Russia’s election influence blown out of proportion
There are two Russian scandals connected to the 2016 campaign. One deserves the attention that it’s getting. The other is closer to — what’s the term I’m looking for? — fake news.
The real scandal involves the Russian hacking operation against the Democratic National Committee. This was a genuine crime — a meaningful theft, which led to a series of leaks that were touted by the Republican nominee often enough that we can assume that Donald Trump, at least, thought they contributed to his victory.
The fact that members of his family and inner circle were willing and eager to meet with Russians promising hacked emails, the pattern of lies and obfuscation from the president and his team thereafter, and the general miasma of Russian corruption hanging around Trump campaign staff — all of this more than justifies special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and depending on what his team ultimately reports it might even justify impeachment.
But alongside this real scandal you have the other Russian efforts to influence the election and its aftermath, the outlines of which have been apparent for some time, but which have earned a new wave of agitated attention thanks to Mueller’s indictments against a Russian troll farm.
The Russians had the clever idea to organize demonstrators on social media on both sides of our great American divide. Memes were distributed, millions of dollars spent, fake accounts employed — not just to elevate Trump (and Bernie Sanders) and discredit both party establishments, but with the broader ambition of widening our internal fissures, inflaming our debates, and making our imperium more ungovernable at home and thus weaker on the global stage.
Such conduct is certainly worthy of indictment, legal and rhetorical. What it is not worth is paranoia and hysteria, analogies to Pearl Harbor and an “America under attack”/“hacking our democracy” panic that give the Russian trolls far too much credit.
Because on the evidence we have, nothing they did particularly mattered. The Russian effort did not introduce anything to the American system that isn’t already present; it just reproduced the arguments and images and rhetorical tropes that we already hurl at one another every day.
People believed the trolls were real Americans because so many bornin-the-USA counterparts were saying exactly the same things.
And the people who believed them, by and large, were probably not the nearly 78,000 Midwestern swing voters who officially determined the election’s Electoral College outcome, since on the evidence we have most fake news is political pornography for hyperpartisans.
In this landscape, the people obsessing about how Russian influence is supposedly driving polarization and mistrust risk becoming like J. Edgar Hoover-era G-men convinced that communist subversives were the root cause of civil-rights era protest and unrest. There really were Soviet agents bent on encouraging racial conflict then, just as there are Russian trolls today. But then as now obsessing over Russian influence can become a way to deny or minimize American realities that are far more important than some provocateur’s Hillary-forprison meme.