The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

CHAPTER SIX EQUALITY OR OLIGARCHY (2016)

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 1788

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

—OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1770

Vladimir Putin’s eternity regime challenged political virtues: undoing a succession principle in Russia, assaulting integration in Europe, invading Ukraine to stop the creation of new political forms. His grandest campaign was a cyberwar to destroy the United States of America. For reasons having to do with American inequality, Russian oligarchy won an extraordinary victory in 2016. Because it did, inequality became a still greater American problem.

The rise of Donald Trump was the attack by “these most deadly adversaries of republican government” that Alexander Hamilton had feared. Russian leaders openly and exuberantly backed Trump’s candidacy. Throughout 2016, Russian elites said with a smile that “Trump is our president.” Dmitry Kiselev, the leading man of the Russian media, rejoiced that “a new star is rising—Trump.” The Eurasianists felt the same way: Alexander Dugin posted a video entitled “In Trump We Trust” and urged Americans to “vote for Trump!” Alexei Pushkov, the chair of the foreign relations committee of the lower house of the Russian parliament, expressed the general hope that “Trump can lead the Western locomotive right off the rails.” Some Russians tried to alert Americans: Andrei Kozyrev, a former foreign minister, explained that Putin “realizes that Trump will trample American democracy and damage if not destroy America as a pillar of stability and major force able to contain him.”

The Russian media machine was at work on Trump’s behalf. As a Russian journalist later explained: “we were given very clear instructions: to show Donald Trump in a positive way, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in a negative way.” The Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik used the #crookedhillary hashtag on Twitter—a gesture of respect and support for Trump, since the phrase was his—and also associated Clinton with nuclear war. Trump appeared on RT to complain that the U.S. media was untruthful, which for RT was the perfect performance: its entire reason for being was to expose the single truth that everyone lied, and here was an American saying the same thing.

When Trump won the presidential election that November, he was applauded in the Russian parliament. Trump quickly telephoned Putin to be congratulated. Kiselev, the leading man of the Russian media, celebrated Trump as the return of manhood to politics on his Sunday evening program, Vesti Nedeli. He fantasized before his viewers about Trump satisfying blondes, including Hillary Clinton. He was pleased that “the words ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are not in the vocabulary of Trump.” Describing a meeting of Trump and Obama, Kiselev claimed that Obama was “waving his arms, as if he were in the jungle.” In his commentary on Trump’s inauguration, Kiselev said that Michelle Obama looked like the housekeeper.

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The politics of eternity are full of phantasmagoria, of bots and trolls, ghosts and zombies, dead souls and other unreal beings who escort a fictional character to power. “Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism. Russians raised “a creature of their own” to the presidency of the United States. Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.

Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.

Throughout the exercise, Russians knew what was fact and what was fiction. Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the “VERY successful businessman” of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool. Although Americans might dream otherwise, no one who mattered in Moscow believed that Trump was a powerful tycoon. Russian money had saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.

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From an American point of view, Trump Tower is a garish building on Fifth Avenue in New York City. From a Russian point of view, Trump Tower is an inviting site for international crime.

Russian gangsters began to launder money by buying and selling apartment units in Trump Tower in the 1990s. The most notorious Russian hit man, long sought by the FBI, resided in Trump Tower. Russians were arrested for running a gambling ring from the apartment beneath Trump’s own. In Trump World Tower, constructed between 1999 and 2001 on the east side of Manhattan near the United Nations, a third of the luxury units were bought by people or entities from the former Soviet Union. A man investigated by the Treasury Department for money laundering lived in Trump World Tower directly beneath Kellyanne Conway, who would become the press spokeswoman for the Trump campaign. Seven hundred units of Trump properties in South Florida were purchased by shell companies. Two men associated with those shell companies were convicted of running a gambling and laundering scheme from Trump Tower. Perhaps Trump was entirely unaware of what was happening on his properties.

By the late 1990s, Trump was generally considered to be uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed about four billion dollars to more than seventy banks, of which some $800 million was personally guaranteed. He never showed any inclination or capacity to pay back this debt. After his 2004 bankruptcy, no American bank would lend him money. The only bank that did so was Deutsche Bank, whose colorful history of scandal belied its staid name. Interestingly, Deutsche Bank also laundered about $10 billion for Russian clients between 2011 and 2015. Interestingly, Trump declined to pay back his debts to Deutsche Bank.

A Russian oligarch bought a house from Trump for $55 million more than Trump had paid for it. The buyer, Dmitry Rybolovlev, never showed any interest in the property and never lived there—but later, when Trump ran for president, Rybolovlev appeared in places where Trump was campaigning. Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade. Having realized that apartment complexes could be used to launder money, Russians used Trump’s name to build more buildings. As Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The Russian offers were hard to refuse: millions of dollars up-front for Trump, a share of the profits for Trump, Trump’s name on a building—but no investment required from Trump. These terms suited both sides. In 2006, citizens of the former Soviet Union financed the construction of Trump SoHo, and gave Trump 18% of the profits—although he put up no money himself. In the case of Felix Sater, the apartments were currency laundromats. A Russian American, Sater worked as senior advisor of the Trump Organization from an office in Trump Tower two floors below Trump’s own. Trump depended upon the Russian money Sater brought through an entity known as the Bayrock Group. Sater arranged for people from the post-Soviet world to buy apartments using shell companies. From 2007, Sater and Bayrock were helping Trump around the world, cooperating on at least four projects. Some of these failed, but Trump made money regardless.

Russia is not a wealthy country, but its wealth is highly concentrated. It is thus common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later. As a candidate for the office of president, Trump broke with decades of tradition by not releasing his tax returns, presumably because they would reveal his profound dependence on Russian capital. Even after he announced his candidacy for the office of president, in June 2015, Trump was pursuing risk-free deals with Russians. In October 2015, near the time of a Republican presidential debate, he signed a letter of intent to have Russians build a tower in Moscow and put his name on it. He took to Twitter to announce that “Putin loves Donald Trump.”

The final deal never went through, perhaps because it would have made the Russian sources of Trump’s apparent success just a bit too obvious at the moment when his presidential campaign was gaining momentum. The fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” had more important things to do. In the words of Felix Sater, writing in November 2015, “Our boy can become president of the United States and we can engineer it.” In 2016, just when Trump needed money to run a campaign, his properties became extremely popular for shell companies. In the half year between his nomination as the Republican candidate and his victory in the general election, some 70% of the units sold in his buildings were purchased not by human beings but by limited liability companies.

