Americans imagine their adversary as masterly and strategic, and their own society as unstable and deeply at risk.
On Friday, the special counsel Robert Mueller filed an indictment of thirteen Russians, for meddling with the 2016 election. Over the long
weekend, four ways of interpreting the document solidified. The White
House focussed on a statement by the deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who said the indictment
contains no allegation that any American knowingly colluded with the
Russian effort. President Trump tweeted,
“They are laughing their asses off in Moscow.” Rob Goldman, Facebook’s
vice-president for ads, took to Twitter to assert that the primary
purpose of Russian meddling was to “divide America,” not to influence the election.
Meanwhile, most of the legacy media interpreted the indictment as a
major blow to Trump, who, they write, can no longer dismiss the
allegations of Russian meddling as a hoax. Here is the bad news: all of
this is true at the same time.
It is true that
the indictment tells us nothing about connections
between the Russian efforts and the Trump campaign, and the Trump
victory. It is also true that Moscow is laughing, at least in part
because the Kremlin had no grand plan to elect Trump. To understand what
happened in 2016, we have to understand, among other things, how
Russians perceived their own efforts. Perhaps the hardest thing for
humans to do is to imagine the world as it is imagined by others. We
tend to confuse acting in accordance with the goals and values of the
society in which we live with rationality; we tend to confuse
intelligence with thinking in accordance with those goals and values.
And, of course, we are always inclined to see events as
predetermined—and we are almost always wrong. An event as shocking as
Trump’s election demands that the forces that may (or may not) have
contributed to his victory be rendered suitably monstrous in retrospect.
Trump’s tweet about Moscow laughing its ass off was unusually (perhaps
accidentally) accurate. Loyal Putinites and dissident intellectuals
alike are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with
Russian meddling to be ridiculous. The intellectuals are amused to see
Americans so struck by an indictment that adds virtually nothing to a
piece published in the Russian media outlet RBC, back in October; I wrote at the time that the article showed the Russian effort to be more of a
cacophony than a conspiracy. The Kremlin and its media are, as Joshua
Yaffa writes,
tickled to be taken so seriously. Their sub-grammatical imitations of
American political rhetoric, their overtures to the most marginal of
political players, are suddenly at the very heart of American political
life. This is the sort of thing Russians have done for decades, dating
back at least to the early days of the Cold War, but those efforts were
always relegated to the dustbin of history before they even began.
Goldman, the Facebook V.P., has seen more of the Russian ads and posts
than most Americans, and his imagination clearly strains to accommodate
the push to take them seriously. It’s hard to square words like
“sophisticated” (frequently used by the Times to describe the Russian
campaign) with posts like one from an apparently fake L.G.B.T. group
promoting something called “Buff Bernie: A Coloring Book for Berniacs” with catchy English-language copy: “The coloring is something that suits
for all people.” It’s hard to apply the description “bold covert effort” (used by Politico) to the enormous amount of social-network static that Russian trolls
produced. To Goldman, it may all look like a giant gray mass in which
only a few colorful ads and posts have any meaning—and that meaning is
hard to discern.
The need to see the Russian effort as somehow meaningful and masterly
has produced its own experts in the field. Molly McKew, who identifies
as an “information warfare expert,” has said
that, back in the day, Soviet intelligence designed a “ninety/ten”
approach in order to “embed” its agents in political communities: ninety
per cent of what they produced mirrored what they saw, so that they
could blend in before starting to sow discord. This idea makes so much
sense that it doesn’t seem to matter that McKew offers no source for it
or, indeed, any credentials for her own expertise. She is the C.E.O. of a company called Fianna Strategies, which seems to be a tiny Washington-based lobbying operation that has worked for the opposition parties in Georgia and Moldova.
McKew’s “information warfare expertise” appears entirely self-styled,
yet so great is our need for a rational interpretation of
incomprehensible events that recently she has published extensively in
Politico and appeared on Slate’s Trumpcast. Russians, meanwhile, have
laughed parts of their anatomy off over her coverage of the Gerasimov Doctrine, which is a thing that, well, doesn’t exist.
The phantom Gerasimov Doctrine, described in Politico as a “new chaos
theory of political warfare,” sounds more sinister—but also,
comfortingly, more serious—than the picture that emerges from the
indictment, of Russian agents staging an elaborate production to travel
to the United States to gather valuable intelligence, such as advice to
“focus their activities on ‘purple states like Colorado, Virginia and
Florida.’ ” Americans’ apparent need to imagine a Russian adversary as
cunning, masterly, and strategic is matched only by the Russians’ own
belief in a solid, stable, unshakable American society. Stability is
what Vladimir Putin has been promising Russians for eighteen years and
still hasn’t delivered, making Russians all the more resentful of what they imagine as a predictable, safe American society. Americans, on the
other hand, increasingly imagine American society as unstable and deeply
at risk. While most people believe themselves to have a solid grip on
reality, they imagine their compatriots to be gullible and chronically
misinformed. This, in turn, means that we no longer have a sense of
shared reality, a common imagination that underlies political life. In a
society with a strong sense of shared reality, a bunch of sub-literate
tweets and ridiculous ads would be nothing but a curiosity. Even the
fact that Russians put money into organizing rallies and demonstrations
across the political spectrum would be absurd: surely they didn’t force
people to join these rallies. If sincerely held beliefs brought people
to the rallies, then it makes no difference to the broader political
life whether someone paid for an actress to take part, too (even if that or similar payments were themselves illegal).
Both sides have rushed to interpret Rosenstein’s statements as offering
certainty: with the White House claiming that the Trump campaign has
been exonerated, and the legacy media running with the story of a
sophisticated, bold Russian plan to meddle in American elections. In
fact, the plan was not at all sophisticated, and about as bold as, say,
keying a neighbor’s car under the cover of night. Rosenstein’s message
was one of uncertainty. The investigation may or may not turn up
evidence of intentional coöperation between the Trump campaign and
Russian agents. It is exceedingly unlikely that we will ever have a
clear understanding of whether Russian meddling affected the outcome of
the election. But a huge number of Americans imagine that it did. They
imagine that exposure to a foreign effort to muddle American politics
can fundamentally change the fate of this country—and by imagining it,
they render the country all the more muddled, divided, and vulnerable.
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