…Forty-five years after Churchill
warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led
by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American
leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries,
believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand
in hand.
But history, in fact, was not
over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate
formerly public property into their own hands. They did so using what scholar
Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the
techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.”
By the early 2000s, the Russian
state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on
“political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became
increasingly available.
Russian “political technologists”
used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused
state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with
names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus
open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create
opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that
enabled them to control public debate.
This system enabled leaders to
avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a
firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to
figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced
the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters
rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In 2004, Putin tried to extend
his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for
the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was
full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to
break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and
other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the
Ukrainian government voided the election.
To resurrect his political
career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort,
who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for
Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the
presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after
months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled
to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s
ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the
European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian
businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no
way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who
was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help.
Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska
know about his new position.
Russian operatives told Manafort
that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would
work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin
took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war
in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.
According to a 2020 report from
the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government
engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to
influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary
Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of
the Kremlin.”
That effort was “part of a
broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to
sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and
strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest
installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the
citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained
campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing
how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their
fellow Americans.”
In other words, they used
“political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a
false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.
The other night, President Donald
Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and
forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with
the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone
else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most
successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president,
George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at
everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.
Trump’s speech was valuable not
as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered
supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA
movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington
Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never
before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,”
“lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that
virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro
nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
Russian leaders created a false
narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public
enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk,
who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government
Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology
conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and
suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the
United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also
appear to be a prelude to privatization.
The Trump administration today
announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs
in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then
push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”
Jess Piper of The View
from Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt
to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature
of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that
enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate
individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”
In mid-February, Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the
U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14,
Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values
and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks
later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr
Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for
abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.
Most recently, United States officials
said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables
Ukraine to target Russian positions.
In a nationally televised speech, France president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to
stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the
United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries,
affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our
side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.”
Politicians in the
United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some
random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K.
after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine
peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S.
repeatedly since World War II.
“We were at war with a dictator,”
said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against
Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”
—Heather Cox Richardson
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