Five years ago, white nationalists chanted "RUSSIA IS OUR FRIEND!" at a rally in Charlottesville, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and less than 45% of Republicans and Democrats said in polls that they thought of Russia as an enemy.
Today, 72% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans describe Russia as our enemy according to Pew. One third of Americans go so far as to support military action against a nuclear-armed near-peer adversary state (OK, well, given what we're seeing from their army, almost-sort-of-near-peer).
That’s almost good.
A few things are surprising and potentially bad about that, though.
One, less than half of all Americans polled three weeks ago believed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. That's lower than it used to be (45% versus 55%) because it includes 10% fewer Democrats who believe in it; most Republicans continue to blanket-deny it ever happened.
This is somewhat of a sticking point for me, so let me address that last claim. These are the ads that Facebook ran for the Russian Internet Research Agency, which it turned into the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They’re available online in their entirety, somewhat unhelpfully, in individual PDF form.
A colleague took them all out of PDFs; I cleaned the data (a lot of letters came out as numbers for instance, because of OCR) and put it all in a spreadsheet. In the interest of public awareness, that spreadsheet is also publicly shareable (on Google Drive). This is what it looks like:
All these ads were paid for in rubles. All of them target American audiences. All of them display shockingly sophisticated logic in targeting and narrative, supporting Trump not only directly, but also building audience for Trumpist themes, repositioning Hillary Clinton in negative contexts for conservative audiences, and in some cases, for logic that still puzzles a lot of people, running Spongebob memes.
This is not a "believe or disbelieve it happened" kind of thing. This is a reality that you either accept or don't.
In this reality, not the counterfactual one that Trump supporters and “skeptics” of disinformation theory live in, we are in a multi-pronged hybrid war with Russia with multiple interlocking parts that include political corruption, disinformation, organized crime, cyber-war and outright kinetic war in Ukraine.
And although we are situated vastly better than we were six years ago relative to it, I would contend that we are still, on-balance, losing that war. Russia has demonstrated repeatedly that they can compromise our head-of-state and turn him into a tool of their geopolitical aims, while we can't even make an internationally illegal war in Ukraine unpopular inside Russia.
Two, surprisingly high approval ratings for the war inside Russia are demonstrative of a larger problem of widespread susceptibility to disinformation and fascist narratives that I don't think people really want to face.
It’s still surprising to most people, but the graphs (based on flawed polling data, to be sure) show that Putin has never been below 60% popularity, and the war in Ukraine has over a 70% approval rating inside Russia.
Immediately prior to the revelation of the Bucha massacres, in fact, Putin was at 83% approval according to Levada polls in The New York Times.
So, Twitter is full of people reporting discussions with Russian friends who believe shockingly counterfactual, often aggressively untrue things about the Ukraine conflict. More than a few of them are talking to Republicans.
How common do you think it is, that people are putting 2 + 2 together and realizing the commonalities between Russian regime-internal propaganda, and Trump-era Republican disinformation?
Introspection was never this audience’s strong suit; you don't win a prize here for saying "it's rare as hell that anyone has that level of self-insight".
The issue here is more about pointing out the mechanism of Putin’s appeal - outright, high-frequency disinformation that destroys any sense of truth in Russian society and “shocks” it in to pliancy and submission. This has been true of Russia since before the Trump era (see, for instance, this book review by Pomerantsev in 2015).
The issue is, I think, accepting that Russia did something wrong means accepting a series of assertions - facts, really - about the media environment and the psychological vulnerabilities of mass media audiences that a lot of people don’t want to really grapple with.
If Russia’s intervention worked - and, by all appearances, it not only worked, they’ve gotten better at it… that means a lot of conventional wisdom on political comms strategy is wrong. It also means that our notions of strategic symmetry in international affairs may be badly wrong, because, again, what kind of “by the book” response is there for Russia doing this to us?
I don’t think there is one.
Not only that admission, but also admitting the efficacy of disinformation and information warfare practices, are both deeply uncomfortable to people in the public sphere.
Three, I don't think anyone is really seeing this in context of 2016, as far as the balance of power and the status of the system of international law, and rule of law generally.
Russia interfered with our political system and brainwashed our people. They brainwashed their own people too. Russia showed how easy it is to manipulate a democracy - merely a few million dollars worth of false news stories and support for "useful idiots" inside a country, and you can make a democratic country even vote to remove its own democratic traditions. Get Tucker Carlson or his Russian equivalent (Tuckovich Tucker Carlsonov?) to spout a few lies from a high-status platform and even the elites will buy into it.
We can't let them get away with that. That is an open "hack" on democracy that fundamentally devalues the duly-arrived-at outcomes of democratic societies throughout the world.
So what retaliation is there for that? What is a lawful, proportionate, timely response to that?
It's obviously not kinetic force; as I've argued (again, this hardly wins a prize) it is downright insane to say that we're going to, like, invade people because they said a thing on Facebook we don't like. That is not how rational nation-states behave.
I don't think it's lying back, either. I hold a somewhat heretical stance with regard to this; I know a few colleagues in the intelligence and international activism space whom I respect a great deal (and some I don't respect at all) who argue that in a war situation, lying back to someone who's lying to cover up their atrocities is a proportionate response. To me, it just seems like making a bad situation worse.
If you look at where we stand, I think we've ended up, quite fortuitously and perhaps not completely by accident, in a position where we are actually doing the only proper form of retaliation against a disinformational nation-state like Russia that kills people and covers it up with lies.
America's anti-war policy on Ukraine is heavy on diplomatic engagement and economic warfare, but completely absent of any kind of direct military force like the old days. It is anti-disinformational - Americans are attacking Russian disinformation outlets, albeit fitfully and rather half-assedly in Facebook's case by banning RT. (Like, there's more than one Russian disinformation outlet on Facebook, you know that right?)
It's like this: if you removed the Ukraine war from the equation altogether, and we were still doing what we are doing, right now, against Russia in terms of non-kinetic, broad-spectrum diplomatic, intelligence, economic, and political warfare?
That would actually be a surprisingly appropriate and proportionate response to 2016 as well.
That would actually constitute us no longer actively losing our hybrid war against Russia.