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Russia’s “boy” existed in the American mind thanks to a popular American television program, The Apprentice, where Trump portrayed a mogul capable of hiring and firing at will. The role came naturally to him, perhaps because pretending to be such a person was already his day job. On the show, the world was a ruthless oligarchy, where an individual’s future depended upon the capricious whims of a single man. The climax in each episode came when Trump brought the pain: “You’re fired!” When Trump ran for president, he did so on the premise that the world really was so: that a fictional character with fictional wealth who ignores law, despises institutions, and lacks sympathy can govern people by causing pain. Trump outshone Republican rivals at debates thanks to years of practice at playing a fictional character on television.

Trump was broadcasting unreality, and had been for some time. In 2010, RT was helping American conspiracy theorists spread the false idea that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. This fiction, designed to appeal to the weaknesses of racist Americans who wished to imagine away their elected president, invited them to live in an alternative reality. In 2011, Trump became the spokesman of this fantasy campaign. He only had a platform to do so because Americans associated him with the successful businessman he played on television, a role which in turn was only possible because Russians had bailed him out. Fiction rested on fiction rested on fiction.

From a Russian perspective, Trump was a failure who was rescued and an asset to be used to wreak havoc in American reality. The relationship was playacted in Moscow at the Miss Universe pageant of 2013, where Trump preened before Putin, hoping that the Russian president would be his “best friend.” Trump’s Russian partners knew he needed money; they paid him $20 million while they organized the pageant. They allowed him to play his role as the American with money and power. In a music video filmed for the occasion, Trump was permitted to say “You’re fired!” to a successful young pop star, the son of the man who actually ran the pageant. Letting Trump win meant owning him completely.

Trump the winner was a fiction that would make his country lose.

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The Soviet secret police—known over time as the Cheka, the GPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and then in Russia as the FSB—excelled in a special sort of operation known as “active measures.” Intelligence is about seeing and understanding. Counterintelligence is about making that difficult for others. Active measures, such as the operation on behalf of the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman,” are about inducing the enemy to direct his own strengths against his own weaknesses. America was crushed by Russia in the cyberwar of 2016 because the relationship between technology and life had changed in a way that gave an advantage to the Russian practitioners of active measures.

The cold war, by the 1970s and 1980s, was a technological competition for the visible consumption of attractive goods in the real world. North American and west European countries were then at an unmistakable advantage, and in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. As an unregulated internet entered most American (but not Russian) households in the 2000s and the 2010s, the relationship between technology and life changed—and the balance of power shifted along with it. By 2016, the average American spent more than ten hours a day in front of screens, most of that with devices connected to the internet. In “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot wrote that “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.” The shadow in the America of the 2010s was the internet, dividing people from what they thought they were doing. By 2016, technology no longer made American society look better to the outside world. Instead, technology offered a better look inside American society, and into individual American minds.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the hero is told, “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” In the 2010s, the competition was not about physical objects that could be consumed, as during the cold war, but about psychological states that could be generated in the mind. The Russian economy did not have to produce anything of material value, and did not. Russian politicians had to use technologies created by others to alter mental states, and did. Once the competition was about the invisible manipulation of personalities, it was not surprising that Russia won.

Russia under Putin declared war not for cause but because the terms were favorable. Ilyin and other Russian nationalists after him had defined the West as a spiritual threat, whose very existence generated facts that could be harmful or confusing to Russians. By that logic, preemptive cyberwar against Europe and America was justified as soon as it was technically feasible. By 2016, Russian cyberwar had been underway for nearly a decade, though it was largely ignored in American discussions. A Russian parliamentarian said that the American secret services “slept through” as Russia chose the American president, and there was justice in his words.

Kiselev called information war the most important kind of war. At the receiving end, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party wrote of “a war, clearly, but waged on a different kind of battlefield.” The term was to be taken literally. Carl von Clausewitz, the most famous student of warfare, defined it as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” What if, as Russian military doctrine of the 2010s posited, technology made it possible to engage the enemy’s will directly, without the medium of violence? It should be possible, as a Russian military planning document of 2013 proposed, to mobilize the “protest potential of the population” against its own interests, or, as the Izborsk Club specified in 2014, to generate in the United States a “destructive paranoid reflection.”^* Those are concise and precise descriptions of Trump’s candidacy. The fictional character won, thanks to votes meant as a protest against the system, and thanks to voters who believed paranoid fantasies that simply were not true.

During the 2014 presidential elections in Ukraine, Russia hacked the server of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission. Ukrainian officials caught the hack at the last moment. In other realms, Ukrainians were not so lucky. The most terrifying possibility of cyberwar is what the professionals call “cyber-to-physical”: an action taken at a keyboard to change computer code has consequences in the three-dimensional world. Russian hackers attempted this several times in Ukraine, for example by shutting down parts of the electrical grid. In the United States in 2016, these two forms of attack were brought together: an attack on a presidential election, this time as cyber-to-physical. The aim of Russian cyberwar was to bring Trump to the Oval Office through what seemed to be normal procedures. Trump did not need to understand this, any more than an electrical grid has to know when it is disconnected. All that matters is that the lights go out.

The Russian war against Ukraine was always an element of the larger policy to destroy the European Union and the United States. Russian leaders made no secret of this; Russian soldiers and volunteers believed that they were engaged in a world war against the United States—and in a sense they were right. In spring 2014, when Russian special forces infiltrated southeastern Ukraine, some soldiers were clearly thinking about defeating America. One of them told a reporter his dream was that “the T-50 [a Russian stealth fighter] will be flying above Washington!” Similar visions filled the imagination of Ukrainian citizens who fought on the Russian side: one of them fantasized about hanging a red flag on top of the American White House and Capitol. In July 2014, when Russia began its second major military intervention in Ukraine, the commander Vladimir Antyufeyev grouped Ukraine and the United States together as “disintegrating” states, and anticipated that the American “demonic construction” would be destroyed. In August 2014, Alexander Borodai (and many others) passed on a joke in social media about Russia intervening in the United States, which included a racist characterization of its president. In September 2014, Sergei Glazyev wrote that the “American elite” had to be “terminated” for the war in Ukraine to be won. In December 2014, the Izborsk Club published a series of articles on a new cold war directed against the United States, to be fought as an information war. It anticipated “filling information with misinformation.” The goal was “the destruction of some of the important pillars of Western society.”

The Russian FSB and Russian military intelligence (the GRU), both active in Ukraine, would also both take part in the cyberwar against the United States. The dedicated Russian cyberwar center known as the Internet Research Agency manipulated European and American opinion about Russia’s war in Ukraine. In June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, the Internet Research Agency was expanded to include an American Department. About ninety new employees went to work on-site in St. Petersburg. The Internet Research Agency also engaged about a hundred American political activists who did not know for whom they were working. The Internet Research Agency worked alongside Russian secret services to move Trump into the Oval Office.

