Have a Little Faith

There is a interesting article in the weekend Wall Street Journal which expresses the view that some in the US are losing faith in democracy.  I should remind you that was one of the goals of the Russian Information Warfare campaign examined by Congress this past year.

David Ignatius wrote about this in January of 2017 in the Washington Post and I covered a lot of it in my new book because it is part of a concerted effort to limit the US and keep us bound up with internal matters.  The Ignatius article points to a directed campaign at the highest levels of government in Russia, and the belief that it will put Russia on an equal footing with the US like the Russian atomic bomb did many years ago.  That is a big statement to make, but a reflection of the success of these types of campaigns - at least in the minds of the Russians.  They push their achievements in these areas, and refine them at each interaction.  We can expect better in the 2020 elections, and it will likely be something we have not entirely anticipated.  Perhaps they will try to unseat the Trump Administration and get another Barack Obama to run.  At least we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around any more.

Some of the political dirty tricks in the run up to the election included attacks against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and New Jersey Governor (at the time) Chris Christi - who didn’t need much help from anyone to eliminate himself.  These are long running campaigns that were supported by many of the social media outlets.  After the Primaries started it was more difficult to get the kind of long-running campaign to work.  They largely rely on campaign contributions to be successful, an area where the Chinese excel.   These campaigns rely on changing attitudes which takes some time, and time is on their side.

The Russians don’t necessarily do any of these things themselves, but use the activities as reference points to disrupt the coming elections.  They did the same things in other countries so let’s not believe that they were not doing it here too.  Our government did not chose to look further back to find out how long the types of interference have been going on, when it would have been prudent to do that kind of exploration.  Since the Democrats were in power, they had little incentive to look.