The Russians fertilized American divisions. Can we fertilize healing?
A friend from the more rural (read: redder) area of the county described a particularly divisive Republican’s approach to politicking: listen for district voters’ complaints and then “wedge” the hell out of them against Democrats. Leverage the animosity.
It is neither an innovative nor constructive approach, but it works. Derision and division, David Corn wrote, was Rush Limbaugh’s bread and butter.
The Russians, too, realized derision and division was a handy weapon against ideological foes in the west. Anand Giridharadas examines how the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia learned to “speak like Newt” and drive deep wedges between sectors of American society. They sent spies to the U.S. on a cross-country listening tour to find ways to destabilize our politics and society. Russia would turn social media into a strategic weapon (The Atlantic):
In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness.
Giridharadas describes the effort in some detail, much already familiar. There were trolling tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts in the millions. Some meant to inflame the right, others to inflame the left.
Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. But their common aim was to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.
The fractures were already there, the Russians saw, long before Donald Trump MAGAfied them. Their mission, writes Giridharadas, “far from dropping something on America from outer space, had been to fertilize behaviors already flourishing on American soil.”
Russia’s goal was to destroy faith in democracy itself by undermining the social foundations needed to sustain it. That is, “to undermine citizens’ trust in government, exploit societal fractures, create distrust in the information environment, blur the lines between reality and fiction, undermine trust among communities, and erode confidence in the democratic process” as one report put it.
Giridharadas’s mission here is not to spotlight the damage done, but to suggest a way forward. “Americans have grown alienated from an idea central to democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds—by persuading.” He asks, “If Russian trolls could pull us apart, can we bring ourselves back together?”
A couple of key points.
First, recognize no one is immune to the toxic stew. Ideological rigidity is a reflex, not a theory of change. We need to take a step back from the impulse to view political opponents as intractable mortal enemies. That’s a challenge with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene dim-wittingly nudging fans towards genocide. But, says Alicia Garza, a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, those who want a “woke” future must make space for the “still-waking.” Giridharadas met activists who view deradicalizing QAnon supporters as a public health problem.
Deep canvassing is a kind of craze right now, but it is a longer-term approach to softening attitudes, especially in rural areas, by listening long enough to get beneath Fox-conditioned reactions. But it’s a project for beyond election season and gets little funding or support.
“My discovery in doing this work was that most people are 60–40 around most things,” Steve Deline, a longtime organizer for LGBTQ rights and a co-founder of the New Conversation Initiative, told me. “If we ask them to plant their flag on one side or the other, if we approach them that way, they’re going to do so, because that’s what makes us feel like rational, thinking humans—having an answer to a tough question. But if we approach people with the idea that it’s normal to have complicated feelings, even if they have a Trump sign on their front yard, even if their public face expresses one thing—if we approach them with the assumption of There’s something more going on underneath, oftentimes we find out that there is.”
Who wants a pizzaburger?
A second key insight is that Democrats, as a party, misinterpret the political divide, says Anat Shenker-Osorio. They take the left for granted and try to water down ideas to reach the middle, Giridharadas explains, often “leaving the base disillusioned and the moderates merely meh.” He reveals the flaw in this reasoning with a pithy metaphor.
The error of this way, by Shenker-Osorio’s lights, is a misconception of what a “moderate” actually is. People associate “moderate” with the middle of the road, the center, but Shenker-Osorio thinks that’s a mistake. When it comes to big issues and policies, moderates are confused, torn, not sure which pole is their pole. Which is different from saying they prefer the mean between the two poles. One way to think of this is, if I offer you a choice between a pizza and a burger, and you can’t pick—you’re an undecided voter!—it doesn’t follow that you want a pizzaburger. Maybe you want a pizzaburger, the mathematical midpoint between a pizza and a burger. More likely, you will ultimately resolve the dilemma and go with a pizza or a burger. Your “moderate” stance was a temporary state—a situation, not an identity.
Prodded to question within themselves, many Americans are ‘Good Point’ People. On the one hand this. On the other hand that. The challenge for the left is helping those 60-40 neighbors become more comfortable with coming down on the progressive side.
A better term for moderates, then, might be “persuadables.” Moderate implies a taste for the tempered version of a thing. Persuadable implies malleability.
Shenker-Osorio believes persuadables “are hungry for clues from the world about how to think,” Giridharadas writes. What they need is a nudge, not a shunning.
What the IRA, Fox News, and the fringe left preach, explicitly or not, is that “those people” are unreachable when what many are is persuadable. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, in part, because her campaign abandoned persuasion efforts, convinced that Democratic base turnout was enough to win the White House. See where that got us.
Persuasion is doable. Watch filmmaker Annabel Park move someone’s needle in real time in rural Bakersville, NC (timestamp 4:20).
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