Taking Bearings

For those of you wondering why I recently took an impassioned interest in defending the Electoral College, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)^[i] from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Russian meddling in the recent U.S. elections explains my combative stance.

Whether intending to elect or defeat a foreign candidate or cause, influencing elections is an old game played globally by both Russian and U.S. intelligence agencies. Destabilizing institutions and reducing confidence in government are often key components. The ICA acknowledges that “Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on U.S. presidential elections” and that recent efforts, including “press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin” were an escalated use of existing techniques.

For many us familiar with Russian tradecraft, the Bear’s paw prints were abundant and easily visible months before the election.

Omitting classified supporting evidence that would reveal methods and sources, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) cooperated to draft the ICA. Their joint conclusion — based on evidence known by 29 December 2016 and offered with generally high confidence^[ii] — was that Russian hacking, along with propaganda and disinformation efforts (including the creation and dissemination of fake news), were undertaken with the direct knowledge and approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials. The Russian effort, initially designed to “denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency” and eventually included efforts to “help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him” (about this last assertion, the NSA offered only moderate versus high confidence).

The Russian effort was part of a continuing and “longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order” by undermining “public faith in the U.S. democratic process.”

Saying that the Russians “hacked the election” actually plays right into that Russian desire to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process. Those who loosely use such rhetoric should be scorned, tolerated only because the First Amendment has no exclusion cause for inarticulate speech, errant blabber, and partisan prattle.

The ICA found no evidence of Russian tampering with election results, only that the Russians hacked email accounts and computer systems to gain information they subsequently fed into propaganda efforts to sway voters.

While the Russians supported fake news factories, there is no evidence that WikiLeaks material “contained any evident forgeries” (i.e., that the contents of damaging emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign staff were altered). The damaging disclosures that the Clinton campaign was given debate questions in advance and that the DNC had conspired to game the system against Senator Bernie Sanders’ efforts to secure the Democratic Party nomination were merely revelations uncovered by Russian hacking. On those scores the Russians illegally exposed evidence, but it was the underlying content that hurt the DNC and Clinton campaigns.

Dictatorships love to ridicule and undermine democracy. As the ICA shows, absent any sense of irony, the Soviets, and now Russians, have long attempted to disparage U.S. democratic institutions, including the Electoral College and our electoral process, as “undemocratic.” The ICA directly asserts, “Before the election, Russian diplomats had publicly denounced the U.S. electoral process and were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results… When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the presidency, the Russian influence campaign focused more on undercutting Secretary Clinton’s legitimacy and crippling her presidency from its start, including by impugning the fairness of the election.”

That “U.S. electoral process,” what we commonly refer to as the Electoral College, is our essential Federalist compromise. I won’t recapitulate my defense^[iii] of the Electoral College herein, in favor of simply asserting that institutions of representative democracy like the Electoral College are anathematic to Putin’s programs of promoting destabilizing populist movements and revolutions.

The political Left in the West has always been an easy target for Soviet, now Russian, disinformation and influence campaigns. The partisan Right has also proved itself vulnerable with an eager willingness to swallow and regurgitate fake news that serves their interests. The vociferous “take our government back” chants from the Right mirror the drumbeat sentiments expressed by the Occupy movement so beloved and supported by Russia’s propaganda machine.

The ICA points the finger directly at one instrument of that propaganda machine, the RT (formerly Russia Today) news channel. The ICA asserts that RT programming “highlights criticism of alleged U.S. shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties” and works to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest. RT takes genuine problems and issues and twists them to more fundamental indictments of the U.S. as a nation deeply divided by racism with “widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and domestic surveillance.”

Sound familiar?

Problems and inequities exist, of course, but well-intended souls involved in lawful protest regarding such issues can ensure they are not simply tools of foreign propaganda by taking extra care to check the sources of their facts, restrain from overgeneralized indictments of America, and check their rhetoric short of calls for anarchy and revolution that would be self-destructive to their own interests. Russian propaganda, for example, loves to insist the U.S cannot be changed democratically, but only through “revolution.”

America does not have “resistance movements.” We have the next election.

If you think inequities, injustice, and intolerance exist in America (they do), take a look around the world at other systems, especially outside those protected by American might. Consider how your cause might fare in Moscow or Beijing (neither known for their patience with dissent) or under the progressive tolerance of theocrats.

The ICA asserts “Putin, Russian officials, and other pro-Kremlin pundits stopped publicly criticizing the U.S. election process as unfair almost immediately after the election.” That sets the proper frame to interpret President-elect Trump’s statements regarding the potential “rigging” of the election and his wavering on whether he would accept the results of the election. It also explains his sudden self-serving silence following his unanticipated upset victory.

