The Russians interfered with our elections. This has been repeatedly confirmed by the top echelons of our state security apparatus up to and including Jeh Johnson, the former Secretary of Homeland Security. The meddling occurred at several levels and it has been traced to the highest levels of the Russian government. The only thing still to be established by several investigators is whether there had been cooperation, witting or otherwise, by our citizens.
Even in these days of a unipolar world, one would have to be naïve in the extreme to think that the rump of the other pole of what used to be a bipolar power world, Russia, would give up all its pretense to being a world power, regardless of what ex-president Barack Obama thought of it.
No doubt, we, too, interfere enough in other countries’ elections. We do so on the surface, for the most part, through NGOs like the Open Society and the Cato Institute or quasi-governmental institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy as well as our many well-heeled foundations supporting democracy around the globe.
Russian interference may be a case of “what goes around!” It matters less to me that the Kremlin was involved. Our own foundations and other assortment of think-tanks are not fully innocent of ties to our own government, either. It is completely unacceptable when it comes to Russian spy outfits seeming to preselect winners and losers in our presidential election.
Which is worse: that the Russians interfered with our elections or that they had any measure of success at doing so? If, indeed, the Russians set out to secure a certain outcome in our elections and, from the look of things, got it, then, it must be that either the Russians somehow knew what would resonate with our electorate, offered it, and watched our voters lap it up; or ours is an electorate that would play suckers for whatever the Russians fed through our multiplex public spaces—media, internet, town halls, rallies, etc.—and vote the way the Russians wanted or expected us to
I am inclined to dismiss the first option. All we have been told, so far, is that the order to interfere in our elections was given at the highest levels of the Russian security apparatus. We now know that they had a clear preference for an outcome: the election of Donald Trump.
That they obtained their desired outcome is more important and more sobering. It is the one that anti-Russian hysteria is likely to obscure and, by so doing, prevent us from looking at what is wrong with our society such that we ended up where we are at this moment. Of course, I assume that our current administration is not one that meets with the approbation of most Americans and few would deny that the Trump presidency does not have popular support, a fact indicated by Trump’s loss of the popular vote in the last elections. The president is neither popular nor was he popularly elected. Yet, that he is president today, despite his popular vote loss, means that there is a solid block of his supporters, especially in so-called swing states, some of whom bought, alongside other things, whatever it was that the Russian infiltrators were selling during the electioneering campaign.
Certainly, we now know or have reason to believe that a lot of what the Russians fed to our electorate, apart from the leaked emails of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s private emails, too, was fake news. This is what should worry us as a country, a democracy, and the only recognized super-power in the world: that we have a solid segment of our electorate that is susceptible to manipulation by a foreign country that is willing to feed their communication lines with lies, half-truths and outright fabrications.
Whatever epithets we care to choose to describe this portion of our electorate—“low information voter”, “angry male voter”, “apathetic voter”—what matters is that we now have a not insignificant percentage of our electorate that is vulnerable to manipulation by local and foreign mischief makers, that will be around for some time to come and, therefore, represents a very present imponderable factor in future elections. This constitutes a severe existential threat to a democracy that has been losing its democratic attributes for quite some time now.
How do we rid our system of this segment or how do we inoculate our electoral system against this pathogen? That, for me, is the challenge that the news of Russian meddling in our elections has brought home to us. My fear is that we are not paying it enough heed.
No comments:
Post a Comment