Why Americans Could Believe the Worst From Russian Trolls

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/americans-believe-russian-trolls.html

Version 0 of 1.

Russian meddling in the politics of the United States and most every other Western country demands a tough response, but it should not come as a surprise. President Vladimir Putin has long believed that such interference is an effective way to assert the Kremlin’s might. And President Trump’s characteristically egocentric reaction, focusing exclusively on how it affects him, is likewise, sadly, in character.

What may be most disconcerting in the entire affair is what it says about the state of democracy in the country that is supposed to be the model for the world.

Whether the Russian web brigades actually affected the outcome of the presidential election, or any other, is impossible to tell. The fake news, false identities, cyberattacks and other tactics outlined in the Justice Department indictment last week seemed aimed at people who probably already got that sort of ranting from plenty of zany, homegrown sources.

But therein lies the true danger: that the polarization in American politics, society and life has become so yawning that people on the far right, and to some degree on the left, are prepared to accept the most appalling and transparent lies to bolster their beliefs. As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher wrote in “The Interpreter” column in The Times on Sunday, “The false information and political advertisements that the Russians are accused of spreading could ring true only to those already predisposed to suspect the worst.”

Not so many years ago, fake quotes like one in which Hillary Clinton praises Shariah law, or reports suggesting that Black Lives Matter activists are killing police officers, would have been dismissed as the rants of sick extremists. That they evidently find credence in at least a part of the population says far more about the state of public discourse than about Russia.

We have become almost accustomed to Mr. Trump’s outrageous references to “Crooked Hillary” and all the other innumerable ways he constantly stokes partisan flames. Whether he knowingly colluded with the Russian web campaign is almost beside the point, since he is directly colluding with Russia’s efforts to discredit democracy when he treats the Kremlin’s brazen cybermeddling as a partisan issue and absurdly pins the blame on Barack Obama or Mrs. Clinton.

It’s getting worse. Freedom House, an independent democracy watchdog, concluded in its annual report that “democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets — including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press and the rule of law — came under attack around the world.” The United States, it added, “retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties.”

Mr. Putin and his operatives no doubt take credit for this. Fear and suspicion of liberal democracy runs deep in Russia and in other countries slouching toward authoritarianism. They have a vested interest in making Western democracies appear as flawed, ugly and messy as possible. The Kremlin is not likely to abandon what looks to it like a winning strategy.

But blaming Russia for America’s polarization makes as little sense as blaming Latin America for America’s opioid epidemic. We have created the market and the mess, and the Russian troll factory, however mendacious, should be seen not as a cause, but as a loud warning that democracy as we know it, as we have celebrated it for so long, is in peril.