Football teams scout their opponents to discover their strengths and weaknesses. We can imagine the disgust a scout would feel if he reported to the coach that the opponent has a strong passing game and the coach responded by saying pass defense wasn’t really that important. Defeat would be sure to follow.
Something like that has happened in American politics. It has long been the belief of the Russian KGB, and its successors, that the best way to defeat American democracy would be to destroy Americans’ belief in our democratic institutions. Despite our knowledge of that strategy, some of our political leaders seem intent on doing just that. They have, without evidence and contrary to the rulings of more than 60 courts, denied that the 2020 presidential election was honestly conducted. They have more recently stood by silently while former President Donald Trump advocated the termination of our constitution. They have made a mantra of the quip that the most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.” And, on the other side of the political spectrum, there have been isolated calls to abolish ICE, the agency that enforces immigration laws.
Of course, it is not always a valid objection to a proposed policy to say that it would be giving your enemy his fondest wish. It may be that the coach does not believe that the opponent has a strong passing game. It may be that our political leaders think our democratic institutions are so strong that they can resist all attacks, or that our leaders actually favor the destruction of democracy and its replacement with a more anarchic or, more likely, autocratic form of government. But it would be foolish to support those attacks without realizing that they follow the playbook of one of our most formidable enemies.
All of this was brought home a few weeks ago in an Oxford speech to federal judges and lawyers who practice in Mississippi’s northern federal district. The speaker, Yale lecturer Asha Rangappa, formerly worked in counterintelligence for the FBI. She hosts an online “Freedom Academy.” She specializes in the analysis of Russian disinformation campaigns.
In her Oxford speech she quoted from a KGB officer who defected to the United States in 1984. He said the focus of KGB “active measures” was to subvert anything of value in an enemy country, create chaos, and destroy the enemy without firing a single shot. One of the KGB’s primary objectives was to foster “mistrust in the American system of justice” and government. Rangappa urged her audience to defend that system.
The KGB analysis is not unique. Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador once wrote “To destroy a society it is first necessary to delegitimize its basic institutions.” If you believe that American institutions are no different from their opposite, there is no reason to defend them, a point Anne Applebaum makes in her book, Twilight of Democracy.
Whether or not it is the result of Russia’s “active measures” in particular, or social media in general, trust in our system of government is on the decline as is participation in groups that have promoted civic responsibility such as Scouts, Rotary Clubs and PTAs. Nationally, the belief that “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 32% in 2012, and the percentage in Mississippi was below 20%. Surveys that compared the views of Americans born before World War II with millennials showed a similar decline. While in the older group, 72% believed that it is essential to live in a democracy, only 33% of the millennials agreed. In the older group, 43% said a military takeover would be illegitimate, only 19% of the millennials felt the same way.
Given these numbers, it is hard to believe that our institutions are so strong that they can resist all attacks or that, if they fall, anything other than a Russian-style autocracy will follow. That being the case, our political leaders should realize that in a very real way they are violating their oaths to “support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies” when, just because they don’t like the result, they attack the legitimacy of an election courts have examined and upheld through the process required by that constitution. The same is true of cynical attacks on government in general. The politicians may believe that they are simply engaging in harmless political theatre. But they are not, and we all should at least understand that those clapping in the audience include our sworn enemies.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
