Why Putin keeps winning the ideological war

I have no idea whether Russia successfully interfered in the US election; I imagine it’s one of those situations where everyone is lying but the Russians are lying twice as much. But there are a couple of questions that no one seems to be asking, which makes me curious.

Firstly, how could America have got to a stage where an outside, not very friendly power could influence the course of an election? Would this have been possible in the 1950s or 1980s, for example? It seems extremely unlikely.

America’s founding fathers were quite vehement on the subject of foreign influence in US politics, which they thought would lead to corruption – and with good reason. It’s why Hilary Clinton’s links to oil-rich Gulf states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia rightly made her seem untrustworthy to American voters. Those countries are at best America’s frenemies, and though that part of the Arabian world is slowly moving in the right direction (while the Levant burns) their interests are not the same as the American people’s.