It was clear in 2016 that Russians were excited about these new possibilities. That February, Putin’s cyber advisor Andrey Krutskikh boasted: “We are on the verge of having something in the information arena that will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.” In May, an officer of the GRU bragged that his organization was going to take revenge on Hillary Clinton on behalf of Vladimir Putin. In October, a month before the elections, Pervyi Kanal published a long and interesting meditation on the forthcoming collapse of the United States. In June 2017, after Russia’s victory, Putin spoke for himself, saying that he had never denied that Russian volunteers had made cyberwar against the United States. This was the precise formulation he had used to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine: that he had never denied that there were volunteers. Putin was admitting, with a wink, that Russia had defeated the United States in a cyberwar.

American exceptionalism proved to be an enormous American vulnerability. The Russian ground offensive in Ukraine proved to be more difficult than the concurrent cyberwar against Europeans and Americans. Even as Ukraine defended itself, European and American writers conveyed Russian propaganda. Unlike Ukrainians, Americans were unaccustomed to the idea that the internet might be used against them. By 2016, some Americans began to realize that they had been duped about Ukraine by Russian propaganda. But few noticed that the next attack was under way, or anticipated that their country could lose control over reality.

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In a cyberwar, an “attack surface” is the set of points in a computer program that allow hackers access. If the target of a cyberwar is not a computer program but a society, then the attack surface is something broader: software that allows the attacker contact with the mind of the enemy. For Russia in 2015 and 2016, the American attack surface was the entirety of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google.

In all likelihood, most American voters were exposed to Russian propaganda. It is telling that Facebook shut down 5.8 million fake accounts right before the election of November 2016. These had been used to promote political messages. In 2016, about a million sites on Facebook were using a tool that allowed them to artificially generate tens of millions of “likes,” thereby pushing certain items, often fictions, into the newsfeeds of unwitting Americans. One of the most obvious Russian interventions was the 470 Facebook sites placed by Russia’s Internet Research Agency but purported to be those of American political organizations or movements. Six of these had 340 million shares each of content on Facebook, which would suggest that all of them taken together had billions of shares. The Russian campaign also included at least 129 event pages, which reached at least 336,300 people. Right before the election, Russia placed three thousand advertisements on Facebook, and promoted them as memes across at least 180 accounts on Instagram. Russia could do so without including any disclaimers about who had paid for the ads, leaving Americans with the impression that foreign propaganda was an American discussion. As researchers began to calculate the extent of American exposure to Russian propaganda, Facebook deleted more data. This suggests that the Russian campaign was embarrassingly effective. Later, the company told investors that as many as sixty million accounts were fake.

Americans were not exposed to Russian propaganda randomly, but in accordance with their own susceptibilities, as revealed by their practices on the internet. People trust what sounds right, and trust permits manipulation. In one variation, people are led towards ever more intense outrage about what they already fear or hate. The theme of Muslim terrorism, which Russia had already exploited in France and Germany, was also developed in the United States. In crucial states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, Russia’s ads were targeted at people who could be aroused to vote by anti-Muslim messages. Throughout the United States, likely Trump voters were exposed to pro-Clinton messages on what purported to be American Muslim sites. As in the Lisa F. affair in Germany, Russian pro-Trump propaganda associated refugees with rapists. Trump had done the same when announcing his candidacy.

Russian attackers exploited Twitter’s capacity for massive retransmission. Even in normal times on routine subjects, perhaps 10% of Twitter accounts (a conservative estimate) are bots rather than human beings: that is, computer programs of greater or lesser sophistication, designed to spread certain messages to a target audience. Though bots are less numerous than humans on Twitter, they are more efficient than humans in sending messages. In the weeks before the election, bots accounted for about 20% of the American conversation about politics. An important scholarly study published the day before the polls opened warned that bots could “endanger the integrity of the presidential election.” It cited three main problems: “first, influence can be redistributed across suspicious accounts that may be operated with malicious purposes; second, the political conversation can be further polarized; third, spreading of misinformation and unverified information can be enhanced.” After the election, Twitter identified 2,752 accounts as instruments of Russian political influence. Once Twitter started looking it was able to identify about a million suspicious accounts per day.

Bots were initially used for commercial purposes. Twitter has an impressive capacity to influence human behavior by offering deals that seem cheaper or easier than alternatives. Russia took advantage of this. Russian Twitter accounts suppressed the vote by encouraging Americans to “text-to-vote,” which is impossible. The practice was so massive that Twitter, which is very reluctant to intervene in discussions over its platform, finally had to admit its existence in a statement. It seems possible that Russia also digitally suppressed the vote in another way: by making voting impossible in crucial places and times. North Carolina, for example, is a state with a very small Democratic majority, where most Democratic voters are in cities. On Election Day, voting machines in cities ceased to function, thereby reducing the number of votes recorded. The company that produced the machines in question had been hacked by Russian military intelligence. Russia also scanned the electoral websites of at least twenty-one American states, perhaps looking for vulnerabilities, perhaps seeking voter data for influence campaigns. According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.”

Having used its Twitter bots to encourage a Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, Russia now turned them loose in the United States. In several hundred cases (at least), the very same bots that worked against the European Union attacked Hillary Clinton. Most of the foreign bot traffic was negative publicity about her. When she fell ill on September 11, 2016, Russian bots massively amplified the scale of the event, creating a trend on Twitter under the hashtag #Hillary Down. Russian trolls and bots also moved to support Trump directly at crucial points. Russian trolls and bots praised Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention over Twitter. When Trump had to debate Clinton, which was a difficult moment for him, Russian trolls and bots filled the ether with claims that he had won or that the debate was somehow rigged against him. In crucial swing states that Trump won, bot activity intensified in the days before the election. On Election Day itself, bots were firing with the hashtag #War AgainstDemocrats. After Trump’s victory, at least 1,600 of the same bots that had been working on his behalf went to work against Macron and for Le Pen in France, and against Merkel and for the AfD in Germany. Even at this most basic technical level, the war against the United States was also the war against the European Union.

In the United States in 2016, Russia also penetrated email accounts, and then used proxies on Facebook and Twitter to distribute selections that were deemed useful. The hack began when people were sent an email message that asked them to enter their passwords on a linked website. Hackers then used security credentials to access that person’s email account and steal its contents. Someone with knowledge of the American political system then chose what portions of this material the American public should see, and when.

