RussiaGate scandal

Today in Society
A major event in today’s society is the RussiaGate scandal, which has been reported on the news for two years running. With the recent release of the Mueller probe, President Trump has declared victory—No Collusion, No Obstruction—and now many news media are doing damage control after basically accusing the president of colluding with Russia for the past two years (Collins & Jackson, 2019). From a sociological perspective, this event can best be interpreted by conflict theory and functionalism—with the best explanation falling in the middle of the two diverging approaches to sociological understanding.
The issue of the great Collusion-RussiaGate-Obstruction story occurred in the political context of Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016. Democrats and the media, which overwhelmingly supported Clinton during the campaign, jumped onto the RussiaGate narrative to explain the loss: Russia hijacked the election and Trump colluded with Putin to win the White House—so the story went. The event impacted all classes of society, from political ruling classes to middle and lower classes as Trump tried to deflect from the accusations and implement policies to show he was still following through on campaign promises in spite of the accusations. It was important that he still try to show that he was not hampered by the narrative swirling around him for the past two years.
The news source for this story is credible and is really just one of the many several media outlets reporting on the Mueller probe and its findings. Access to the full report can be obtained using the Internet to verify what has been reported on. USAToday’s reporting does not deviate from any other outlet and consists mainly of the facts of the matter giving a bit of perspective on what has transpired over the past two years.
Conflict theory can be used to partially explain why this event has transpired. The conflict between the Trump base (consisting mainly of working class individuals) and the Clinton base was palpable during the campaign. Trump’s supporters wanted Clinton jailed for her various offenses relating to EmailGate and Benghazi along with the murder of Seth Rich and various other conspiracies that hit the Web during the time. Trump’s supporters did not trust Clinton and they were angry that the FBI did not charge her with any crimes relating to EmailGate. Clinton’s supporters were confident of a victory all the same and were stunned on election night when she lost. The Clinton supporters in the FBI, led by Strzok, Paige, Comey and others, conspired to launch an investigation into Trump to delegitimize his presidency. The conflict was thus between the power structure and the working class that supported Trump.
Conflict theory has its origins in Marx, who argued that there was conflict between the classes, with the working class and ruling class (the owners of the means of production) at odds with one another. This theory was in direct opposition to the theory of Weber, who believed that the various classes were mutually beneficial to one another and that social injustices could be addressed and harmonized without the need for class warfare. Critical theorists, such as those of the Frankfurt School—i.e., Adorno and Horkheimer (1944), who wrote the book The Culture Industry—argued that the class uprising never took place because the ruling classes had developed the culture industry to essentially hypnotize the middle and working classes to be content with their lot and no longer engage in war with the ruling class.
While conflict theory thus makes sense to a degree in the interpretation of the Trump RussiaGate event, it does not fully explain the entirety of the event. Conflict theory could be said to suffer from two logical fallacies—one being the false cause fallacy and the other being the strawman fallacy. The false cause fallacy could apply to conflict theory in the sense that the theory attempts to explain human and social behavior by identifying the cause of human behavior as the struggle for power and dominance: people and groups seek to obtain power for themselves and thus there will be conflict as this behavior can lead ultimately to a zero-sum game in which there is a victor and a loser. This may be viewed as a false cause fallacy because as the critical theorists show, some people are perfectly content to be without power. The critical theorists believe the masses have been duped by those with power into feeling this way, but nonetheless, this identification of the need for power could be a false cause of human behavior and thus a fallacy in the theory.
Another fallacy could be the strawman fallacy. For example, by exaggerating the functional aspect of society (everyone getting along), an opposite reaction could be to develop conflict theory to show that really no one gets along for long. One exaggeration leads to another in the opposite direction. Instead of saying that sometimes people in society get along very well and other times they do not, the theorist relies upon a strawman in order to develop or promote his own theory.
For that reason, functionalism could be said to also explain the event. For instance, the independent investigation led by a Mueller was done not out of a revolution, as would align with a Marxist approach, but rather out of a spirit of functionality. The state is meant to be ruled by law and order and if there is a problem, it is investigated. The Mueller probe lasted two years and uncovered no evidence of collusion or obstruction on the part of the Trump Administration and identified no hijacking of the election by the Russian government. Thus, this shows that the goal of the state is to maintain functionality through a process of law and order. Without this process there would be no stability.
Thus, these two theories explain the event from two different perspectives and allow the witness to arrive somewhere in the middle. The conflict theory brings the individual from the perspective that there is a war between the working class represented by Trump’s supporters and the ruling class represented by Clinton. The funcionalist approach provides the perspective that in spite of any allegations of war or conspiracy, they can be investigated using the tools that society has provided in the context of law and order—the purpose being to maintain social stability and welfare rather than to see things devolve into revolution and chaos.
References
Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1944). The Culture Industry. UK: Routledge.
Collins, M. & Jackson, D. (2019). Donald Trump reacts to Mueller report: 'It’s called no collusion, no obstruction'. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/18/mueller-report-trump-says-no-collusion-no-obstruction/3474814002/