I'd say it is working. The sheer quantity of anti-American rhetoric online, places like Reddit and even on HN, is astounding. Ostensibly coming from our own citizens, in many cases. If this kind of self-loathing is reality, we have a big problem indeed. The optimist in me likes to assume that a good chunk of it is planted deliberately by America's foes.

The only way to make a great country greater is to acknowledge its flaws and strive to correct them. The default mode of communication seems to have been people pointing out US failures, and US people widely shouting them down, regardless of the merit of the claim. That has also been a major factor driving anti-American rhetoric, you can't blame that on foreign influence.

Or, in other words: anti-American rhetoric coming from American citizens is a good thing: it makes the country better.

Wouldn't subversion be opportunistic, though? Maybe during Cold War, their tactics had more success on the left, but more recently they've had more success on the right. If your goal is to subvert the whole, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I guess it makes sense and it doesn't have to be pejorative: conservatives are usually more attached to traditional structures while historically leftist groups push for a transformative change. Subversion is a good way to transform a structure.

A good example would be the 1619 projet that, whether you agreed with its message or not, explicitly aimed at undermining the current mainstream narrative on the history of the USA. I can't think of any right wing equivalent

Read what I wrote in another comment. It doesn't matter if it's left, or right for as long as disturbing random discourse keeps your mind jammed, and prevents you from seeing things for what they are.

To me it seems more demoralizing to look back and think things have gotten worse

And yes of course it's demoralizing, his theory was that if you think your country is evil or based on evil and not much better than anything else why would you ever fight for it? Especially when faced with an enemy who actually believes that he is dying for a great cause, and the best system.

From a cold war perspective, if the other side doesn't believe his system to be superior anymore that could've been decisive to win a war. Just look at the vietnam war and how it (thankfully) ended.

Then my normalcy bias kicked in and I thought "it would never get that bad"

What I'm essentially saying is that he doesn't really fit into the "demoralize/destabilize/subvert/normalize" framework. But that's not to say he doesn't fit very well in others ;)

No, it's more like he is a Russian authoritarian leader appealing to the greatest imagery of Russian national struggle to make a war of aggression look like something more noble.

Back then, organizations like Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were Soviet-influenced.