I know all of this already, Anne Applebaum thought (The Atlantic) in reading the National Intelligence Council’s unclassified report on foreign interference in the 2020 election. Russian President Vladimir Putin worked his mischief through players close to President Donald Trump. The Iranians tried using online influence. The Chinese considered playing but dropped the idea. The Trump administration, claiming intelligence proved otherwise, touted China as the principal threat and dismissed Russia. They were liars. But we knew that already too.
Applebaum’s second reaction was If I know this already, and none of it seems to matter, then something is seriously wrong with the American political system. A third thing we knew already.
Russia interferes because, having studied how Americans take in information, spreading disinformation is easy. Rank partisans on the right no longer care about the information’s source or credibility so long as they can use it as a bludgeon:
As a result, supplying an edited audiotape or a piece of false evidence to one of the bottom-feeders of the information ecosystem is incredibly easy; after that, others will ensure that it rises up the food chain. Russian disinformation doesn’t succeed thanks to the genius of Russians; it succeeds thanks to the sharp partisanship of Americans. Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work—and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.
A couple of Friday tweets got me thinking about just how long this evolution took.
Chris Labarthe may be correct on both counts about the large-scale and proximate causes of the devolution of the Republican Party into an anti-American one. Still, what we see today perhaps represents the end state of the American paranoid style Richard Hofstadter described so famously in 1964. Russia has simply exploited it for its own ends.
Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller observed (The New Republic) that “violent anti-democratic sentiment is rampant in the conservative movement.” The journalistic narrative, they wrote, is that the movement is reverting back to its pre-Buckley paranoid roots before conservatism exiled “outright racists and conspiracy theorists, like Robert Welch and his John Birch Society” to its fringes.
Not so, Perlstein and Miller argue, citing examples from Buckley to Reagan. They’ve been here all along but with a lower profile. It was Birchers who first decided sex education was a tool for the Red takeover. Abortion too:
It was the John Birch Society that first discovered the power of the nascent Christian right’s most galvanizing issue. And because the John Birch Society was a secular organization with members of all faiths, it pioneered the sort of operational unity between evangelical Protestants and Catholics that the Moral Majority received credit for when it came along, nine years after the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion rights decision in Roe—a group that Ronald Reagan hugged tight as an ally, even as Birchers were officially personae non gratae.
The John Birch Society leaders’ motivations for joining this fight, as always, were fantastical. They believed abortion was part and parcel of the strategy of the “Insiders”—the shadowy globalists who directed the Communist conspiracy—to weaken America by shrinking its population. It was “people control,” just like “gun control.” That is how front groups work: Find an inviting come-on with the power to arouse an angry citizenry, even if it is just to win their vote; and if this becomes the gateway drug to sell the whole crazy conspiratorial package, all the better.
Donald Trump, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are merely the latest manifestation of the latent paranoid style in conservatism (the left’s strain is there but less virulent). Perlstein and Miller conclude, “This is why Trumpism is not a reversion to an older, more gothic form of conservatism but an apotheosis decades in the making.”
Soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, my late father brought home a Bircher filmstrip series about the creeping Communist menace called “Two Worlds.” (The old phonograph-and-filmstrip-beep thing.) He had his kids watch it at night in the dining room. I think that’s where I learned you had to beware of propaganda because the commies would use it to undermine America from within. Decades later my dad, his friends, and plenty of your crazy uncles would traffic in “pass-it-on,” conservative chain-mail. Virtually all of it lies, smears, and distortions: propaganda.
As I’ve said:
Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.
“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care,” as Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said of disinformation spread in 2013 by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. Truth is no longer an American value.
To this day I wonder if there was an overseas shop churning out at least some of those conservative emails about the Clinton “death list” and other faux scandals the way teens in the Balkans churned out fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign. Their style — with the large text, the waving-flag gifs, praying hands, and “if you love America and this makes you angry” codas — played so neatly into a paranoid narrative building for decades. The news isn’t telling you the truth; they hate America and are behind it all; the government is in bed with the enemies of freedom, etc.
And here we are.