Russian interference: Go with the Flow

The five stages of grief end with acceptance.  Death is, after all, inevitable.  

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.   The Russians intervened in our election.  My Republican friends say, so what?  They deny it mattered and accept the outcome: their guy won.   Democrats are stuck at angry.

A former brokerage client, self identified as a Republican and a Christian, forwarded me dozens of ridiculous emails repeatedly in the last couple of months of the 2016 campaign.  Hillary as murderer, Hillary as brothel owner, proof of Hillary with Parkinson's, Hillary actually dead and a body double is campaigning.   He received them, he passed them along with cover notes telling me how alarmed he was that the proven lesbian man-hater might win.  Asked yesterday if he thought he was duped by Russians who created some of the stories he had spread,  he says it doesn't matter.  Those emails had no effect on the election.  Acceptance.

Karma is a boomerang

Democrats have been angry--and opportunist.  Democrats got lucky with the source of the involvement:  Russia.  Many Republican officeholders have a long career of opposition to Soviets and then Russians.  Had the meddling been done by Europeans, or indeed by anyone but Russia or a Muslim country, they might have ignored it, but there was a lot of history in opposing Russian influence, so they signed on with Democrats.  Let's look into Russia.   

For Democrats, it is an entry point for investigations of wrong-doing close inside the White House.  It is payback for the Kevin Starr investigation of Bill Clinton.  They are doing what Jason Chaffez said he planned to do if Hillary won: harass her and bankrupt her with investigations.  

So the Democratic joy at investigating Trump's campaign and administration will continue but the guest post below raises the question of whether, in fact, Americans should shrink in horror at the idea of foreign involvement in our elections.  Maybe not.  Maybe we all should just relax here.

It is clear that Republicans don't actually mind foreign intervention all that much: the right guy won.  Russian fiction-writers wrote crazy stuff, but it was stuff that fit right in beside the stories American conspiracy believers were writing and thinking all along, which is why they spread so quickly.  American conservatives would believe it, post it to Facebook, and send it around by email chains.   

It wasn't poison.  It was sugar.  American partisans liked it, which is why it worked.

This morning on Fox

This raises the question whether it is actually "foreign" intervention at all. If the intervention consists of horror stories of dark skinned men who are in America illegally and who invade an American home and rape a 6 year old girl, what does it matter where the money to circulate the story comes from?   This is a big story on Fox right now.  It diverts from the story of a native born white man who shot some 600 people, killing 58.  He is described as "mentally ill."  The new story describes the criminal as an "illegal immigrant."   The purported purpose of such a story would be to inform the public of "news," the presumed mission of a news organization.  Since the news organization is Fox, then the branding and audience retention and corollary political purpose is made clear.  The story reinforces a major Fox News narrative: normal Americans are under attack by dark skinned foreigners up to no good.  He is criminal, he is here illegally, and just look at him, how frightening he is.  He is shown in a triptych showing him dark and darker.   

Fox, supposedly, is all-American.  

If the goal is to heighten American fear of dark foreigners, which might then cause American public opinion to vote for Trump, why would it matter if the news story was created or amplified by Fox alone, or if distribution of the story had help from a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads paid for by Russia, making sure that a lot more Americans saw the story?   Fox created the story so it would be seen and have its political effect.  News, yes, but news that fits a narrative.  If people pass around the narrative on Facebook and Twitter, with help from some ads, so what?  It is news.  What does it matter who pays for the ads? 

My client--the email forwarder--would eagerly pass along the above story if he knew of it.  He was not infected by an unwelcome, foreign virus.  He would have passed along a welcome virus, one that meets his mindset and politics.   Americans infecting Americans.

I saw this via MSNBC at first

Conversely, if an DACA student drowned in Houston, saving a family trapped in a flooded house, it might not be covered by Fox, but it would be well covered by the other networks.  If a Democratic Party group paid for ads to make sure the story got around on Facebook and became part of an email chain, no one would mind.  Free speech.  And that is exactly what happened.

So what if, instead, an international human rights group paid for the ad to amplify this story?  Or the Mexican government paid for the Facebook ad boost?   It would be a story Americans ought to know, right?  It is news. It would be passed around by Dreamer supporters because it fits their notion of good politics.  

