A look at the effectiveness at Russian attempts to influence US politics through disinformation

Aleksandr Fisher analyzes one aspect of Russian disinformation operations in Demonizing the enemy: the influence of Russian state-sponsored media on American audiences Post-Soviet Affairs 36:4 (2020). It is an attempt to evaluate and measure the actual effect of one specific type of information related to Russia and Ukraine.

One notable thing about this article is Fisher’s repeated reminders that governments' information operations, common as they may be, may not have nearly the effect that policymakers hope and imagine. Yes, people running American foreign policy may be doing stuff that doesn’t necessarily work very well. This may come as a shock to some. 

Russian Interfernce in Current US Political Discourse

The influence of non-US governments on American politics has become a big issue since 2016. The Russian intervention in the 2016 Presidential election has been well documented. The actual effect of that intervention on the outcome of that election is much harder to estimate. To say that it determined the end result would require showing that a few tens of thousands of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were decisively influenced to change their votes from the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump or some third party. It would also require showing, for instance, that the reduced turnout that was seen in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, was directly related to Russian information operations.

And all of this would have to be evaluated in relation to domestic political events, notable among them FBI Director James Comey’s highly unusual announcement of an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails two weeks before Election Day. In practice, that is effectively impossible.

Then again, that’s part of what disinformation campaigns aim to do, spread information in a way that obscures its origins.

In the 2016 case, the Democrats have given a lot of emphasis to Russian interference and Trump’s seeming deferral to Vladimir Putin in many ways. Both of which are justified. But the Democratic establishment being what it is, promoting new-Cold-War attitudes and their endless fretting about sounding “tough” on foreign policy gets into the mix. And in the impeachment process in 2019-20, they deliberately emphasized Trump’s foreign shenanigans aimed at influencing American politics and mostly studiously avoided digging in the staggering corruption the administration is obviously practicing.

Here’s where I feel I should mention that there are scholars, journalists, and political analysts who have kept their heads in looking at Russian information operations in American politics. One notable example is Marcy Wheeler who posts as emptywheel at the blog of the same name.

Obviously, disinformation operations are one important factor in a complex web of relationships between the US and Russia. Here I would just note that outside of some of the more literate Republican authoritarians like Steve Bannon or Sebastian Gorka, there is not a lot of overt admiration for Vladimir Putin or his particular brand of government among the US public. So there isn’t much of a constituency for *welcoming* Russian propaganda interference in American elections. At a basic level, of course Russia and other governments (China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, and pretty much every other one) make some effort to influence American political opinion in some way. And most Americans would take it as a given that the federal government should be making efforts to counter illegal interference by foreign governments in American elections.

It’s also important to remember something that seems to be widely neglected in US media treatments of this problem. Which is that the most important measures for securing American elections are things like preventing hacking of voting systems and rigging voting machines are also things that work against *the high-priority Republican Party goal* of suppressing potential Democratic voters.

Fisher's study

Aleksandr Fisher’s article reports on “a survey experiment – analyzing the conditions under which states can influence public opinion about an adversary.” He writes, “This is the first study, to my knowledge, that measures the causal effect of modern Russian propaganda on American audiences.” (“Modern” there presumably means the post-Soviet era.) His study specifically tests whether knowing that the Russian state outlet RT is the source of a story affects the participants’ evaluation of its validity, using a story about Ukraine.

He writes of the current state of academic studies of the field:

[D]uring the Cold War, US government officials were optimistic that by providing more information to citizens in the Soviet Union, these audiences would hold their government more accountable and push for democratic reforms. According to one comprehensive study of Western broadcasting to the countries behind the Iron Curtain, Western radio had between 25 and 50 million Soviet listeners from 1978–1990, and Radio Liberty reported a weekly listenership of over 15% (35 million people) after jamming ended in 1988. While these figures may look impressive, scholars still debate the actual influence of these initiatives and foreign messaging in general. 

While information from foreign countries has never been as abundant or accessible as it is now, it is not clear how international audiences respond to information from foreign actors. A growing body of research shows that foreign actors can significantly shape public opinion. Others argue that foreign cues are ineffective or even counter-productive. Noting an in-group bias to political persuasion, some argue that foreign messages – especially from low credibility sources – will be discounted by audiences or provoke backlash effects. [my emphasis; parenthetical sources references in the original omitted without ellipses]

He emphasizes that previous studies indicate that negative propaganda communicated by one government to another country’s public about a third country can increase negative attitudes toward the third party. But he argues that they have not established it generates a positive attitude about the country running the information operation. Especially: “When citizens have weak prior opinions about a foreign nation, a small amount of negative coverage can make these negative attributes more salient.”

I’ve been following politics more-or-less actively for my whole adult life, and even before I was old enough to vote at 18. So I’m used to the need to evaluate sources and to think critically about their perspectives and biases. And that includes information from government sources. There are public news stations that are institutionally largely independent, like the BBC, Aljazeera, and RT (formerly Russia Today). They have records and reputations that people can evaluate. And those records change and evolve over time.

