Is Our Democracy at Risk?

It seems pretty obvious to me that Russia declared war on the United States last year, and it’s a war that continues to be waged today.

Unlike the Cold War in which the Soviet Union and the United States aimed thousands of weapons of mass destruction at each other’s population centers, this is perhaps the first time in modern history that Russia has directly attacked the United States - on American soil no less - and precision aimed at what matters most: the integrity of our democratic process.

The other issue I find troubling is exactly how and why Russia’s sustained attack on the U.S. has been so successful.

We’ve barely begun to acknowledge that millions of our own people - American voters on both sides of the aisle - were manipulated into acting as unwitting foot soldiers for Vladimir Putin’s invasion. It’s rather frightening to see the ease with which tens of millions of Americans were suckered by Putin’s plot and acted in accordance with it.

An emerging perfect storm in America made this possible. Here’s a few contributing factors:

1. A growing distrust in government institutions
2. Distrust in the 24/7 news media
3. A 24/7 news cycle more interested in ratings than fact
4. Universal social-media usage
5. The willingness to repeat outrageous rumors
6. Political polarization
7. Social media information bubbles & echo chambers
8. Allowing politicians unlimited funding by special interest

The brilliance of Putin’s war against democracy is that he was able to successfully exploit these elements of our discourse in order to turn our own people against one another.

The hard reality I’ve come to acknowledge: Americans are deeply vulnerable to digital manipulation and weaponized social-media hoaxes.

Putin observed our vulnerability through the lens of a seasoned KGB veteran. He viewed it all as exploitable weakness and subsequently recruited malicious hackers linked to the Russian intelligence community. With the apparent support of WikiLeaks and quite likely some working in our own political circles, Putin injected countless volumes of disinformation into our virtual bloodstream.

One would have hoped that an informed society would recognize such propaganda as it scrolls across its smartphones and computer screens. But sadly, we’re no longer a conscientious or informed society. We believe what we choose to believe, based not on evidence or peer-reviewed facts, but on ideology and whether the information we encounter conforms to the rules of our particular team. We seem to have also decided that each of us is an expert in everything. (and we’re definitely not.)

The blind acceptance of Russian propaganda, because it happened to include partial “facts” that some of us were starved to read, is what turned otherwise decent though gullible Americans into Putin’s infantry. It has turned our informed voters into attacking zombies - feeding on one another.

Twitter feed by Twitter feed; Facebook group by Facebook group; Americans executed Putin’s plan for him. Bother turning against brother - friends turning on friends. Putin lobbed fake news and ridiculous conspiracy theories into social media. Pundits (not journalists) used these to make themselves famous. It fed the 24/7 news cycle. It was a textbook “divide and conquer” strategy - turn the people on one another.

I don’t think Putin’s attack was necessarily aimed at electing Donald Trump (while he certainly contributed to that). It’s deeper and more disturbing than that. It’s more about turning Americans against America. Now we all suffer from a skewed view of U.S. elections today. We’re all more suspicious about whether our elections are on the level, and we should be. We wonder will we trust the outcomes of future elections — knowing that Russia began this manipulation several years ago and then set about guaranteeing Putin's desired outcome - turning our people against one another. We’ve been told by our own newly minted President that over 3 million people voted illegally (albeit with no supporting evidence). And sadly, we have citizens who believe that.

In my simple view, we have two huge tasks ahead of us: to re-establish the integrity of our electoral process; re-establishing facts and reality as the basis for our decisions.

There are too many of us who sadly and disturbingly can’t tell the difference between foreign propaganda — fake news — and legitimate news. This has to change or else Putin will have won, and democracy as we know it will cease to exist.