Russia Is Destroying Our Democracy

“He knows he’s an illegitimate president…I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories – he knows that – there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did,” Hillary Clinton said on CBS News in September 2019. When Clinton lost the 2016 election, many Democrats were hesitant to accept the results. When Trump lost in 2020, many Republicans stole Clinton’s playbook and cried fraud. The truth is, we have entered a brutal phase in American politics where the losing party does not hesitate to cry foul when things don’t go their way. 

The narrative the losing side tries to push is always at odds with the truth. It took the supreme court 4 minutes of debate to unanimously reject Trump’s absurdly evidence-free claim of a rigged election (The Wall Street Journal). In 2019, after years of Mueller reports and “bombshell evidence” reported on CNN, the reports finally came up with a total of zero bits of conclusive evidence that the 2016 election was rigged (NPR). 

While our democracy is not being destroyed by hackers altering vote counts, perhaps, those alleging that our democracy isn’t perfect do have a point. While there is no evidence to suggest Russia manipulated vote counts behind the scenes or colluded with the Trump campaign, there are a plethora of disturbing reports of how they have attempted to undermine our nation’s political system. 

As the RAND (Research and Development) corporation, a strategic think tank, puts it, Russia has repeatedly been caught attempting to spread misinformation online in an attempt to polarize the American public. This would cause the United States to become a dysfunctional country that lacks international credibility and falters as a global leader. They have infiltrated all sorts of organizations, from Black Lives Matter, Right-Wing nationalists, to government bureaucracies. The sole goal is to spread polarizing misinformation to turn the American public against itself. 

Their goals revolve around reflexive control theory, a psychological strategy designed by the Soviets during the Cold War. It relies on complex psychological calculations, but it can best be summarized as the idea that people have to make choices between cooperation and conflict. The level of cooperation is directly linked to how successful and stable society can become. If one wants to undermine a society, reduce cooperation. To do this, get people to ignore the common ground they share while maximizing emotional disagreement. 

For example, let’s say you and your friend agree on something like tax rates and may even have voted for the same candidates in the past, but you disagree about race relations, abortion, or one of the other tough subjects. Reflexive control theory would say that in order to ruin your relationship, one would have to minimize the tax rates and voting patterns by ignoring them (this is quite easy as these areas, while important, are a tad boring) and overemphasizing the race relations and abortion. They would flood your social media feed with emotionally inflammatory messages that equate your side with moral superiority and sound credible, yet sprinkle subtle falsehoods into fact. You would feel as though these issues are the only ones that matter and become unable to understand just how your friend could be so ignorant of the “facts.” You share, retweet, and repeat the misinformation, joining in on this destructive cycle. 

Thus, you become more and more radicalized by the day. As this happens to more and more American citizens, the nation becomes politically unstable. Candidates for office become more radical and the nation’s policies shift drastically from one administration to the next, making America an unreliable ally. (Foreign Affairs) The nation’s image begins a slow yet near irreversible decline as “reliable” news organizations and politicians realize they can get a lot of money and power by aiding in the process by validating the emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere. 

To be quite blunt, Russia is winning its game. Our very reaction to proof of their interference is evidence of their success. Ideally, the American people would have responded by cautiously yet unanimously denouncing Russia and trying to stop their tactics. However, we responded by pointing fingers and saying they rigged the election in the other side’s favor, all validating the polarization brought about by them. Perhaps Russia isn’t some “guy in the chair” changing polling numbers and holding our democracy hostage. Maybe they’re really pulling off some Palpatine-esque manipulation and using America’s worst tendencies to turn it to the dark side from the inside. 

The only ones who can decisively strike back against these efforts are the American people. Most Russian hackers are too sophisticated to be thwarted by social media censors or government bureaucracies. They’ve gotten to the point where they can infiltrate massive government and private agencies without anyone batting an eye, as demonstrated by their startling Solarwinds Hack. (The Wall Street Journal) The internet is too vast and complex for the government or Facebook admins to solve the problem for us. The only way to effectively fight back is to avoid the mindset that makes you vulnerable to misinformation and radicalization. Vigorously fact-check every bit of alarming information you see online. Pay attention to local politics and other “boring areas” of policy that you may find common ground with others on. But most importantly don’t fall into the trap of equating your political beliefs with moral or intellectual superiority, as that’s what really makes it easy to believe ludicrous claims and falsified statistics.

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