With an outlet like RT that is widely understood to be directed by Russian government policy, it becomes an easily accessible source for anyone who is curious for whatever reason about what the preferred Russian policy is. Even public or private stations with a reputation for bad or crassly propagandistic journalism, such as FOX News or One America, can be a source to see what their propaganda position of the moment is. And also, it’s notable when they provide reporting that goes against their usual ideological mode, as when some leading FOX News figure criticizes Trump directly. “Evidence against interest,” attorneys call it.

For instance, in Fischer’s article, I was struck by a sentence when he uncritically cites the shadowy PropOrNot group, which is a highly dubious sources, though he does note it is an “anonymous” group, an important qualifier. (On PropOrNot, see: Dave Lindorff, Rather Than Exposing Propaganda, WaPo Shows How It’s Done FAIR 12/08/2016) That raises a caution for me about his choice of sources. But that doesn’t mean I dismiss everything in the piece, not least because he provides extensive citations of his other sources.

He finds from his study that negative RT information affected the American participants’ attitudes toward Ukraine negatively, even when they knew RT was the source. “People still have less favorable attitudes toward Ukraine when they know the information comes from a Russian-funded news network. They also do not become any less critical of Ukraine when they are told the intentions of the Russian news network.”

He makes this qualification:

I find some evidence that providing information about the intentions of RT mitigates the effect of propaganda in individuals with greater levels of political awareness ... What this means in practice is that making the source of foreign information apparent is an important counterpropaganda strategy, but it may only be effective on a limited audience with sufficient prior knowledge about the topic. Individuals with low levels of prior knowledge about Ukraine are actually more likely to adopt less favorable attitudes toward Ukraine when presented the treatment with more information about the Russian network.

The level of information is apparently based on a self-identification of the participants, rather than on any kind of test requiring them to demonstrate specific knowledge.

This being an actual scholarly article, Fisher lists various possible weaknesses of the study and the sampling. The survey was taken in October 2016, more than two years after the intensive reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict around the time Russia occupied and annexed Crimea. And one of the limitations he identifies is the fact that “the conflict in Ukraine is a low-saliency issue for most Americans.” (my italics)

The international coverage by American media has been drastically cut back since the end of the Cold War. Unless Americans have a particularly strong independent connection with a particular foreign country, like Cuban or Venezuelan exiles or their descendants, most people are likely to take their cues about a foreign country from the American government’s position as communicated by American media. Most Americans in October 2018 probably had a vague idea that the US was siding with Russia against Ukraine over some conflict. But knowing anything substantial about internal events or political forces in Ukraine? Being able to identify Ukraine on a map with borders but no names shown? Not nearly so likely.

So it’s not surprising that when confronted with more specific information about Ukraine, most participants wouldn’t have a basis to raise appropriate questions or challenge specific claims. Especially if it’s not framed specifically in the context of American foreign policy positions. 

An Appendix detailing the survey results is available online and not behind subscription: Supplementary Online Appendix.

Trump, hypocrisy and lies: the difference between "hypocrisy in democracy" and "hypocrisy about democracy"

David Runciman's Book Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond was first published in 2008. For the 2018 revised edition, he added an Afterword in which he addresses the current US President and his political style. (The name "Trump" appears only in the Afterword.)

I won't try to comment here on Runciman's main historical argument. The Afterword gives attention to the 2016 race and discusses the difference in a politician's being perceived as a liar rather than a hypocrite. This is his summary from the close of the main text:

Liberal societies have always attracted accusations of hypocrisy from the outside, because of their failure to live up to their own standards. But seen from the inside, it is clear that the problem of hypocrisy in liberal politics is a good deal more complicated than this. What matters is not whether liberals are worse than they would like to appear, but whether they can be honest with themselves about the gaps that are bound to exist between the masks of politics and what lies behind those masks. This honesty cannot be taken as a given - liberal societies, particularly once they have become bound up with the requirements of democratic politics, are as capable as any others of self-deception. But liberal politics, and liberal political theory, have the advantage that they are able to probe the gaps between political appearance and political reality without either overstating them, or seeking to deny them altogether. This then is one of the resources that a history of liberal political thought has to offer. Armed with a sense of historical perspective, we can see that many forms of political hypocrisy are unavoidable, and therefore not worth worrying about, and that some others are even desirable in a democratic setting, and therefore worth encouraging. But, as Hobbes says, when hypocrisy deprives us of our ability to see what is at stake in our political life, then it still has the capacity to ruin everything for everyone. [my emphasis]

An example that we could take would be American or European politicians celebrating the equal rule of law. That is a basic principle of liberal government, and their legal systems are structured so that the law applies equally to all. (Let's leave Hungary and Poland aside for the moment.)

