Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping attend a concert marking the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and China and opening of China-Russia Years of Culture at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on May 16, 2024. (Alexander Ryumin, Pool Photo, AFP/TNS)
You would think that if anything could unite Americans, it would be a foreign attack. Think Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Well, I got one for you: Russia and China have built a vast disinformation machine designed to weaken democracies from within and strengthen authoritarians around the world.
During Pearl Harbor and 9/11 our enemies attacked us physically. But today China and Russia are attacking us in ways that, though not physical, are more invasive, and arguably, existential.
They are trying to poison the idea of intersubjective truth, our faith in democracy and trust in each other. Put in blunt terms, they’re trying to infect our minds in order to destabilize our culture and politics.
And they seem to be succeeding. To be fair, they don’t have to try too hard. They can just amplify our preexisting divisions. “We’re a highly polarized society.” How many times have you heard that? How many times do we repeat it to ourselves?
Around the world things are also not going very well. Democratic countries are facing a hope deficit. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently warned that “authoritarians have the momentum.” And former President Donald Trump – who is leading in swing state polling over President Joe Biden – is not our best candidate to die on the hill of democratic values.
And yet, there is a glimmer of hope. Let’s call them the political “normies.”
They are Americans who want to move past the performative politics of “fake eyelashes.” Not the loudest bunch out there, they prefer bipartisan pragmatism over “owning” the other side. They could be our best response to America’s authoritarian adversaries.
But before we get to them, and to address any skeptics about how Russia and China have upped their propaganda game, I have to share with you some details from Anne Applebaum’s cover story in the Atlantic. It’s an eye-opener.
She documents in depth how Russia and China turned their “repressive mechanisms outward.”
In the last decade or so, China has built a media empire that includes wire services, television networks, radio stations, and a thick social media presence in multiple languages and countries, especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia – all supported by billions of dollars in state financing.
With this media infrastructure in place, Chinese outlets form partnerships with local journalists, offering them training courses, stipends, even laptops and cellphones “in exchange for what the regime hopes will be favorable coverage.”
And it’s not just about news. They even use entertainment like kung-fu movies, soap operas and sporting events to “carry China-positive messages.”
The content is cheap, sometimes for free, and via content-sharing agreements, Russia and other authoritarian regimes like Iran and Venezuela make full use of it.
On the more sinister side of things, the Russians especially use media and their online accounts to spread conspiracy theories about our elections, about Ukraine or about hot-button issues like immigration — whatever advances their interests, which seem to include dividing Americans even further.
Their aim?
Overall, they want to break the rules-based international order, the system the U.S. helped put in place after World War II to end wars of aggression. Breaking that would also put a good dent in international law and Western economic prosperity. Russia’s war in Ukraine is a frontal assault on this system.
Another aim of Russia and China is self-preservation. By spreading doubt, confusion, anger or indifference about democracy to as large an audience as possible, they have a better chance of repressing these sentiments at home.
“If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned,” Applebaum writes. And poisoned at the source, I would add.
It’s the reason the U.S. Congress took several months to pass a crucial aid bill for Ukraine. Some MAGA Republicans in the House tried to shoot it down while mouthing Kremlin talking points during floor debates. A few seemed to be against the idea of bipartisanship altogether.
All of this when support for Ukraine should have been a no-brainer. What could be more core to our values as Americans than helping another democracy fight for its life against a brutal authoritarian state, especially one that meddles in the affairs of just about everyone – with the integrity of the whole international order at stake?
But then something interesting happened in the House. Over the objections of the chamber’s loudmouths, both sides came together in April to pass the $95 billion aid package. Bipartisanship on full display.
This is where the normies come in. Comedian Bill Maher has been using the term lately to discuss “that vast middle that is tired of the partisanship.” He calls them“ normal people who are not part of this extremism of either side.”
He doesn’t elaborate much on the exact composition of this group, but I think we can extrapolate. They could be Republicans, Democrats, independents or “moderates.” Once you get past the fog of punditry and social media outrage, many of them converge around fundamental values. This means they’re not ideological to the gills. They’re open to being persuaded, open to compromise. They want solutions to problems. And most importantly, as Maher has suggested, they know they can’t hate the other side: “Half the country is not going to self-deport.”
Ah yes, the normies. They can help us come to age politically. As full-grown political adults in the digital world, they can show us that “owning” and “destroying” our fellow Americans on social media is starting to feel old and counter-productive.
They can help us heal our internal divisions, knowing that a good motivator in doing so are the authoritarians on the outside who want to amplify them, who want to change us. Our adversaries want us to hate each other.
Patriotism has gotten a bad rap among some voters. But “normie patriotism” might be the best way to reverse the authoritarian tide. It sends a signal to other countries that bipartisanship works, civil debate works, democracy works. And it reminds us that our own democracy needs to be tended like a garden.
Terrance J. Mintner is a news editor and writer living in the Midwest. He writes a newsletter on Substack called Feral Brain (https://feralbrain.substack.com/).
