Twelve years ago, I wrote my first book. A novel.
My original goal was to tell a story about gerrymandering (because no one seemed to know anything about it). But when I rightfully concluded that wasn’t enough of a page-turner to make for a good novel, I added a Russian oligarch to the tale (I chose Russia because I had worked there).
And rather than my directly telling the story of how gerrymandering weakens American democracy, I chose to use the Russian oligarch as the observer who figures it out for himself. So he ultimately observes how gerrymandering (along with other broken aspects of America’s politics) undermines American democracy, then takes advantage of those weaknesses to meddle in American politics and shape American policy in the way that most favors his private interests.
I wrote the heart of that plot by 2013, edited the book for a few years as I did many other things, and launched it in the middle of 2016. The title: The People’s House (irony).
Soon after, due to the actual events that happened in the 2016 election, and what we later learned (the details were different but the overall narrative of my book paralleled real-life events), the book got some attention:
Then, after this….
…it went viral. It turns out Judy Woodruff viewers really buy books! (You can watch the interview HERE.)
How Did I Know?
“How did I know?” people asked.
While I had worked in Russia in the early 1990s, the truth is, I didn’t know anything.
It’s what I did (at first unwittingly) and have done since—as a novelist—that have made most of my books prescient as to later real-world events. (Wait until you hear about the plot of my sequel, The Wingman).
And what I did, in writing these books, was put myself in the position of an antagonist trying to cause damage to the United States. But to stay credible—to keep readers buying into the stories—I never wanted to present over-the-top plots. I wanted them to feel realistic. I wanted to scare people by how real they felt. So I brainstormed what could really happen.
And once you set out do that, things become pretty clear. And quite predictable.
What a foreign adversary would do, realistically, becomes pretty obvious.
Which is the reason I’m not at all surprised by the news that Russian Intel looks to have injected disinformation, via a source and the FBI, into the maelstrom of American politics—to then get proactively weaponized by GOP House members in their zeal to take down President Biden:
Why am I not surprised?
Because if you’re Russia, and you’ve watched American politics for the past decade, it would be obvious to do this. And you could do it confident that American politicians would advance your disinformation with the very glee and energy that they ultimately displayed.
Because you would have discovered long ago that the soft underbelly of American national security IS our broken politics. And that leaves a sea of potential “marks” who can and will do your dirty work for you.
Let me quote a column I wrote in 2016 explaining this phenomenon:
“What if leaders of a foreign entity are eager to change policy in America? Something substantial. How could they go about it?…America has imposing strengths: a direct coup would never work, and a military invasion of the country’s largest superpower is out of the question. So what to do?…
After studying American politics, the Russian in my book concludes that the Achilles’ heel of American democracy is its crumbling political infrastructure, and gambles that taking advantage of certain weaknesses is the best way to change the government and accomplish his agenda….
“We have allowed key pillars of our democracy to erode to the point where the deep dysfunction of our political system and culture has emerged as perhaps the prime vulnerability of our nation.”
Then I listed some of those weaknesses:
“Gerrymandering is so extreme that our legislatures are no longer democratic.”
““Dark” money overwhelms our campaign cycles. Small groups of special interests and even individuals from far beyond a targeted state can play an outsized role in who will serve as that state’s representative.”
“Our culture of politics is breaking down before our eyes. People can no longer delineate fact from fiction amid frenzied media coverage and social media postings. Campaign cycles have become an endless sequence of superficial breaking news rather than substance.”
“From courts to the Fed to our intelligence apparatus, no institutions are beyond the fray of the fierce partisan divide. Even the principle that partisanship stops at the water’s edge has become a relic of the past.”
“To top it all off, we have come to accept these weaknesses. They’ve become normalized — in some cases, cemented into place by court decisions.”
So, 8 years ago, it was clear to me that these and other factors weren't simply problems afflicting our own national politics, but they were problems foreign adversaries would clearly see as opportunities to undermine our nation. They were so serious they had become national security vulnerabilities.
What’s happened since?
The problems above have grown worse. Since I wrote those words in 2016, the weaknesses that Russians and other can take advantage of are all the more glaring.
And unfortunately, Russia and other nations have learned even more since then.
New lessons.
They’ve watched countless American politicians openly ignore the fact that they openly meddled in things. They’ve watched politicians willing to repeatedly value party and power over country, to a degree they likely could not have been imagined even in 2016. They’ve watched many American politicians tolerate repeated acts of open lawlessness, then rewrite history to pretend that lawlessness didn't even occur.
Think about it: most of us have been deeply disturbed by: the dismissal of both impeachments, the partisan and often fact-free investigations being waged by Jim Jordan and company, the whitewashing of the Mueller report, the GOP House’s willingness to side with Russian interests over Ukraine’s, and so on.
But if you’re a foreign adversary, all of these incidents give you enormous comfort that there are all sorts of ways to meddle in American and get away with it. And specifically, injecting concocted narratives into official and ultimately GOP hands would of course turn into exactly what it turned into. And those adversaries would also know that even if ultimately detected, not only wold the damage be done—but those caught peddling such disinformation would dismiss it and continue moving forward….exactly as they did last week.
Bottom line: our broken and dysfunctional politics makes us vulnerable to just this type of chaos-inducing and damaging disinformation attack. And even if discovered, that same dysfunctional politics means politicians and their allies still won’t do anything about it.
Seeing all that they’ve seen….of course they’re going to keep doing it! The behavior of Jim Jordan, James Comer and others is like a billboard inviting all of it.
What To Do?
In the end, as I concluded in both my first book (where political leaders do actually clean up the mess at the end, and, yes, they hold accountable the American politician who took advantage of the meddling after it was discovered), the solution of this continued foreign meddling lays less with foreign affairs, and more with ourselves.
As I wrote in that CNN piece: “If a foreign government can figure out that the sorry state of our democratic infrastructure has become America’s soft underbelly, it is long past time American political leaders also figure it out, come together, and take steps to fix it.”
That clearly didn’t happen since I wrote those words in 2016.
Until it does, foreign adversaries won’t stop taking advantage of our dysfunction—they’ll keep pushing, and seeing just how far they can go.
And it will work, because they'll keep finding American politicians all too willing to serve as their useful idiots.
By the way, if you’re looking for a good political thriller, may I recommend a book called The People’s House? It will scare the hell out of you.
David
Thank you so much for your very insightful writing and powerful voice for democracy and upholding our state and federal Constitution. I cannot tell you the number of times we have, told others about, or thought back on the revelatory inside information you presented to the world in “Laboratories of Autocracy” and your many other writings. Your work is both art imitating and real life depicting of life. It motivates all, who encounter your work, to realize that democracy is not a “spectator sport”. It will only survive, if we all do our part in preserving it. Thank you, David!
Thank you, David, again and again. It's frightening that the most vulnerable and with least power of voting had & have to vote to save American democracy again and again. We're all so worried, disheartened, & exhausted but we'll have to act again to save ourselves and our nation's, as well as globally, future generations from existential threats. I'm thankful to sane authors, activists, and good people who have power but it's clearer and clearer that the most vulnerable and most powerless have to fight the most greedy and powerful. The infuriating part is that we're also acting to save idiot magots, their faux preachers and greedy and shameless pretend leaders, and oligarchs who are funding the slow, now expedited, (talk about Dr. kavorkian), death and even funeral of our and other democracies, when they don't believe that it's dangerous for ALL.
We should all be able to sue drumfp, and his traitor party for the decades of pain and anguish inflicted on Americans. Why weren't the relatives of people who died of focus because of drumfp, and fakenoise be able to sue them?