On the other hand, social and economic factors, ranging from access to qualified attorneys to rascist police practices to official corruption and other factors besides, mean that in lived reality the rule of law does not apply equally to all. Labor unions have known since they have existed that formal equality before the law does not make real class factors disappear. But that doesn't mean that the formal equal rule of law should be abandoned. It also means that it is important for political leaders to support the formal rule of law. And they can and should use the principle of equal rule of law to address the actual impediments to realizing it in practice.

In his 2018 Afterword, he discusses both formal research and his own observations of the 2016 Presidential campaign to elaborate differences in public perception of policies who they take to be liars and those they perceive to be hypocrites.

Runciman argues that in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was probably more damaged by perceptions of her as a hypocrite than Trump was damaged by clearly and obviously being a liar. But he also discusses how voter perceptions of hypocrisy and dishonesty in serving officials is different than for political challengers.

He sees that the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump 2016 race "was the definitive embodiment of the clash between the honest hypocrite and the sincere liar; and ... the liar won." His concept of "honest hypocrites" refers to those practicing "a form of reserve or holding back in the spirit of avoiding untruths." On the other hand, politicians who are more comfortable with lying about their own positions or feelings can come off more sympathetic, because they are better at feigning empathy, concern, and agreement.

Here I find myself raising a caution. Because this line of analysis is uncomfortably similar on the surface to the lazy American pundits' focus on theater criticism in their reporting of campaigns. Particularly their silly obsession with "authenticity". Our corporate media pundits thought the plutocrat trust-fund-baby George W. Bush was "authentic," because he was "the kind of guy you want to have a beer with." Mark Shields alone must have used that line a hundred times during the 2000 campaign. It was also a weird thing to say about a guy who was open about having had an alcohol problem. The same establishment pundits also ridiculed Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 being "inauthentic" stiffs.

The pundit version of "authenticity" is painfully superficial. But even today, in a Twitter-and-YouTube political world, the corporate media is still a major influence on how politicians come across to the general public, especially in a Presidential race.

Runciman, though, is making a more focused argument. Clinton had been the target of relentless rightwing attacks since 1992 and a particular focus of Rush-Limbaugh-ish misogyny. And even more substantive commentators like Gene Lyons who were generally sympathetic to her noted with regret that she wasn't a "natural" politician in the glad-handing, "hey, man, how 'ya doing, how's your wife Martha?" mold. Joe Biden is a master of the traditional glad-handing style, e.g., his signature phrase, "C'mon, man!" Hillary Clinton always came off by comparison as a bit of a stiff to those who didn't adore her. And Runciman makes a good observation about her serving as Secretary of State, the chief US diplomat, under Obama: "honest hypocrisy is the diplomat’s calling card."

Clinton’s cool demeanor, her tireless attention to detail and her persistence made her an effective advocate for America’s interests abroad. But these same qualities came back to haunt her as a presidential candidate. Two incidents from her time in office - her use of a private email server and her conduct during and after the attack at Benghazi - left her fatally exposed. It did not matter that she was able to defend herself effortlessly when a Congressional select committee tried to nail her over the Benghazi affair during eight hours of testimony in 2015. On that occasion she came across as better informed and smarter than her critics. But on the campaign trail her attention to detail seemed like nit- picking, and nit-picking is not far from covering your tracks, which in itself is tantamount to having something to hide. [my emphasis]

On the other hand:

Above all, Trump could claim to be something other than a politician. He had the authenticity [!] that came with being an outsider to the game that Hillary had been playing much of her adult life. He was not, of course, an outsider to the elite social circles in which the Clintons moved (Bill and Hillary had both attended his wedding to Melania in 2005). But in public he used a kind of language— blunt, crude, impulsive, vicious— that was wholly alien to their manner of political performance. Trump often spoke on stage as though he were not on stage at all. It made his performances all the more compelling. Above all, Trump lied. He lied repeatedly, carelessly, with abandon. Hillary Clinton edged around the truth. Bill Clinton twisted it. Trump didn’t seem to care about it at all. [my emphasis]

He makes an argument that strikes me as counterintuitive but plausible. He argues that:

... lying is for many people less offensive than hypocrisy. As I argued in this book, hypocrisy is such an affront in democratic politics because of the implied tone of superiority that comes with it. The hypocrite seems to be saying that some things can only be discussed among the grown- ups, who do not include the voters. So what the voters get is the patronizing brush-off, dressed up as a solicitous concern for their welfare. They are treated like children. The essence of Clinton’s weakness was her inability to shake the impression that she was doing the real business of her politics behind the scenes. There is a kind of honesty to this: after all, that is where the main business of politics has always been done, even in a democracy. But it is fatal not to be able to give a different impression. Trump was the master of giving that impression. Everything about how he presented himself seemed to say: what you see is what you get. He did not try to hide the fact that he didn’t care about the truth. There was something transparent about his evasiveness. [my emphasis]

But he also explains that not trying "to hide the fact that he didn’t care about the truth" plays differently for Trump as President. Because, in Runciman's view, "the liar cannot govern without becoming a hypocrite." And Runciman was writing over two years before the COVID-19 pandemic:

Trump’s presidency has exposed the limits of his approach to politics, because as president he has made a mockery of the institutions of government that he leads. This is what I called second-order hypocrisy: Trump’s personal authenticity as a non-thinking non-politician might win him the campaign, but to govern in those terms is to operate at a far deeper level of inconsistency. The non-politician trying to do the real business of democratic politics - building coalitions, maintaining them, and ultimately passing legislation - risks getting nothing done. [my emphasis]

In other words, actual experience in politics and government counts for a lot in a President!