During a presidential election year, each major American political party has its turn at a national convention, with an equal chance to choreograph the choice and presentation of its candidate. Russia denied the Democratic Party this chance in 2016. In March and April, Russia hacked the accounts of people in the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign (and tried to hack Hillary Clinton personally). On July 22, some 22,000 emails were revealed, right before the Democratic National Convention was to be held. The emails that were made public were carefully selected to ensure strife between supporters of Clinton and her rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders. Their release created division at the moment when the campaign was meant to coalesce.

According to American authorities then and since, this hack was an element of a Russian cyberwar. The Trump campaign, however, supported Russia’s effort. Trump publicly requested that Moscow find and release more emails from Hillary Clinton. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was in personal communication with WikiLeaks, the proxy that facilitated some of the email dumps. WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to have his father publicize one leak—“Hey Donald, great to see your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweet this link if he mentions us”—which Trump Sr. in fact did, fifteen minutes after the request was made. With his millions of Twitter followers, Trump was among the most important distribution channels of the Russian hacking operation. Trump also aided the Russian endeavor by shielding it from scrutiny, denying repeatedly that Russia was intervening in the campaign.

Leaked emails came to the rescue when Trump faced difficulties. On October 7, Trump seemed to be in trouble when a tape revealed his view that powerful men should sexually assault women. Thirty minutes after that tape was published, Russia released the emails of the chairman of Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta, thereby hindering a serious discussion of Trump’s history of sexual predation. Russian trolls and bots then went to work, trivializing Trump’s advocacy of sexual assault and guiding Twitter users to the leak. Then Russian trolls and bots helped to work the Podesta emails into two fictional stories, one about a pizza pedophile ring and another about Satanic practices. These served to distract Trump’s supporters from his own confession of sexual predation and helped them to think and talk about something else.

As in Poland in 2015, so in the United States in 2016: no one considered the totalitarian implications of the selective public release of private communications. Totalitarianism effaces the boundary between the private and public, so that it is normal for us all to be transparent to power all of the time. The information that Russia released concerned real people who were serving important functions in the American democratic process; its release to the public affected their psychological state and political capacity during an election. It mattered that the people who were trying to run the Democratic National Convention were receiving death threats over cell phone numbers that Russia had made public. Since Democratic congressional committees lost control of private data, Democratic candidates for Congress were molested as they ran for office. After their private data was released, American citizens who had given money to the Democratic Party were also exposed to harassment and threats. All of this mattered at the highest level of politics, since it affected one major political party and not the other. More fundamentally, it was a foretaste of what modern totalitarianism is like: no one can act in politics without fear, since anything done now can be revealed later, with personal consequences.

Of course, citizens play their part in creating a totalitarian atmosphere. Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism. Yet the temptation went broader and deeper. Citizens are curious: surely what is hidden is most interesting, and surely the thrill of revelation is liberation. Once all that is taken for granted, the discussion shifts from the public and the known to the secret and the unknown. Rather than trying to make sense of what is around us, we hunger for the next revelation. Public servants, imperfect and flawed to be sure, become personalities whom we think we have the right to know completely. Yet when the difference between the public and the private collapses, democracy is placed under unsustainable pressure. In such a situation, only the shameless politician can survive, one who cannot be exposed. A work of fiction such as “Donald Trump, successful businessman” cannot be shamed because it feels no sense of responsibility for the real world. A work of fiction responds to revelation by demanding more. As a candidate, Trump did just this, calling on Moscow to keep searching and exposing.

If they take as knowledge only what is revealed by foreign hackers, citizens become beholden to hostile powers. In 2016, Americans were dependent upon Russia, without realizing that this was the case. Most Americans followed Vladimir Putin’s guidance about reading hacked email: “Is it really important who did this?” he asked. “What is inside the information—that is what is important.” But what about all of the open sources from which people are distracted by the thrill of revelation? And what about all the other secrets that are not revealed, because the power in question chooses not to reveal them? The drama of revelation of one thing makes us forget that other things are hidden. Neither the Russians nor their surrogates released any information about the Republicans or the Trump campaign or, for that matter, about themselves. None of the ostensible seekers of truth who released emails over the internet had anything to say about the relationship of the Trump campaign to Russia.

This was a telling omission, since no American presidential campaign was ever so closely bound to a foreign power. The connections were perfectly clear from the open sources. One success of Russia’s cyberwar was that the seductiveness of the secret and the trivial drew Americans away from the obvious and the important: that the sovereignty of the United States was under visible attack.

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The open sources revealed extraordinary interactions between Trump’s advisors and the Russian Federation. It was no secret that Paul Manafort, who joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and ran it from June through August, had long and deep connections to eastern Europe. As Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort took no salary from a man who claimed to be a billionaire, which was rather unusual. Perhaps he was simply public-spirited. Or perhaps he expected that the real payment would come from other quarters.

Between 2006 and 2009, Manafort had been employed by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to soften up the United States for Russian political influence. Manafort promised the Kremlin “a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government,” and Deripaska reportedly paid him $26 million. After a joint investment project, Manafort found himself in debt some $18.9 million to Deripaska. In 2016, while Manafort was working as Trump’s campaign manager, this debt appears to have been of concern to Manafort. He wrote to offer Deripaska “private briefings” on the Trump campaign. He tried to convert his influence into Deripaska’s forgiveness, hoping “to get whole.” Interestingly, Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz also represented Deripaska.

Aside from his history of working for Russia to weaken the United States, Manafort had experience getting Russia’s preferred candidates elected president. In 2005, Deripaska recommended Manafort to the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who was a backer of Viktor Yanukovych. As an operative in Ukraine between 2005 and 2015, Manafort used the same “Southern strategy” that Republicans had developed in the United States in the 1980s: tell one part of the population that its identity is at risk, and then try to make every election a referendum on culture. In the United States, the target audience was Southern whites; in Ukraine the target audience was speakers of Russian: but the appeal was the same. Manafort managed to get Viktor Yanukovych elected in Ukraine in 2010, though the aftermath was revolution and Russian invasion.

Having brought American tactics to eastern Europe, Manafort now brought east European tactics to the United States. As Trump’s campaign manager, he oversaw the import of Russian-style political fiction. It was during Manafort’s tenure that Trump told a television audience that Russia would not invade Ukraine—two years after Russia had done so. It was also on Manafort’s watch that Trump publicly requested that Russia find and release Hillary Clinton’s emails. Manafort had to resign as Trump’s campaign manager after it emerged that he had been paid $12.7 million in off-the-books cash by Yanukovych. Right down to the last, Manafort showed the touch of a true Russian political technologist, not so much denying the facts as changing the subject to a spectacular fiction. On the day the story of his cash payments broke, August 14, 2016, Manafort helped Russia to spread an entirely fictional story about an attack by Muslim terrorists on a NATO base in Turkey.

