January conclusions and careful not to suggest any direct electoral tampering. As the joint assessment noted, “DHS [Department of Homeland Security] assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying”.

Who is really tampering?

Obviously, foreign capitalist state interference in domestic democratic elections is an odious practice. It should be opposed. The US State Department and the CIA know all about it, having intervened far more forcefully and more frequently than any other foreign state. According to political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie-Mellon University, Pennsylvania, the number is about 80 times between 1946 and 2000 – not including interventions to oust established regimes.

But let’s get serious about the big questions concerning the corruption of the 2016 contest, and, indeed, previous US presidential campaigns. They are pretty much entirely domestic in their scope.

All the talk today is about “fake news” disseminated through far right websites such as Breitbart or Russian-controlled outlets such as RT and Sputnik and spread through pro-Russian social media accounts. Sure. But the mainstream news outlets in the US – CNN, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, Fox, plus the newspapers – were clearly the prime platforms for Trump to spew his bile and build his profile. All the so-called respectable journalists are squealing about Trump now. But they put him there.

According to mediaQuant, a data research company, the value of Trump’s free media coverage during the election season was close to US$5 billion. CBS CEO Leslie Moonves explained to the Hollywood Reporter last February, as the primary contests were heating up, why his network gave such coverage to the man they now have come to believe is the biggest disaster ever to enter the White House: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.

When you think about it, there is no more apt way for Trump to have won the US election than on the back of moneygrubbing corporate sentiment like that. American as apple pie.

But more than fake news and calculations about what’s good for business, the serious interventions to undermine the democratic process have been carried out by learned robe-wearers in the Supreme Court and venerated moderate Congressional representatives – the very people who claim to be democracy’s biggest defenders.

For example, the 2010 Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court gave corporations the ability to spend unlimited sums of money on campaign advertising for or against any candidate through so-called super Political Action Committees. These operate as shadow parties funded by millionaires and billionaires, further skewing the democratic balance in favour of big money. There’s no sign that the Russians bought off a few justices to push that decision over the line.

That was followed by the 2013 Supreme Court decision, in Shelby County v. Holder, to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 2016 election was the first for 50 years to allow states with the greatest number and longest record of voter discrimination to make changes to their own voting laws without federal oversight. According to Rolling Stone’s Ari Berman, writing in June last year:

“The country is witnessing the greatest rollback of voting rights since the act was passed five decades ago. This year, 17 states have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election cycle, including laws that make it harder to register to vote, cut back early voting and require strict forms of government-issued IDs to cast a ballot that millions of Americans don’t have.

“These states comprise 189 electoral votes … and include crucial swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia. Such efforts have been overwhelmingly backed by Republicans to target Democratically leaning constituencies, particularly people of colour and young voters.”

It’s not Putin running around checking IDs and turning people away at the polling booths.

When you add gerrymandering to create electoral outcomes that cut against majority state-wide popular results, and the arcane provisions of the Electoral College – which give disproportionate weight to less populated, more conservative states – the problems of US democracy are stark. But they have nothing to do with Russia.

There may be some genuine concern within the Washington, DC, beltway about foreign influence and defending “the greatest democracy on earth”. But the main concerns of those obsessed with Putin relate to the integrity of the US state and the possibility that it has been made to look weak in the face of one of its imperialist rivals; the desire to take attention away from Hillary Clinton’s abject failure to sell another four years of “liberal neoliberalism”; and the wish to distract from the very real failings of the US democratic system, which, election after election, leaves millions of people disenfranchised.

Moreover, establishment figures much prefer to take on Trump from the right, not the left. Politicians and journalists who serve the millionaires and billionaires are on secure ground crying, “The Russians are coming!” The political terrain can then be centred on institutional processes, check-and-balance government, the integrity of the intelligence agencies and the ever-present threat of external enemies.

It’s much more dangerous for their careers to fight like hell for union rights, healthcare, wages and democracy.