“The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation – a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the US. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin … widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin”
The Mueller Report
Success in life often requires one to think counterintuitively. Want to hit a golf ball further? Swing easier, not harder. Caught in a riptide? Swim sideways, not toward shore. While we’re at it, want to get to the beach quicker on a 4th of July weekend? Leave at rush hour on Friday. Want your teenager to do what you want them to do? Suggest the opposite! So many things in this world are built on foundations that are not as they seem, at odds with conventional wisdom, requiring full outside-the-box approaches that most miss.
Somewhere in the bowels of a nondescript Russian intelligence building, maybe around 2012, perhaps in the cyber espionage division – who knows – a heretofore anonymous bureaucrat had a bone shaking epiphany and sprinted down the hall to tell his superior about it. What if we have always been thinking about it backwards?! What if our target audience in America isn’t left-wing progressives, but right-wing reactionaries?! What if it’s been right there before us all this time? After all, if American ruin is our goal, aren’t there plenty of other ways to skin that cat?!
The blind spot for Cold War Soviets and Putinites alike was recognizing what was always most in Russia’s wheelhouse to export: invigorating a mob’s mindless servility by relentlessly promoting hatred of enemies to assuage their alienation. Forget Marxist tales of economic exploitation; it’s all about the grievance and resentment. Manufacture that, control that, and dominoes will fall. Like a nuclear reaction, just get the ball rolling.
Those still agog over how millions can worship a man who, not only embodies, but ceaselessly creates measures fully at odds with their most basic self-interest, are missing the forest for the trees. The essence of Trumpism is the salve so many require to soothe their alienation from what America’s narrative has always been. The rabid dependence on symbols like the flag and national anthem illustrates the whiteboard of American patriotism’s deep and complex attributes has been erased for millions, replaced by unquestioned allegiance to those who make conquest possible, and those who obsessively validate that fidelity. In North Korea you can do 10 years of hard labor for appearing insufficiently attentive when their national anthem is playing, nobody is interested in discussions about patriotism’s many layers.
Trump’s singular specialty is blaming people. The Apprentice was nothing more than a weekly display of contestants doing and saying anything to pass the buck. A weekly tutorial on avoiding responsibility, with our current President, and often his children, refereeing the backstabbing. Trump’s requirements for the prize of joining his company’s executive team were clear and unwavering…, always be the biggest asshole in the room, without ever making me doubt your sycophancy. The resume for impelling dictatorship is identical, civic responsibility is no virtue, unless it’s redefined as turning in your neighbor with the dark skin, or praise for Allah, or liberal leanings.
Back in the Vietnam days Soviet strategy for affecting American politics centered on inciting and goading to action the downtrodden and disaffected, unbridled capitalism’s most unquestioned victims… blacks, coal miners (yes!), exploited workers without a union voice, counterculture hippies against war and certain plastics were the beginning of the end (prescient it turns out). Now, the messaging targets bigots and the love em-or-leave em crowd. Those once seen as fertile soil for discontent are now the “snowflakes” on the other side of twitter wars. Alex Jones and Sean Hannity are current Russian assets, not some Stanford historian, or Columbia economics professor. The name of the destabilization game is unhinged, falsely informed grievance, and a nihilist pursuit of nostalgia, a feeling of control, of supremacy. We want what was once ours and they took away. Case closed.
The incumbent President most always has the power to define the campaigns of both sides for his upcoming re-election battle. Generally if the country is in arguably better shape than when he inherited it, voters will be presented with his side’s argument their interests lie in continuing with his prescriptions. His opponent will raise other issues and argue their importance and the need to better address them, or even deny things are as good as the incumbent claims. Either way, the sitting President determines the parameters of debate, while respecting general assumptions that national traits like unity, equality, tolerance and empathy are necessary virtues.
Trump, fully supported by both Fox/AM and Russian intelligence, seeks to destroy such templates. He is overt now in his desire to frame 2020 as Us vs. Them. We love our country, they don,t. We will keep power in white hands, they won’t. We will keep beaners out, they will welcome them in. Each day, each hour, any traces left to the imagination are consciously deleted by Trump and the GOP he now fully controls.
The Kremlin has hit the jackpot by embracing a strategy Khrushchev, Brezhnev, even spymaster Andropov never considered, and now enjoys a tireless White House effort to tear the US apart. One of our three branches of government is seditious, as is half of another branch. It’s all there in the open, right now, so emboldened it seems prepared to toss aside all pretense of anything else, all dog whistles, all window dressing, and make the first Tuesday of next November a referendum. Is our fear of demographic boogiemen greater than our fealty to the democracy that is supposed to define us. A very binary, straightforward choice. If Trump and the GOP have their way, Russia will influence the outcome. BC