People-to-people
More on the Russian meddling, from a couple of days before the election.
A range of activities speaks to a Russian connection: the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials, hacks surrounding voter rolls and possibly election machines, Putin’s overt praise for Trump, and the curious Kremlin connections of Trump campaign operatives Paul Manafort and Carter Page.
But most observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.
Yep. That happened.
The United States and its European allies have always placed state-to-state relations at the forefront of their international strategies. The Soviet system’s effort to undermine those relations during the Cold War, updated now by modern Russia, were known as “active measures.”
A June 1992 U.S. Information Agency report on the strategy explained:
It was often very difficult for Westerners to comprehend this fundamentally different Soviet approach to international relations and, as a result, the centrality to the Soviets (now Russians) of active measures operations was gravely underappreciated.
Active measures employ a three-pronged approach that attempts to shape foreign policy by directing influence in the following ways: state-to-people, people-to-people, and state-to-state. More often than not, active measures sidestep traditional diplomacy and normal state-to-state relationships. The Russian government today employs the state-to-people and people-to-people approaches on social media and the internet, directly engaging U.S. and European audiences ripe for an anti-American message, including the alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties. It also targets left-wing audiences, but currently at a lower tempo.
So for all we know, we’ve all been helping them.
Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:
- Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
- Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
- Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
- Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
- Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction
In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia’s enemies without the use of force.
It all sounds a little bit Hollywood, a little bit tinfoil hat…but it also sounds somewhat plausible. That version of social media sounds painfully familiar.
Are we all just pieces in someone else’s game?
This is a weakness of an open society, and potentially the seeds of its closing.
I think this is a distinction without a difference. They would have settled for a President Clinton facing raging opposition (aka business as usual), but they pretty clearly wanted Trump to win the election. So they favored him not because he’s Putin’s cuddlebuddy, but because he’s an idiot who will damage the nation. Either way, we’re screwed.
“Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction”
I’d say all of those boxes got checked this election (though popularizing Russian policy agendas may mostly be through the pretender’s eyes as opposed to those of the citizens).
There’s no winning in these circumstances; bowing down is suicidal and refusing to accept the results of our political process only de-legitimizes it.
Are we all just pieces in someone else’s game?
Well, yes. Just remember Trump is the king!!!!11!
I would so much like to believe that the mess we are in is not solely due to our own hatred, greed and willful ignorance, but hey, I need more proof.
Or, it’s not enough that Trump win, but that he also does so facing raging opposition. The “raging opposition” is probably the important part of diminishing and tarnishing American democracy.
Which makes me think – regardless of how many anti-Clinton messages may have been started by Russian interests, how many anti-Trump messages were? And even if liberal voters are less susceptible to fake news (oh, how easy and tempting it is to accept that story uncritically!), there’s plenty of true, and half-true, anti-Trump fodder to be found that could have been found by those seeking to undermine the system.
Further, I did see a couple of articles a week or so ago mentioning that the Electoral College is meant to be part of a defense against the electorate picking a demagogue like Trump. So, the articles said, people (i.e. anti-Trump activists) should campaign to persuade the electoral college voters to vote their conscience in the electoral college vote in December.
Whether or not you agree with that, do you think that if it happened, that it would further weaken trust in US democracy? It’s possible. If so, would foreign propagandists have been dropping the core of that idea about the place as much as possible, trying to get legitimate Clinton supporters to latch on and run with it?