I can tell that more people are starting to pay attention to that nasty “politics” thing that they hate so much. Unfortunately, because they don’t like “politics” they aren’t prepared for the onslaught of mis- and disinformation being firehosed into the brains of our electorate.
An old high school friend on Facebook just posted a paragraph stating that it is her right not to vote in protest to what she sees as nothing but bad options. She didn’t elaborate, and I won’t ask her (at least not on her public post) what she thinks the bad options are, but…
I’m also frightened and frustrated to see people making that choice.
It is especially terrifying because one of the stated, desired outcomes of the various disinformation campaigns is to undermine Americans’ faith in the democratic system - in other words, to convince them there is no hope and that they should stay home.1
There are three things that happen when voters don’t vote:
A depressed voter turnout reduces the legitimacy of the “winners” - which, I realize, is kind of the point of the protest vote in the first place, but…
When you drop out because you don’t like the choices for U.S. Presidents, you make it harder for local candidates and issues that you might otherwise support to win, and
…you make it easier for the actual Bad Guys (tm) to win.
I despise it when people try to use fear to manipulate me, so I hate that I am reduced to waving the Bad Guy card at you as a threat. But I am also a person who does pay attention. On the off chance you don’t know this about me, the Air Force taught me Russian in 1995, and while I didn’t stay a Russian linguist, I have paid attention to Russia both professionally and not professionally for nearly 30 years - and it is my expert opinion that what they want for our country is dangerous.
I don’t claim to speak with any authority, but when I warn you about what is at stake, you should consider the fact that I have based my opinions about who the Bad Guys are on thirty years of observation and skeptical questioning. The whole point of this Substack feed of mine is to examine my biases and question my assumptions about things.
That paying attention thing also means that when a guy named Paul Manafort showed up in 2015 to help a clownish would-be strongman get elected as U.S. President, I already knew who Manafort was and what his offer to work “for free” meant. It meant the same thing that it meant when Vladimir Putin had his friend Oleg Deripaska hire Manafort to help elect a pro-Putin thug named Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine in 2010.
Russia and Putin have never been subtle about what their goals are or how they plan to achieve those goals. Putin has said publicly, many times - sometimes on U.S. soil with international media broadcasting his words - that he wants to show Americans that we aren’t so great, that our democracy is flawed, and that he wants to destroy NATO. He has been publically blaming the U.S. for Russia’s economic and political problems since he first became Russia’s president in 2000. He hates the Clinton family in particular because he considered their relationship with his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, to be paternalistic and embarrassing. (He was probably right about that - but it doesn’t make him the good guy, here.)
This is not special, secret knowledge that I possess. This is all in the public record, available to anyone willing to go look for it. (And if you can get hold of his Russian speeches over the years, it’s even more obvious.)
What is “secret” - in the sense that when you ask Putin directly, he won’t answer or will deflect - is that Russia has actively sought to buy influence in our Congress and use our internal disagreements to change the outcomes of our elections. They have been doing this for decades. The closest Putin comes to denying this is to engage in the Whataboutism fallacy - “The U.S. has done the same thing, so why are you complaining to me?”
Since the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court decision in 2010, it is no longer legally possible for us to guard against foreign money being used to pay for U.S. candidates’ campaigns. Because I pay attention, I remember Maria Butina and how she used the NRA to funnel Russian money into American lobbying groups. There is no way for us to know how much money made its way to U.S. candidates or who those candidates were - but it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that even members of the Republican party are starting to express concern that their Republican colleagues appear to be working toward Russian outcomes.
What I’m saying is this: when you tune into the news and see lots of angry people yelling at each other, it might be tempting to tune back out. There is a strong desire in most of us to avoid conflict, and to “live and let live.” But making you feel that way is the goal of a well-funded, active, ongoing campaign that has spent the last 10 to 15 years pushing our voters to either vote for the people who will end democracy for us, or to not vote at all.
There is a lesson in 1930s Germany that applies to this exact situation. It’s worth remembering that the Nazi party did not have a majority in Germany, and neither did Germany’s socialist parties. But the Nazis won elections in the early 1930s by violently attacking the minority socialists and making a “both sides have problems” argument to the rest of the electorate. If you have ever read about the atrocities the Nazis committed and wondered how the German people let that happen, I talked about it in a paper2 I wrote in 2017:
Just as universal suffrage does not equate with universal participation, the reasons people have for voting the way they do are not necessarily harnessed to logic or an informed viewpoint… most people learn their political tendencies from family, and those tendencies “are reinforced by relatives, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and others in the local community.” People not directly associated with the government or the military did not see themselves as “political,” and as studies conducted immediately after World War II demonstrated, average Germans did not feel personally responsible for atrocities which they blamed on the Nazi party or the SS.
Throughout my life as an American voter, I have never felt like I belonged to a particular ideology or party. With one exception (which hardly counts, IMHO) I have always been either independent or unaffiliated. But this time around, one of the current presidential candidates is campaigning on the idea that I should be fired and that my family and other loved ones should be hounded out of their jobs, homes, and schools if he wins. (Do you need citations? I can give you citations.) Worse than campaign promises, the party of that candidate is ignoring both history and their own voters to carry water for Vladimir Putin’s agenda.
The terrifying thing is that even though the majority of my fellow Americans agree with me on every issue that is on the ballot this time around, there is a very real chance that a minority party, sponsored by foreign actors, will prevail in this election.
And people who should be on my side - at least as far as the notion of “keeping our country free of monarchs and foreign rulers” - are telling me that they won’t fight for it because they don’t like the two old white guys.
If that’s how you really feel, I want you to know - I don’t blame you. I sympathize with you. I’m exhausted, too, and I wish everybody who claimed to love this country cared enough to break through the wash of false information and logical fallacies. I wish elected officials weren’t so cynical and that monied interests didn’t hold sway over the rest of us.
But I beg you: Don’t Stay Home - because this time, you could cost all of us our voice.
And now that I infected myself with a 1995 earworm, I’ll share it with you, too:
Hey, Don’t break the mold, kid, just eat around it
Yeah, that’s what I did
“Don’t Stay Home” - by 311
Google search on “Russia disinformation goals U.S. election 2024”
I posted the paper “The View From Within” on my old blog if you want to read the rest.