Manafort was replaced as campaign manager by the right-wing ideologue and filmmaker Steve Bannon, whose qualification was that he had brought white supremacists to the mainstream of American discourse. As the director of the Breitbart News Network, Bannon made them household names. America’s leading racists, to a man, admired Trump and Putin. Matthew Heimbach, a defender of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, spoke of Putin as the “leader of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” and of Russia as “the most powerful ally” of white supremacy and as an “axis for nationalists.” Heimbach was such an enthusiast of Trump that he physically removed a protestor from a Trump rally in Louisville in March 2016—his legal defense at trial was that he was acting on instructions from Trump. Bannon claimed to be an economic nationalist and thus a champion of the people. Yet he owed his career and his media outlet to one American oligarchical clan, the Mercers; and ran a campaign to bring another oligarchical clan, the Trumps, to the Oval Office—in cooperation with a man who had helped open the United States to unlimited campaign contributions in a lawsuit sponsored by yet a third American oligarchical clan, the Kochs.

Bannon’s extreme-Right ideology lubricated American oligarchy, much as similar ideas had in the Russian Federation. Bannon was a far less sophisticated and erudite version of Vladislav Surkov. He was intellectually underequipped and easily overmatched. By playing Russia’s game at a low level, he assured that Russia would win. Like Russian ideologues who dismissed factuality as enemy technology, Bannon spoke of journalists as the “opposition party.” It was not that he denied the truth of claims made against the Trump campaign. He did not, for example, deny that Donald Trump was a sexual predator. Instead he portrayed the reporters who conveyed the relevant facts as enemies of the nation.

Bannon’s films were simplistic and uninteresting in comparison to the literature of Surkov or the philosophy of Ilyin, but the idea was the same: a politics of eternity in which the innocent nation is under regular assault. Like his Russian betters, Bannon rehabilitated forgotten fascists, in his case Julius Evola. Like Surkov, he aimed for confusion and darkness, even if his references were a bit more quotidian: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” Bannon believed that “Putin is standing up for traditional institutions.” In fact, Russia’s ostensible defense of tradition was an attack on the sovereign states of Europe and the sovereignty of the United States of America. The presidential campaign Bannon led was a Russian attack on American sovereignty. Bannon grasped this later: when he learned of a meeting between the top members of the Trump campaign and Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016, he called it “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” In the end, though, Bannon agreed with Putin that the federal government of the United States (and the European Union, which he called “a glorified protectorate”) should be destroyed.

Throughout the campaign, regardless of whether Manafort or Bannon was formally in charge, Trump counted on his son-in-law, the real estate developer Jared Kushner. Unlike Manafort, who had a history, and Bannon, who had an ideology, Kushner was linked to Russia only by money and ambition. It is easiest to track those connections by noting his silences. Kushner failed to mention, after his father-in-law’s election victory, that his company Cadre held a weighty investment from a Russian whose companies had channeled a billion dollars to Facebook and $191 million to Twitter on behalf of the Russian state. It was also noteworthy that Deutsche Bank, which had laundered billions for Russian oligarchs, and which was the only bank still willing to loan to Kushner’s father-in-law, extended to Kushner a loan of $285 million just a few weeks before the presidential election.

After his father-in-law was elected president and after he was given a wide range of responsibilities in the White House, Kushner had to apply for security clearance. In his application, he mentioned no contact with Russian officials. In fact, he had taken part in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, along with Manafort and Donald Trump Jr., in which Moscow offered documents to the Trump campaign as part of (as their intermediary put it) “Russia and the Russian government’s support for Trump.” The Russian spokeswoman at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, worked as a lawyer for Aras Agalarov, the man who had brought Trump to Moscow in 2013. Also present at the Trump Tower meeting was Ike Kaveladze, a vice president of Agalarov’s company, whose own business involved establishing thousands of anonymous companies in the United States. When knowledge of the Trump campaign’s meeting with Russians became public, Trump Sr. dictated to Trump Jr. a misleading press release, claiming that the subject of discussion was adoptions.

In addition to his participation in the Trump Tower meeting with Russians, Kushner had spoken multiple times during the campaign to the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. On one occasion he smuggled Kislyak into Trump Tower in a freight elevator—for talks about how to set up a secret channel of communication between Trump and Putin.

During the campaign, Trump spoke little about foreign policy, limiting himself to the repeated promise to “get along with Putin” and words of praise for the Russian president. Trump delivered his first foreign policy speech on April 27, almost a year after declaring his candidacy. Manafort chose as Trump’s speechwriter the former diplomat Richard Burt, who at the time was under contract to a Russian gas company. In other words, a man who owed money to an important Russian hired a man who was working for Russia to write a speech for Russia’s preferred candidate. Burt’s firm had been paid $365,000 that same spring for the furtherance of Russian commercial interests. Burt had also been a member of the senior advisory board of Alfa-Bank, whose computer servers made several thousand attempts to establish contact with computers in Trump Tower.

As soon as Trump named foreign policy advisors, they fell immediately into conversations with Russians or Russian intermediaries about how Russia could harm Clinton and help Trump. A few days after learning that he would be serving Trump as a foreign policy advisor in March 2016, George Papadopoulos began conversations with people who presented themselves as agents of the Russian government. On April 26, right after Russian military intelligence hacked the email accounts of Democratic politicians and activists, Papadopoulos was offered emails and “dirt” about Hillary Clinton by his Russian contact. He had just been at work editing Trump’s first foreign policy speech, which he discussed with his Russian contacts. They were very impressed, and praised him. Shortly after that exchange, Papadopoulos met Trump and other advisors.

One evening in May, while drinking at a London bar, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton. The Australians told the FBI, which began an investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia. For his part, Papadopoulos continued his exchanges with his contacts, who urged him forward. “We are all very excited,” his female contact wrote him, “about the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump.” Arrested by the FBI, he confessed to lying to American authorities about these interactions.

A second Trump advisor on foreign policy, Carter Page, had once briefly worked for an American firm whose director remembered him as pro-Putin and “wackadoodle.” Page then set up shop in a building connected to Trump Tower, and met with Russian spies. In 2013, he supplied Russian spies with documents about the energy industry. Page became a lobbyist for Russian gas companies; while working for the Trump campaign he promised his Russian clients that a Trump presidency would serve their interests. At the moment when he was named an advisor to Trump, he owned shares in Gazprom.