The Russian goal was to delegitimize the election results during a time when they thought Clinton might win. Following her defeat — stinging from a loss to a candidate many, including myself, judged to be unfit for Presidency — the Left allowed their outrage and partisanship to, at a minimum, unwittingly contribute to the Russians’ intervention and destabilizing efforts. In a seemingly spasmodic reflex, the Left took up the cause of vilifying the Electoral College.

The Bear got a BOGO.

What followed the election was an explosion of inane public commentary about the “unfairness” of our electoral process. Dozens of articles published in otherwise reputable media sources blatantly misrepresented the intentions and motives of the Founders; decontextualized historical links to slavery (an increasingly common inflammatory tactic); and pushed highly partisan narratives about the nonexistent national popular vote designed to malign the Electoral College. Factions decrying the Electoral College as unjust sung its praises when they thought it might work in their favor. Regardless, it all conveniently served the Russian goal of portraying U.S. election results as untrustworthy and not reflective of the popular will.

In the United States, our popular will is primarily expressed in our Constitution and our electoral process, not in a nonexistent national popular vote that is an artifact of an election and election campaigns designed top to bottom to win a majority of electoral votes.[iv]

The ICA provides no evidence of direct links between President-elect Trump and the Russian efforts, but it is clear that President-elect Trump at least unwittingly participated in and encouraged Russian efforts to destabilize our democratic institutions. He then exacerbated that injury with disparagements of the U.S. intelligence community.

The intelligence community has many flaws and failures. It’s risky and tough business often undertaken at high peril to brave patriots. President-elect Trump’s blanket dismissal of the U.S. intelligence community’s abilities, motives, and credibility has an all-too-familiar Soviet-era scent about it.

It is a familiar tactic: taint the source and motive in order to taint the evidence — in this case, that the President-elect at least unknowingly served as self-serving opportunistic dupe of Russian intelligence.

I will close with the simple observation that there is something deeply wrong with a President-elect who refuses intelligence briefings (if you buy into the businessman model, what CEO disregards intelligence about anything?), offers blanket denunciations of the U.S. intelligence community, and refuses to fairly sift the evidence before drawing conclusions.

Those are not the qualities of a leader, they reflect the mindset of the dogmatic and imperious.

Sadly, this story is far from conclusion, but this is not my charter. The Russians may not have influenced the vote tally, but whether the Russians influenced voters in sufficient numbers in select areas to sway the electoral vote and thus the outcome of the election is a matter for scholars of American politics to examine and debate. The ICA draws no conclusions, and so shall I refrain.

The Electoral College certainly does not need my help. It is part of the essential Federalist compromise and there is near zero chance it will be diluted by amending the Constitution. Smaller states will never yield power, and none of the proposed extra-Constitutional compacts/agreements between States to turn the election into a de facto popular vote have a realistic chance of becoming governing political reality. In addition, claims that such schemes would easily pass legal scrutiny are naïve. If ever attempted, I fear such Constitutional evasions would result in armed insurrection and/or civil war.

For those who think the Electoral College is a problem, the solution is simple. Find a candidate and construct a platform that more broadly appeals to the majority of Americans. Waiting on shifting demographics, especially as America grows more diverse along its edges, is an arrogant and foolish strategy. Progressives need candidates and platforms that make them competitive in states like Texas. In turn, conservatives need to pull back from the extremist fringes in order to appeal to the more diverse demographics of states like California. Facile advice, of course. More easily said than done. But far easier than altering or attempting to thwart the Electoral College.

Back to science. Back to verse…

[i] Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.” (January, 2017). Available at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

[ii] “Confidence levels provide assessments of the quality and quantity” of intelligence that supports assertions and conclusions. “High confidence generally indicates that judgments are based on high-quality information from multiple sources.” High confidence does not, however, indicate certainty. Moderate confidence indicates that intelligence is “credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant an higher level of confidence.  Low confidence indicates that intelligence is of uncertain credibility and/or plausibility and is “too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that the reliability of the sources is questionable.” — Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.” (January 2017). Available at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

[iii] Lerner, K. Lee. “Presidential Politics is Electoral College Politics and the Myth of the Alleged National Popular Vote.” (Taking Bearings, November 2016). Available via Academia at https://www.academia.edu/30287717/Presidential_Politics_is_Electoral_College_Politics_and_the_Myth_of_the_Alleged_National_Popular_Vote._Taking_Bearings_November_2016_

[iv] Lerner, K. Lee. “Presidential Politics is Electoral College Politics and the Myth of the Alleged National Popular Vote.” (Taking Bearings, November 2016). Available via Academia at https://www.academia.edu/30287717/Presidential_Politics_is_Electoral_College_Politics_and_the_Myth_of_the_Alleged_National_Popular_Vote._Taking_Bearings_November_2016_