Trump’s hypocrisy does not lie in the fact that he said he was one thing and then he turned out to be something else. He is what he purports to be, a chancer and an opportunist (he has lied about who he is - successful businessman, doting family man, friend of the poor, etc. - but that’s what makes him such a chancer). The destructive hypocrisy of Trump’s presidency is that he said he would do things in office that he has no idea how to do, certainly not within the bounds of democratic politics. He pretends democracy is one thing - bombast and bullying - when it is in fact something else. As I have argued, hypocrisy in democracy is both inevitable and in many ways essential. But hypocrisy about democracy can be fatal. Trump is the second kind of hypocrite, which is the worst kind of all. [my emphasis]

The endless argument over Trumpism and "economic circumstances"

Walker Bragman did a tweet this past week that set off a bit of a flap in the quasi-theological dispute over Racism/Sexism vs. Economics, a perennial favorite on the left that constantly morphs in its particulars.

The issues involved are real and have been part of American politics since 1776 or so in some form or another. But they sometimes wind up sounding like the proverbial medieval theological disputes over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This was not actually a theme in medieval Christian theology, but why spoil a good metaphor? (It apparently evolved as a polemical mockery of scholastic Christian theology including that of Thomas Aquinas.)

Bragman writes as a progressive, including this piece for the social-democratic journal Jacobin, Does Joe Kennedy Still Believe Austerity Is the “Right Blueprint Forward”? 08/26/2020, in which he criticizes Congressman Joe Kennedy's advocacy of austerity economics in the context of his losing campaign against progressive Democratic Sen. Jeff Markley. Nancy Pelosi made a point of endorsing Kennedy in that campaign to attempt to strengthen the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in the Senate. Or "establishment wing," if you prefer.

Bragman reminds his readers in that piece about an aspect of the Obama-Biden Administration that Democrats would prefer not to flag in an election year:

In August 2012, just three years after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression up to that point, Kennedy was a first-time congressional candidate. During a debate hosted by the Martin Institute at Stonehill College, Kennedy told moderators that something had to be done about the debt and deficit and that the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan had gotten it more or less right. That plan — which came out of a White House commission touted by Vice President Joe Biden — proposed cuts to Social Security, along with Medicare and Medicaid. [my emphasis]

Obama in his 2008 campaign against John McCain, and to a large extent in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, presented a more progressive image than the way he actually governed. From the perspective of 2020, there's a good argument to be made that the 2008 crisis (the recession in the US technically started in 2007) represents a turning point where the neoliberal model of both parties that dates back to the 1978-80 period had run out of steam. Without going off on that particular tangent here, the Cheney-Bush model of governance on the Republican side, of which Trumpism is a direct if bizarre successor, and the Clintonite model of "bipartisan" centrism on the Democratic side, had hit their practical limits within the liberal democratic system.

The 2008 Democratic primary and the feminist/antiracist dichotomy

It requires a bit of effort now to recall, but Obama in 2008 was widely seen as the insurgent progressive candidate opposing the more conservative Hillary Clinton. The late Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent figures on the American left in the second half of the 20th century, evidently found himself torn about the diverging political currents in the Democratic Party. In 2008, he endorsed Obama over Clinton in the primaries. But in 2016, he endorsed Clinton over Bernie Sanders, as Miles Mogulescu describes in an obituary memory, My Last Visit With Tom Hayden and Why He Endorsed Hillary Over Bernie HuffPost 10/25/2016 (updated 12/06/2017).

But his perspective didn't necessarily take such a drastic turn as it might seem on the surface. In Obama’s Position on Iraq Could Put His Candidacy at Risk Huffpost (07/12/2008, updated 05/25/2011), he wrote:

Call him slippery or nuanced, Barack Obama‘s core position on Iraq has always been more ambiguous than audacious. Now it is catching up with him as his latest remarks are questioned by the Republicans, the mainstream media, and the antiwar movement. He could put his candidacy at risk if his audacity continues to shrivel.

I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, I believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements.

And of course, there is the need to end the Republican reign that began with a stolen election followed by eight years of war and torture, corporate gouging, environmental decay, domestic spying and right-wing court appointments, just in case we forget who Obama is running against.