Page traveled as a representative of the Trump campaign to Russia in July 2016, right before the Republican National Convention where Trump was to become the Republican nominee for the office of president of the United States. By his own account, Page was speaking to “senior members” of the Putin administration, one of whom “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump.” Page returned to the United States and altered the Republican platform in a way that fulfilled Moscow’s desires. At the Republican National Convention, Page and another Trump advisor, J. D. Gordon, substantially weakened the section of the platform about the need for a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Page spoke to the Russian ambassador at the Republican National Convention, and then again shortly thereafter.

A third foreign policy advisor was the retired general Michael Flynn. Although Flynn had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was under consideration for national security advisor, he illegally took money from foreign governments without reporting that he had done so, while tweeting hither and thither various conspiracy theories. Flynn spread the idea that Hillary Clinton was a sponsor of pedophilia. He was also taken in by the story, enthusiastically spread by Russia, that Democratic leaders took part in Satanic rituals. He used his own Twitter account to spread that story, and thus, like a number of other American conspiracy theorists, became a participant in Russian active measures directed against the United States.

In the fog of mental confusion that surrounded Flynn, it was easy to overlook his peculiar connections to Russia. Flynn was permitted to see the headquarters of Russian military intelligence, which he visited in 2013. When invited to a seminar on intelligence at Cambridge in 2014, he befriended a Russian woman, signing his emails to her “General Misha”—a Russian diminutive meaning “Mike.” In summer 2015, he worked to promote a plan to build nuclear power plants across the Middle East with Russian cooperation, and then failed to disclose that he had done so. Flynn was a guest on RT, where he gave the impression of being outwitted by the hosts. In 2015, he appeared in Moscow as a paid guest ($33,750) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of RT. He sat with Vladimir Putin at the gala dinner. When the American media began to report that Russia had hacked the emails of Democratic activists, Flynn responded by retweeting a message that suggested a Jewish conspiracy was behind that claim of Russian responsibility. On Flynn’s Twitter feed his followers read: “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” Flynn followed and retweeted no fewer than five fake Russian accounts, pushed at least sixteen Russian memes through the internet, and was sharing Russian content with his followers right down to the day before the election.

On December 29, 2016, weeks after Trump had won the election but weeks before his inauguration, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador and then lied to others, including the FBI, about what he was doing. His assignment at the time was to make sure that new sanctions imposed on Russia—as a response to Russia’s interference in the presidential election—were not taken seriously by Moscow. As Flynn’s aide K. T. McFarland wrote: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him.” There seems to have been little doubt among Trump’s advisors that he owed his victory to Putin. After Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, Russia announced that it would not react to the new sanctions.

Barack Obama personally warned Trump not to name Flynn to a position of authority. Trump named him national security advisor, perhaps the most sensitive position in the entire federal government. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warned senior officials on January 26 that Flynn’s lying made him vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Four days later, Trump fired her. Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the international affairs committee of the Russian Duma, characterized the revelation of factual information about Flynn as an attack on Russia. Flynn resigned in February 2017, and later pled guilty of lying to federal investigators.

In addition to Flynn, Trump filled his cabinet with people who had startlingly intimate connections to a foreign power. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was quick to endorse Trump, had multiple contacts with the Russian ambassador in 2016. Sessions lied about this to Congress during his confirmation hearings for the office of attorney general, thereby perjuring himself in order to become the highest law enforcement official in the land.

Trump’s secretary of commerce had financial dealings with Russian oligarchs, and indeed with Putin’s family. In 2014, Wilbur Ross became the vice chairman of, and a leading investor in, the Bank of Cyprus, an offshore haven for Russian oligarchs. He took the position at a time when Russians who sought to avoid sanctions were transferring assets to such places. He worked alongside Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, who had been a colleague of Putin in the KGB. One major investor in the bank was Viktor Vekselberg, a major Russian oligarch trusted by Putin. It was Vekselberg who had financed the reburial of Ivan Ilyin’s remains back in 2005.

Once named secretary of commerce, Ross resigned from his position at the Bank of Cyprus, but retained an undisclosed personal connection to Russian kleptocracy. He was part owner of a shipping company, Navigator Holdings, that transported Russian natural gas for a Russian company known as Sibur. One of Sibur’s owners was Gennady Timchenko, Putin’s judo partner and close friend. Another was Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s son-in-law. Ross was in contact with the very center of Russia’s oligarchy, the family. As an American cabinet minister, he was in a position to make money by pleasing Russia. Since American sanctions included a ban on transfers of technology that would help in the extraction of natural gas, Ross was in a position to profit personally from the lifting of sanctions.

The United States had never before had a secretary of state personally decorated with the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin. Rex Tillerson was such a person. In office, Tillerson oversaw a vast purge of American diplomats, a group whom Putin regarded as the enemy. In throwing the Department of State into chaos, Tillerson substantially reduced the American capacity to project either power or values. Regardless of the particulars of daily events, this was an unambiguous victory for Russia.

The weakening of American diplomacy was of a piece with Trump’s general foreign policy orientation, which was to seek personal flattery while neglecting negotiations. This made him an easy mark. As early as August 2016, three months before the election, he had convinced a former acting director of the CIA that “Mr. Putin has recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” After a year in office, only the “unwitting” part seemed questionable. By then, Trump had convinced a number of leading American intelligence specialists that he was a Russian asset. As one of them put it: “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.” A group of three intelligence specialists summarized: “If the Trump campaign received offers of assistance from Russia, and they did nothing to discourage that help (or even encouraged it), they are indebted to a foreign adversary whose national interests are opposed to those of the United States. You can be sure that at some point, Putin will come to collect, if he has not done so already—and when it comes to protecting our democracy the administration will be a puppet of a foreign adversary, not our country’s first line of defense.” The Trump administration made a mockery of congressional sanctions against Russia, declining to implement legislation and inviting the sanctioned director of a Russian intelligence agency to the United States.

Trump himself repeatedly characterized all accounts of any connections between his campaign and Russia as a “hoax.” The word was well chosen, so long as it was applied to the person who was using it. As president, the hoax had to protect itself from reality. And thus Trump fired U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who had ordered the raid on Trump Tower in 2013. He fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who had cautioned him against hiring Michael Flynn. And then he fired James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for investigating Russia’s attack on American sovereignty.

