Last week, Politico reported that widespread on-line election interference against Democratic 2020 presidential candidates is well underway. Although the data scientists and campaigns don’t have a clear idea of who’s responsible for these cyber operations, they seem to be a combination of individual actors but also, and more worrisomely, coordinated campaigns. The degree of sophistication so far exhibited is unsettling; the coordinated actors are employing techniques that make their efforts appear more organic and real than, say, more easily-detected efforts employing bots. And perhaps most troubling of all, some of the coordinated campaigns seem to have state-level sponsorship, including from North Korea, Iran, and Russia.
Their objectives appear to include exacerbating racial divisions, spreading lies about candidates, and “[dividing] the left by making the Democratic presidential primary as chaotic and toxic as possible.” In this respect, those seeking to sabotage the electoral process have elements of reality on their side; this is shaping up to to be the largest field of candidates in years, at a time when the Democratic Party is fighting over its basic identity.
But the fact that there are real conflicts and high emotions involved in Democratic politics should not distract us from the overriding, incredible issue: once again, the American political system is under cyber-propaganda attack, and the U.S. government is fumbling the response. The first of level of failure is that the U.S. response after 2016 has been insufficient to deter further attacks. And this failure, of course, is inseparable from the horrific reality that has been facing us the last couple years: that just as he benefitted from foreign attacks on Hilary Clinton and propaganda in support of himself in 2016, Donald Trump is now the beneficiary of similar, early attacks on a new wave of his opponents. Indeed, any framing of the situation as merely attacks on Democrats, rather than efforts in support of Donald Trump, is to tacitly abet the nefarious ends of those committing these actions.
The Politico article strongly makes the point that the Democratic campaigns are not ready for this propaganda onslaught. While this is true, it elides the larger point: that it is the responsibility of the U.S. government, particularly its intelligence and defense establishments, to stop cyber interference in the U.S. election process, whether it be primaries or general elections. Only the U.S. government has the resources to do so; this role is also, not incidentally, the government’s actual job. Suggestions that individual Democratic campaigns are simply too weak or incompetent to defend themselves plays into Donald Trump’s preferred narrative of dominance and submission, and accepts his framing of the situation as one in which individual candidates are somehow to be separated out from the integrity of the American electoral system of which they are a part.
And this brings us back to the point I made a moment ago. The context for these attacks is advancement of the re-election prospects of President Trump; and so the fact that the president has not only spent the last two years rejecting that there were such efforts in 2016, but has only undermined government-wide efforts to the protect the U.S. going forward, means that what the Democrats are experiencing now can be clearly traced back to the president’s own self-interest. Throw in the unresolved matter of whether the president’s campaign coordinated with such cyber efforts in 2016, particularly those propaganda efforts by Russia, and we find ourselves face-to-face with a nightmarish scenario in which an American president cultivates interference in our elections.
Reporting on ongoing efforts at cyber sabotage and division is crucial; all Americans need to be aware of this unacceptable behavior, so that we can pressure our government to stop it, and so that Democrats can play out their political conflicts while keeping in mind the reality of outside pressures to force the party into unnecessary fights. But this is only part of the story, and it must never be separated from an examination of both the interests of foreign powers to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor, and the president’s unforgivable willingness to condone this assistance from America’s enemies.
By the same token, this is also a test of the Democratic candidates’ ability to defend the U.S. They obviously have an interest in denouncing such interference, as it impacts their own electoral prospects; yet anyone worthy of the presidency will be able to balance this self-defense with a larger defense of America’s democracy, will be able to make the president pay a maximal price for his complicity while being sure to avoid playing the assigned role of victim or weakling.