Looked at objectively, Americans have no real influence on the political behavior of either George Soros or David Koch, both politically active billionaires, or Russia, Britain, China, or Mexico.  Each can pay for ads to boost Facebook views of news stories, real or invented.  The intervention only works if it reflects what Americans believe or want to believe.

Maybe the toothpaste is out of the tube.  Our elections are a free for all.  Stupid, dangerous ideas are spread around because Americans believe stupid, dangerous ideas.  We don't need Russia or China to screw us up.  We do it to ourselves.  

Republicans who are content with the outcome of the 2016 election have made clear that it is the outcome--not the source of the funding--that determines whether one is in the acceptance phase or the angry phase.   It all worked out for Republicans, so they accept.  Move on.

Americans don't like foreign intervention in "our business", i.e. our elections.  I do not.  I resent it.  It ought to be illegal and it is.  Progressives will be helpless if we stay in our own social media silos.   If progressives are small tent pure, once again Democratic progressives wont know what hit them until election night.  

But we learned something from the Russian hacking in 2016.  It only works if it isn't a "foreign" idea.  The propaganda only spreads if it is "American" in the deepest sense, i.e. that Americans like it, believe it, and want to spread it.

Thad Guyer makes this point in a provocative Guest Post.

He is back in Vietnam, doing an international practice of whistleblower law, representing plaintiff whistleblowers.

Thad Guyer:

"Donald Trump acknowledged the common knowledge that interference in foreign elections has been a long-time American practice. If Donald Trump is the threat not just to American democracy but to the nuclear safety of the world that Democrats say he is, then should we hope that beneficial foreign intervention will be brought to bear to defeat him in 2020?   On the one hand, Americans instictively say no, we should handle this ourselves.  But on the other hand, there is an “ends justifies the means” moral argument to be had, if indeed he is the dangerous, racist if not genocidal force the left claims he is.  For a philosophical moral debate of this point, see “The Ethics of Killing Baby Hitler”, The Atlantic, Oct 24, 2015, https://goo.gl/sxxWYt.

A Harper’s Weekly article from Saturday July 12, 1862 titled “The Ten Who Save the City” was on Americans’ minds 155 years ago.  In a section titled Foreign Intervention Again, the debates in the English Parliament and addresses by the French Emperor were the talk of the day.  Americans were reminded over and over again “of the ever present threat of European intervention into their Civil War”. See, “Foreign Intervention during the Civil War”, June 24, 2011, https://goo.gl/XCv62W.  Intervention for the north was applauded, for the south it was condemned; and visa versa.

America is in a new civil war now.  The weaponry is the electronic media, it is cyber war. Democrats vociferously denounce Russia for having participated in our 2016 electoral debate through social media and paid articles. They exercised political speech that for Americans, would otherwise be the hallmark of 1^stAmendment free speech.  Republicans, especially the winning Trump coalition, seem unconcerned with that foreign intervention, convinced they would have won without any help.  But that intervention is intended to do one thing:  advance the economic and foreign policy interests of the meddling country. See, “Foreign electoral Intervention”, Wikipedia, https://goo.gl/NBEVG2. The United States, of course, has a long history of such meddling as a key element of our own foreign relations strategies.  Indeed, Vladimir Putin wanted payback for Obama’s alleged meddling in Russia’s elections through his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

This time around, the successful interventionist was Russia, playing a role with an analog in the Confederate’s navy having largely been constructed in British shipyards. The English had substantial economic investments in southern textiles, just as other nations had comparable interests in northern industries. Without doubt the European Union has enormous interests in preventing Trump’s reelection, including crushing the continent’s nationalist movements, preventing repetition of Brexits elsewhere, and the environmental and energy politics of global warming. 

Given that foreign intervention in the elections and civil wars of other nations is a permanent feature of the global order, not an aberration, the left seems Pollyannaish in its obsessive outrage with Russia’s role in electing Trump. There is broad consensus that Russia will try to do it again in 2020, as will other countries. There is also agreement that while we may be able to diminish it, there is no stopping it.  It’s time that Democrats take a more realistic view, accept the reality of a longstanding global order, and welcome whatever foreign intervention may come to our aid in removing Trump. He will certainly have that kind of help in seeking reelection.