The FBI had been investigating Carter Page as a target of Russian espionage before Page became an advisor to Trump; the FBI began investigating George Papadopoulos because he told a foreign diplomat that Russia was carrying out an influence operation against Hillary Clinton. It could not be said, however, that the FBI had treated Russian interference as a very high priority. Although American intelligence had been warned in late 2015 by allies that members of the Trump campaign were in touch with Russian intelligence, American agencies were slow to react. Even after Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in spring 2016, the FBI did not communicate that information as if it were urgent or timely. Eight days before the November presidential election, Comey had raised the subject of Clinton’s use of a private email server in a context that was bound to hurt her candidacy—the discovery of copies of some of these emails during an investigation of the husband of one of her aides, under investigation for improper sexual contact with a teenaged girl. Comey concluded two days before the election that the emails were of no significance, but by then the damage was done. The episode seemed to help Trump.

Even so, the FBI did continue its investigations of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. In January 2017, Trump asked Comey, privately, for “loyalty.” In February, Trump specifically asked Comey not to investigate Flynn: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Not receiving such assurances, Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. This was Trump’s confession that his own candidacy was a hoax. Trump told the press that he fired Comey in order to halt the investigation of Russia. The day after firing Comey, Trump said the same thing to a pair of visitors to the Oval Office: “I faced great pressure because of Russia. Now that’s taken off.” The visitors were the Russian ambassador to the United States and the Russian foreign minister. They brought digital gear to the White House, which they used to take and distribute photographs of the meeting. Former U.S. intelligence officers found this unusual. More unusual still was that Trump used the occasion to share with Russia intelligence of the highest level of confidentiality, involving an Israeli double agent inside ISIS.

In the aftermath of the Comey firing, Moscow rushed to Trump’s support. Pervyi Kanal claimed that “James Comey was a puppet of Barack Obama.” Putin assured the world that the president of the United States “acted within the framework of his competencies, constitution, and laws.” Not everyone agreed. After Comey’s firing, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to continue the investigations. Trump ordered that Mueller be fired in June 2017. His own lawyer, known as the White House counsel, refused to carry out the order, threatening to resign instead. Trump then lied about his attempts to halt the investigations and sought new ways to disrupt and undermine American law and order.

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Russia enabled and sustained the fiction of “Donald Trump, successful businessman,” and delivered that fiction to Americans as the payload of a cyberweapon. The Russian effort succeeded because the United States is much more like the Russian Federation than Americans would like to think. Because Russian leaders had already made the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, they had instincts and techniques that, as it turned out, corresponded to emerging tendencies in American society. Moscow was not trying to project some ideal of their own, only to use a giant lie to bring out the worst in the United States.

In important respects, American media had become like Russian media, and this made Americans vulnerable to Russian tactics. The experience of Russia shows what happens to politics when news loses its moorings. Russia lacks local and regional journalism. Little in Russian media concerns the experiences of Russian citizens. Russian television directs the distrust that this generates against others beyond Russia. In the weakness of its local press, America came to resemble Russia. The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse. Every day in 2009, about seventy people lost their jobs at American newspapers and magazines. For Americans who lived between the coasts, this meant the end of reporting about life and the rise of something else: “the media.” Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.

It was an American and not a Russian innovation to present the news as national entertainment, which made the news vulnerable to an entertainer. Trump got his chance in the second half of 2015 because American television networks were pleased with the spectacle he provided. The chief executive officer of a television network said that the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” In providing plentiful free airtime for Trump, American networks granted the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” a far broader viewership. Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton.

Unlike Russians, Americans tend to get their news from the internet. According to one survey, 44% of Americans get their news from a single internet platform: Facebook. The interactivity of the internet creates an impression of mental effort while impeding reflection. The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage. When each day is devoted to emotional venting about supposed enemies, the present becomes endless, eternal. In these conditions, a fictional candidate enjoyed a considerable advantage.

Though internet platforms became major American news providers, they were not regulated as such in the United States. Two Facebook products, News Feed and Trending Topics, purveyed countless fictions. The people who were in charge of Facebook and Twitter took the complacent position offered by the American politics of inevitability: the free market would lead to truth, so nothing should be done. This attitude created a problem for the numerous American users of the internet, who, having lost access to local press (or preferring news that seems free of charge), read the internet as though it were a newspaper. In this way, the American internet became an attack surface for the Russian secret services, who were able to do what they liked inside the American psychosphere for eighteen months without anyone reacting. Much of what Russia did was to take advantage of what it found. Hyperpartisan stories on Fox News or outbursts on Breitbart gained viewership thanks to retransmission by Russian bots. Russian support helped fringe right-wing sites such as Next News Network gain notoriety and influence. Its videos were viewed about 56 million times in October 2016.

The “pizzagate” and “spirit cooking” fictions show how Russian intervention and American conspiratology worked together. Both fictions began with the Russian hack of the emails of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia. Podesta was in touch with the owner of a pizza restaurant—itself no great revelation. Trolls and bots, some of them Russian, began to spread the fiction that the pizzeria’s menu was a code for ordering children for sex, and that Clinton ran a pedophilia ring from its basement. InfoWars, a leading American conspiracy site, also spread the story. This fiction ended with a real American shooting a real gun in a real restaurant. The popular right-wing internet activist Jack Posobiec, who had himself spread the Pizzagate lie on Twitter, claimed that the American who fired the shots was an actor paid to discredit the truth. Podesta was also in touch with someone who invited him to a dinner party that he did not attend. The hostess of the dinner party was an artist who had once titled a painting Spirit Cooking; Russian trolls and bots spread the story that the dinner party was a Satanic ritual involving the consumption of human bodily fluids. This idea was then passed on by American conspiracy theorists, such as Sean Hannity of Fox News and the Drudge Report.

Russian platforms served content to American conspiracy sites with enormous viewership. For example, in an email hacked and stolen by Russia, Hillary Clinton wrote a few words about “decision fatigue.” This term describes the increasing difficulty of making decisions as the day goes on. Decision fatigue is an observation of psychologists about the workplace, not an illness. Once it was stolen by Russia, the email was released by WikiLeaks, and then promoted by the Russian propaganda sender Sputnik as evidence that Clinton was suffering from a debilitating disease. In this form, the story was picked up by InfoWars.

Russians exploited American gullibility. Anyone who paid attention to the Facebook page for a (nonexistent) group called Heart of Texas should have noticed that its authors were not native speakers of English. Its cause, Texas secession, perfectly expressed the Russian policy of advocating separatism in all countries except Russia itself (the South from the U.S., California from the U.S., Scotland from the United Kingdom, Catalonia from Spain, Crimea from Ukraine, the Donbas from Ukraine, every member state from the EU, etc.). The partisanship of Heart of Texas was extremely vulgar: like other Russian sites, it referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as “Killary.” Despite all this, the Heart of Texas Facebook page had more followers in 2016 than those of the Texas Republican Party or the Texas Democratic Party—or indeed both of them combined. Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.