So he recognized from the get-go that Obama's progressive image was far more style than substance. And he treated that as a practical pragmatic choice. The "identity" aspects of the 2008 Democratic primary had to do with the Hillary campaign trying to emphasize the feminist value of having a female President while trying, relatively discretely, to use Obama's race against him. The "Bernie Bros" label her supporters used in 2016 was proceeded by an "Obama Boys" label in 2008. Rebecca Traister wrote in Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Salon 04/14/2008:

I received e-mails and phone calls from women voicing various strains of frustration: They told me about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends; some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women. Others had to find ways to call me out of earshot of their Obama-loving boyfriends.

Actually, Traister's article doesn't really work the racial implication of the phrase "Obama Boys" in the title. And it's a useful real-time account of the antiracism-vs.-feminism theme of that primary.

What we might call the "economic identity" or "class identity" aspect of that 2008 campaign was actually blurred by the dreary conditions of the economy and the general failures of the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a safe assumption during the primary season that a Democratic Administration would be more proactive in stimulating the economy than the Republicans. And also they would handle emergencies like Hurricane Katrina better.

But as Traister noted with this quote from Mia Brunch, who "points to healthcare as an area in which 'Hillary's policy is the more politically progressive one, but this has somehow been ignored, and Obama was projected upon as the progressive redeemer. It's a political fantasy.'"

In addition, Obama's criticism of the Iraq War when he was a state senator in Illinois contrasted dramatically in the minds of antiwar voters with Clinton's vote for the Iraq War as a US Senator. And that was a really big deal in the 2008 primary.

Tom Hayden in the piece quoted above also referred to "the transforming nature of an African-American presidency." The very fact that enough voters were willing to get enough beyond the still deep-seated white racism to vote for an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama for President was certainly a sign that lots of them were in a mood for a transformative Presidency after the Cheney-Bush years. And his presence in the White House as a competent, popular President was a living example of the falsehood of still deeply-ingrained racial prejudices.

But Obama presided over a transactional Presidency, not a transformative one. Hayden's caution about how much Obama's actual policy priorities would be progressive and antiwar were well founded. Obama's conservatism in economic policy, symbolized as Bragman rightly observes by the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles austerity plan that Obama and Biden supported, did not become associated with the anti-sexism/anti-racism-vs.-economic-progressivism in 2008 they way it did in 2020.

The 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and "identity" politics vs. "class" politics

Liberal New Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who in the 1990s found themselves in company with the neoliberal Clintonian version of globalization optimism found themselves by 2009 ringing the alarms over the reactionary nature of the austerity politics. Krugman started talking about the destructive effects of the media and establishment economics deference to those he mockingly labeled the Very Serious People. He named Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as being emblematic of the VSPs, who he defined as "someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence." (Faithocrats New York Times 07/14/2015) He quoted the following observation of John Maynard Keynes in that connection, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally."

By 2016, Bernie Sanders was able to make a effective primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, campaigning as a "democratic socialist" who put forth an unapologetic New Deal type program emphasizing the need to create jobs and strengthen labor unions while also taking a strong stand on civil-rights and civil liberties. Sanders himself had strong roots in the civil rights movement. But as the representative of the very white state of Vermont, he had not been so prominently identified with civil rights causes over the years as some other leading Democrats. He stressed populist appeals to bring new voters into the active electorate and to shore up Democratic support in traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states where Republicans had gained considerable ground.

Hillary Clinton's campaign, heavily favored by the Democratic establishment controlling the Democratic National Committee (which should by their own rules have been neutral in the primary contest) emphasized civil-rights issues of combatting racism, sexism, and immigrant rights along with a continuation of VSP, Simpson-Bowles type economics, stressing the historic value of having a female President. Their campaign popularized the term "Bernie Bros" to dismiss Sanders and his supporters as racist and sexist, or at least weak on those issues.

Tom Hayden explained his reasons for endorsing Hillary over Bernie in the California Democratic primary in 2016 in I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My Mind The Nation 04/12/2020. It's a nuanced piece, which as I read it essentially argues in that moment that he going along with what he took to be a more-or-less inevitable Hillary win for the nomination. I voted the other way in that California primary myself. But he clearly was not expecting Hillary to govern as a flaming progressive.

Starting then and continuing to the present day, an establishment Democratic narrative became established which treated left-populist appeals and programmatic goals as inherently sexist and racist. Given Vladimir Putin's demonstrated fondness for the Trump campaign in 2016, Russian interference in American politics inevitably became an issue. Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment tried to package their criticism at times in what strongly resembled stereotypical and superficial Cold War rhetoric. And to a certain extent, that included an effort to smear left-populist Democrats like Bernie as at least vaguely un-American, as well. In one of the Democratic debates in 2019, Joe Biden interrupted Sanders while he was making a pitch for Medicare For All, aka, national health insurance, by injecting, "This is America!" (Biden shrugs off health-care costs when Sanders brings up Canada: 'This is America' The Week 09/12/2019)

That was at least factually true. The kind of national health insurance that is standard in Europe and much of the rest of the world and which produces much better overall public health results than the US private-insurance-based system is something that the United States has never had.

