Vlad Vexler wrote:
Post-truth politics is a kind of co-conspiracy between politician and citizen, in which both parties half agree that truth doesn't matter.
Post-truth populists flourish where citizens experience, what I call,
the 4 big feelings of distrust (here they are from least to most worry):
1. Feeling unsafe. Belief that your political institutions are incompetent. You are in unsafe hands.
2. Feeling powerless. There is nothing you can do to inflect political process. Your reach out to touch politics, but you can't touch it.
3. Feeling betrayed. Your political institutions prioritize
others over you, thereby making them evil.
4. A feeling of opacity. Which goes with the thought that you can no longer see politics. Your political institutions no longer make sense. This is a lapse into magical thinking, which makes you not mind if your political institutions get destroyed. Because they don't make sense anyway.
The cases of this crisis of trust range from:
1. The untethering of communal bonds in our societies.
2. The disinhibiting and atomising effect of social media.
3. Mechanisms of exclusion.
4. Ideologies of self-realisation which give up on solidarity and the public good.
Everything I've described is organic in the sense that it would still be happening, if the malign actors interfering in our democracies vanished of the face of the Earth. But they haven't vanished. They're trying to exploit and exacerbate our democratic incapacity for their purposes. We want them to lose, but at the moment we might be losing.
It's now that we come to the biggest harm Russian propaganda does, that most people do not recognize. The harm Russian propaganda seeks to do to Western democracies is DO IT YOURSELF harm. Russian propaganda is unreasonably effective because it seeks to trigger a self-destructive response on our part, which if we want to save our democracies, we've got to stop.
They want us to freak out about their interference so dramatically that our freak out about the interference does more harm than the interference itself. The Kremlin wants the architects of the damage to our democracies to be not just people who parrot Russian propaganda, but "you and me", people who might lose their cool, because they're worried about Russian propaganda and interference.
The Kremlin wins if we lose our capacity to tell apart homegrown democratic crisis from malign foreign interference. And the Kremlin wins more if we lose not just that capacity, but our capacity to engage in democratic regeneration, because we think our problems are externally caused, a product of malign foreign interference and therefore do not need a fix.
The Kremlin wins if we laps into magical thinking and ourselves become conspiracy theorists by taking problems, that are 95% homegrown and 5% Kremlin exaggerated, and seeing them as 5% homegrown and 95% Kremlin cause without evidence. Because like a conspiracy theorists we think that the evidence that really matters is evidence that is not visible to the eye.