It sucks that Russia interferes in our elections.  But what sucks even more is that we allow them to succeed.  

 

In reality, the fact that Russia has to resort to hybrid warfare tactics like election hacking should make them look weak and pathetic.  After all, because Russia lacks the monetary resources and is in decline, they really have no other feasible way to provoke us.  Dr. Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, described it this way, "Essentially what Russia is doing is a geopolitical guerrilla.  The Russians can very rarely create problems in the West, instead what they can do is exacerbate, worsen problems that are widespread across the West." 

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Which describes the problem perfectly:  Putin's hack job would have never succeeded unless this country was not at a breaking point to begin with.  Putin didn't create divisions between Americans; he simply exploited them.  A recent academic paper explains that "democracies assume accurate knowledge by the populace, but the human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning.....There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can even alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments."  The paper goes on to say that "the influence of partisan identities threatens the democratic process, which requires and assumes that citizens have access to reliable knowledge in order to participate in the public debate and make informed choices.....The tribal nature of the human mind leads people to value party dogma over truth."  Read the entire paper here.

 

This partisan warfare must end now.  What once could have been called politics as usual has become truly dangerous.  At a time when our only focus should be the shared goal of productive progress, we are entrenched in a two-way political standoff that stifles all desire for compromise, represses intelligent and informed conversation, and prevents our country from being the very best it can be.