Dancing with the angels on the pin

The Democratic Party definitely has a progressive wing and corporate (more-or-less conservative) wing. The actual voters in the two Democratic camps are not themselves at this moment deeply divided over issues. But the corporate donors are deeply divided from the majority of the base that does want national health insurance, a Green New Deal, a revived labor movement, nuclear disarmament, and a genuinely peace-oriented foreign policy. The corporate donors want their corporate-deregulation international "trade" treaties and, massive subsidies for Wall Street with minimal restraint, and freedom for billionaires from the awful burden of paying taxes to support their country and their communities.

But they are happy to have the Democrats use mostly symbolic positions to show voters they are "woke" on issues relating to racism and sexism. Nancy Pelosi clapping sideways at the State of the Union address doesn't cost Democratic corporate donors a dime.

All this is a way of positioning the political rhetoric around these issues in the present-day US context. The multiple identities of even individual voters is obviously a compliated factor in politics. The notion of "intersectionality" emerged as a way to think about the multiple social identifications that voters have.

Here's where Bragman's tweet put him in the Twitter crossfire on an issue that is not very well suited for clarification on Twitter. (To put it mildly!) He was making reference here to the hardcore radical right. Journalists and political analysts are inclined to roll their eyes at what looks like a superficial "economic circumstances" argument to explain radical-right politics.

For one thing, looking at sociological trends is different than looking at individual motivations of highly engaged political activists. A child of an oligarchical family like Franklin Roosevelt can wind up as a "class traitor" who defended the rights of workers, farmers, and labor unions against the Economic Royalists of the 1930s. A kid from relatively modest circumstances like Paul Ryan who depended on public social insurance (i.e., Social Security) to get through college can winded up as an advocate for the Koch Brothers who wants to force grandmas everywhere to make catfood their principal nutrition.

Economic factors like employment, income levels, extreme of inequality all do affect voters political behavior and attitudes on politics and public policy. So do race, gender, national origin, region, religion, family political allegiances, employment, education, personal traumas like illness and divorce - the list goes on. Then there are psychological factors, like those described by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer in their new book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020).

Especially after Trump's election, it became a dreary ritual for the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to send reporters out into the exotic heartland diners and interview conservative white people about why they voted for Trump and then did faithful stenography of their complaints about how all the city slickers and Mean Libruls looked down on them and that's why they found Trump's p****y-grabbing and xenophobic ranting about Mexican rapists so attractive.

A scholarly version of this misguided approach is Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right  (2016). She did a kind of participant-observer study of white people in Lake Charles, Louisiana in which she listened to their stories of how they were being picked on by them thar Mean Libruls and uppity black folks. And then she reported it out apparently without adequate inquiry into the factual basis of the claims they were making and also without putting their favorite narratives about the world into the long narrative tradition of Southern white-supremacist assumptions.

What we now calls issues of "intersectionality" are nothing new in left-leaning politics. Just Google German Social Democratic Party and "woman question" or "national question" to discover some of the abundant historical examples with just that one party. Or dig a bit into the history of the American anti-slavery movement to find many examples of how racial assumptions crossed class lines and also how wealthy interests have deliberately used white racism. The pre-Civil War slave patrols in the South are one historical example, which I discussed in a 2016 post (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 3: Slave patrols and ... "false consciousness"? 04/03/206):

The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that searched for blacks who were not on plantations. Plantations had their own plantation patrols, as well. The slave patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. The slave patrols gave free whites who might be inclined to political and/or violent anger against wealthy slaveowners the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free. And that's a key reason that participation was mandatory.

The fear of slave revolts was widespread and ingrained into daily life in the South prior to the Civil War. It was accompanied by periodic panics over them, most of which existed only the in the fevered, guilty imaginations of white people. Though slave resistance and the occasional slave revolt really did occur, too. John Brown fanned those fears with his plan to set up a guerrilla army in the South to free slaves in the years immediately before the Civil War.

The slave patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan is the most infamous.

Yes, racism, sexism, and xenophobia, and authoritarianism are all phenemena that are not purely dependent on immediate economic conditions or class identity. But they also exist within economic systems that both shape them are are shaped by them. The details of "intersectionality" will always present particular complications that will get translated into political rhetoric in a variety of ways.

Amy Coney Barrett and the twilight (?) of American democracy

Writing about American politics right now seems a bit like writing on of those obituaries news organizations keep in the can on prominent people.

