Dear America, it's not all Russia’s fault.
Image courtesy of PBS.org
By MIKHAIL DMITRIENKO ‘21
American media often portrays Russia as a geopolitical monster eager to disrupt the liberal order in any way possible. After all, the Mueller report proved that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential race to help elect Donald Trump, who has irrevocably shattered this country’s legitimacy on the global stage. However, crediting the outcome of the election solely to the Putin regime would mean that Americans are both incapable of common sense and massively hypocritical.
No one denies that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Through the use of online troll bots, the Russian government’s Internet Research Agency tricked voters into believing incomplete and inaccurate information that helped elect Donald Trump. The conversations that I seem to have missed, however, are whether it was our fault for falling for their obvious deceptions in the first place. Some of the so called "weaponized memes" that major news sources blamed for "dividing the country" were so comically outlandish that one couldn’t help but laugh at their absurdity. One meme spread on Facebook by Russian bots consisted of a two panel photo with Trump in front of a heavenly white background above Clinton wearing demonic horns. The caption read "like for Jesus team, ignore for Satan team.” If such memes were responsible for toppling the great bulwark of democracy that is the United States, then perhaps George Washington made the wrong choice when he refused being crowned monarch.
As important as it is to criticize Russia for interfering with U.S. elections, we first need to pull the plank out of our own eyes and realize that we have been guilty of doing the exact same thing for decades. According to a study done by Carnegie Mellon political scientist Dov Levin, the United States interfered in 81 elections from 1946 to 2000, compared to the 36 elections that Russia or the Soviet Union meddled in during the same time frame--not a very good look for the global democratic hegemon. In 2006, the Bush administration spent $2 million dollars to support the Palestinian nationalist party, Fatah, over the Islamist fundamentalist group, Hamas, in the Palestinian legislative elections that year. When our efforts to influence the result failed, several members of Congress expressed their dismay, including New York Senator Hillary Clinton who was caught on a hot microphone saying, "I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake, and if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” According to Peter Beinart, in the 1996 Russian election, President Bill Clinton helped support the victory of Boris Yeltsin by sending a team of political experts to work on his campaign and securing a loan of $10 billion from the IMF after Yeltsin asked for financial support. As far as the Russians are concerned, in 2016, we simply lost to them at our own game.
Finally, blaming another country for the result is an easy cop out from addressing the main issues that got people out to vote. The success of the Trump campaign was its ability to pander to a white working class electorate that was hell-bent on getting back its lost jobs. The Clinton campaign’s promise to continue the legacy of the Obama administration didn't resonate with these voters because the campaign neglected to address the issue that will forever separate incumbents from nominees: employment. According to Amy Sterling, Forbes Science contributor and advisor to the Obama White House OSTP and US Senate, automation is responsible for the loss of over 7 million manufacturing jobs since 2000, and threatens to displace millions more in coming decades. Until we find a sustainable solution to this massive loss of employment, disenchanted Americans across the country will be drawn toward nationalist ideology and xenophobic explanations for economic issues. It's no wonder why Democratic candidate Andrew Yang has been polling higher among Trump’s electorate than his Democratic counterparts; Yang’s controversial promise to establish a Universal Basic Income system directly tackles many voters’ problem of how to put food on the table in a world where factories are becoming completely devoid of human laborers. With the presidential election only a year away, it's time we ask ourselves whether we will repeat the mistake of hypocritically, blaming foreign countries for our own problems, or look inward to solve them.