Only the subject in this case is American democracy. Because as Bernie Sanders said in a speech this past week, "This is not just an election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is an election between Donald Trump and democracy." Sen. Sanders on Trump's 'threat to our democracy' PBS Newshour 09/24/2020:

But my favorite bellwether for mainstream Beltway Village commentary, the Mark Shields and Bobo Brooks weekly gab fest, provides a picture that fits into the mood of mourning, and of dread that liberal democracy is the US is on the verge of a sad turning point, Shields and Brooks on Ginsburg’s legacy, Trump’s election rhetoric PBS Newshour 09/25/2020:

Short version of the discussion on Trump's new Supreme Court nominee, rightwing Catholic/Pentecostal theocrat Amy Coney Barrett:

Bobo (verbally finger wagging): It would be very, very naughty For Democrats to challenge Bennett's qualification to be a Supreme Court Justice in any way.

Shields: David's absolutely right. Nothing could be worse than for the Democrats to fight for their own side in this confrontation, which the Democrats shouldn't treat as a confrontation at all.

More literally:

Bobo:

Amy Coney Barrett also has values. She's a conservative. She is well-regarded. When she was Supreme Court clerk to Antonin Scalia, all of the clerks, regardless of party affiliation, admired her. When she was on the Notre Dame Law faculty, all of the faculty members, regardless of party ideology, admired her, that, personally, she seems — I have never met her.

She seems reputed to be a wonderful person. But she has a conservative record. She was a law professor for a long time and wrote a lot of articles, some of which were controversial and, in her 2017 confirmation hearings, were brought up.

I think it'll be hard to mount personal attacks, given what we know now. But there will be some conservative attacks. [Presumably meaning attacks on her conservatism]

Shields:

She — you could say, if you're a conservative, she's probably not going to be John Roberts. She is a true-blue and committed conservative.

But I would point out, as David laid out sort of the political land mines for Democrats, she has admirable personal credentials, the mother of seven, two adopted children. She brought a Down syndrome pregnancy to birth, a child, is raising it, and was endorsed by both, not only the conservative members of the law faculty at Notre Dame, but all the liberals as well.

I think it's a potential land mine for both sides. To the degree that abortion becomes the centerpiece issue, it's going to be a problem for Republicans among suburban women. To the degree that it becomes an issue and the Democrats go on the offensive against Amy Coney Barrett, then Joe Biden's hopes of reaching out across to blue-collar white voters who had flirted with Trump in the past, maybe former Democrats, becomes a problem.

And I think if, in fact, there is any sort of a mean personal attack mounted against her, it will only — it will only hurt the Democrats.

You get the drift.

Both cheerfully ignored the immediate effect of her approval for the Court could mean for Trump's brazenly advertised intentions to steal the election to stay in power. Shields did conclude the segment with a sadly expressed hope "that there is some beat [sic] of a soul still left in the party of Abraham Lincoln."

Why he may think such a hope is realistic in any way, he didn't say.

But appointing another far-right hack to the Supreme Court actually is a very big deal, especially at this possibly very late date in the history of American democracy as we've know it.

Michael O’Loughlin writing for the Jesuit America gives a carefully Mugmump description of the male-supremacist, theocratic "ecumenical" group with which Barrett is closely associated, Explainer: Amy Coney Barrett’s relationship with People of Praise 09/24/2020.

See also:

• Stephanie Mencimer, It’s Not Anti-Catholic to Ask Amy Coney Barrett About Her Religious Group “People of Praise” Mother Jones 09/24/2020
• Karen Robinson-Jacobs, Here’s What To Know About People Of Praise, The Christian Group Amy Coney Barrett Belongs To Forbes 09/26/2020
• Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Amy Coney Barrett: spotlight falls on secretive Catholic group People of Praise Guardian 09/26/2020
• Chrissy Stroop, Why the Media and Democrats Should Reject the Christian Rights's Pearl-Clutching and Address Problematic Religious Views Religion Dispatches 09/25/2020:

No one is raising objections to the possible nomination of Barrett for a SCOTUS seat on the basis of her being a Christian. If anyone actually contended that Christian faith is disqualifying, that would leave very few eligible appointees to any position in a majority Christian nation. But to effectively push back on the flood of gaslighting currently being unleashed by the Christian Right, we need to flip the script.

Lord knows (if you’ll pardon the expression), the Democratic Party is far from godless. But, while God talk in the party may sometimes annoy non-religious Democrats, no serious liberal argues that adherence to a religion itself is disqualifying for public office, which would be to advocate for an unconstitutional position. The difference is this: in the vast majority of cases, Democrats of faith understand their religious commitments as compatible with an approach to pluralism that provides robust equality for all in the public square. Right-wing Christians, on the other hand, espouse an anti-pluralist understanding of their faith, using and abusing the rhetoric of “religious freedom” to demand the right to be, as it were, “more equal than others.”

[Updated to correct misspelling of Amy Coney Barrett's name]

Again on the Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbard controversy

Since I mentioned the current Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbart flap in a long previous post, I'm going to follow up with a couple of links and some comments.

The Clinton statements in question came in an October 17 interview with David Plouffe on his podcast, Campaign HQ. The interview is around 45 minutes, and an interesting and informative one. Hillary is smart and has an incredible amount of experience in politics and law.

The Tulsi Gabbart moment comes in the second half. PolitiFact has provided a partial transcript that includes the Gabbart part. (Miriam Valverde, In Context: Hillary Clinton on Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump campaign and Russia 10/22/2019) This is from the transcript, talking about the 2020 general election and assuming that Trump will be the Republican candidate:

Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"

"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."

Plouffe: (Inaudible)

Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.

"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."

The part that PolitiFact quotes begins in the podcast at around 33:00 minutes.

After listening to the whole podcast, my judgment is still that Clinton was strongly implying that Tulsi Gabbard is being groomed by Russia to be a spoiler third party candidate. She doesn't use Gabbard's name, but I've yet to see anyone suggest she was talking about Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Amy Klobuchar. Even in the quote included above, it also sounds like she's implying that Gabbard is a "Russian asset" like she specifically accuses Jill Stein of being.

Anyone can misspeak. But Hillary Clinton is not exactly new to giving media interviews. And as the rest of the interview shows, she's able to deliver her points articulately and convincingly. Earlier in the interview at around 22:00, she talks about Trump's campaign and Russian interference and how she expects it to happen again in 2020. After the interview is over, Plouffe also assumed that she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard in that section quoted above.

So that's my reading of what she was saying about Tulsi Gabbard without naming her explicitly. And I won't recap here what I said about why that's problematic in my earlier post.

But I would also encourage people to listen to the postcast. For one thing, it's an illustration of how impressive Hillary Clinton comes across in this format, as opposed to her stump speech style. And she's providing some well-informed political analysis here. She comes across very strongly on her criticism of voter suppression.

But I will add that, unlike what she presents in this podcast, I haven't seen the evidence from the post-election voting and polling analyses that the third party voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was decisive to the 2016 Electoral College outcome.

Protecting US elections from foreign bad actors

Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow have a new article on one of the many dark aspects of the Trump campaign in 2016, Annals of Covert Action New Yorker 02/18 & 25/2019 issue (accessed 02/12/2019). It's about an Israeli firm, Psy-Group, which has "attracted the attention of the F.B.I. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, has been examining the firm’s activities as part of his investigation into Russian election interference and other matters." And it deals more broadly with former intelligence officials working for private intelligence firms, though its focus is on Psy-Group.

Many paragraphs into the article, Entous and Farrow report that after the fall of the USSR, American intelligence officials began to think that previous "information operations" had been overrated in their effectciveness. But:

Russian military and intelligence agencies, on the other hand, didn’t see information warfare as a sideshow. They invested in cyber weapons capable of paralyzing critical infrastructure, from utilities to banks, and refined the use of fake personae and fake news to fuel political and ethnic discord abroad. “We underestimated how significant it was,” Lwin said, of these online influence operations. “We didn’t appreciate it—until it was in our face.”

The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.”

Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?” [my emphasis]

The actual impact of "information operations" are inherently difficult to measure clearly. No one doubts that advertising has its effects. Or that propaganda can be effective at shaping a public narrative or exploting fears at a particular crisis moment. Will Bunch tweets cautiously:

20. That would be a lot worse than some burglars breaking into the Watergate back in the day. It would be a foreign effort to hijack our election. The worse part? Trump only won by 100,000 votes in 3 states. It may have worked. -30-

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) February 12, 2019

People need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. I think it's perfectly sensible to say that the results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania indicates that the Russian operation may have worked. But in any outcome so overdetermined as a US Presidential election, it's very difficult to tie that down. The result may have been inadequate polling, insufficient media buys, and weaknesses in the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation, too. It may have been Jill Stein's Green Party candidacy.

For me, it's obvious that its the responsibility of the government to counter cyber mischief by foreign governments or private operators. It the responsibility of the government at all levels to enforce campaign laws, including those against illegal campaign donations by non-citizens. And the potential for corruption and various kinds of pressure against US national interests from the Trump Crime Family's various business dealings with Russia should be taken seriously, fully investigated, and prosecuted where appropriate.

Those two considerations are not at all mutually exclusive. I'll also add in the interest of realistically understand the Russian intervention in 2016 that it's by no means clear to me that Putin's government actually wanted to get Trump elected President. From what I've seen and heard from journalists, scholars, and officials who have some legitimate claims to expertise on the topic of such Russian operations, it sounds more likely that the goal was to damage Hillary Clinton politically in order to weaken her Presidency. As much as Putin may like some of Trump's decisions and the effects of his politics in the US, would an old KGB hand like Putin really want and unpredictable and apparently seriously unstable guy like Trump running the US?

Will Bunch himself wrote a story last year whose topic relates to that of the New Yorker story, How the Trump family sold U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder Philadelphia Inquirer 05/20/2018. In it, he calls attention to this important story: Mark Mazzetti et al, How the Trump family sold U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder New York Times 05/19/2018.