Americans trusted Russians and robots who told them what they wanted to hear. When Russia set up a fake Twitter site that purported to be that of the Tennessee Republican Party, Americans were drawn by its edgy presentation and abundant fictions. It spread the lie that Obama was born in Africa, for example, as well as the spirit-cooking fantasy. The Russian version of the Tennessee Republican Party had ten times more Twitter followers than the actual Tennessee Republican Party. One of them was Michael Flynn, who retweeted its content in the days before the election. In other words, Trump’s candidate for national security advisor was serving as a conduit for a Russian influence operation in the United States. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s press spokesperson, also retweeted fake Russian content from the same source. She thus assisted the Russian intervention in an American election—even as her campaign denied that there was such a thing. (She also tweeted “love you back” to white supremacists.) Jack Posobiec was a follower and retweeter of the same fake Russian site. He filmed a video of himself claiming that there was no Russian intervention in American politics. When the Russian site was finally taken down, after eleven months, he expressed confusion. He did not see the Russian intervention, since he was the Russian intervention.

In 1976, Stephen King published a short story, “I Know What You Need,” about the courting of a young woman. Her suitor was a young man who could read her mind but did not tell her so. He simply appeared with what she wanted at the moment, beginning with strawberry ice cream for a study break. Step by step he changed her life, making her dependent upon him by giving her what she thought she wanted at a certain moment, before she herself had a chance to reflect. Her best friend realized that something disconcerting was happening, investigated, and learned the truth: “That is not love,” she warned. “That’s rape.” The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others.

Neither Russia nor the internet is going away. It would help the cause of democracy if citizens knew more about Russian policy, and if the concepts of “news,” “journalism,” and “reporting” could be preserved on the internet. In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

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Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an expectation of the future that calms the present. The meaning of each democratic election is promise of the next one. If we anticipate that another meaningful election will take place, we know that the next time around we can correct our mistakes, which in the meantime we blame upon the people whom we elect. In this way, democracy transforms human fallibility into political predictability, and helps us to experience time as movement forward into a future over which we have some influence. If we come to believe that elections are simply a repetitive ritual of support, democracy loses its meaning.

The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle. Russia opposes European and American democracy to ensure that Russians do not see that democracy might work as a succession principle in their own country. Russians are meant to distrust other systems as much as they distrust their own. If Russia’s succession crisis can in fact be exported—if the United States could become authoritarian—then Russia’s own problems, although unresolved, would at least seem normal. Pressure on Putin would be relieved. Were America the shining beacon of democracy that its citizens sometimes imagine, its institutions would have been far less vulnerable to Russia’s cyberwar. From Moscow’s perspective, America’s constitutional structure created tempting vulnerabilities. Because of the evident flaws in American democracy and the American rule of law, it was all the easier to intervene in an American election.

The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness. In 2016, Russia appealed directly to Americans to buy and use guns, amplifying the rhetoric of the Trump campaign. Trump called for his supporters to exercise their Second Amendment rights against Hillary Clinton were she elected, which was an indirect but transparent suggestion that they should shoot her to death. The Russian cyber campaign was enthusiastic about the right of Americans to bear arms, celebrating the Second Amendment and calling upon Americans to fear terrorism and to buy firearms to protect themselves.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities were cooperating with the American gun lobby in the real world. A Russian group called Right to Bear Arms cultivated ties with the National Rifle Association (NRA). Its purpose was to influence events within the United States: as its members knew perfectly well, Russians will never have the right to bear arms under the present regime. Two prominent members of Russia’s Right to Bear Arms, Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin, were also members of the American NRA. Butina was a student in an American university who cofounded a company with an American working closely with the NRA leadership. Torshin was a Russian central banker wanted in Spain on charges of criminal money laundering. In December 2015, representatives of the NRA visited Moscow, where they met Dmitry Rogozin, a radical nationalist and a deputy prime minister who was under U.S. sanctions.

In February 2016, Butina reported to Torshin from the United States that “Trump (NRA member) really is for cooperation with Russia.” Torshin met with Donald Trump Jr. in Kentucky that May. That same month, the NRA endorsed Trump, and eventually gave some $30 million to his campaign. Its official attitude to Russia meanwhile underwent an interesting transformation. Through 2015, the NRA had complained that American policy regarding Russia was too weak. Once the NRA’s involvement with Russia began, it said the opposite. Russia’s support of the NRA resembled its support of right-wing paramilitaries in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Once Trump was in office, the NRA took a very aggressive tone, proclaiming in a video that “we’re coming for” the New York Times. Given that the NRA endorsed and funded Trump, that it was a gun organization, and that Trump called the press an “enemy,” it was hard to interpret this as anything other than a threat. Democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, where “free” means “without the threat of violence.” An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.

In 2016, the most obvious weakness in American democracy was the disconnect between voting and results. In most democracies, it would be unthinkable that a candidate who received millions more votes than her rival would lose. This sort of thing happens on a regular basis in American presidential elections, thanks to the indirect and approximate electoral system known as the electoral college. The American electoral college accords victory by tallying the electoral votes of states rather than by the number of individual votes. States are allocated electoral votes not by population but according to the number of federal elected representatives. Since all states have two senators, less populous states have a disproportionate number of electoral votes; individual votes in small states count for far more than individual votes in large states. Meanwhile, millions of Americans in territories (as opposed to states) have no vote at all. Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.

American states with small populations are also vastly overrepresented in the Senate, the upper house of the American legislature. The population of the largest state is about eighty times the population of the smallest state, but each has two senators. The lower house of the American legislature, the House of Representatives, is elected according to districts that are often drawn to help one party or another. In interwar Yugoslavia, electoral precincts that were drawn to favor the largest ethnicity were known as “water districts.” In the United States, the process is known as “gerrymandering.” As a result of gerrymandering, Democratic voters in Ohio or North Carolina in effect have, respectively, about one-half or one-third as much ability to elect a representative in Congress as do Republican voters. Citizens did not have an equal vote.

From an American point of view, all of this might appear to be mundane tradition, just the rules of the game. From Moscow’s perspective, the system looks like vulnerability to be exploited. When a minority president and a minority party control the executive and legislative branches of government, they can be tempted into a politics where victory depends not upon policy that pleases majorities but upon further limitation of the franchise. A foreign government that can make the system slightly less representative increases that very temptation, tilting the system towards authoritarianism. Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. election was not just an attempt to get a certain person elected. It was also the application of pressure to the structure. The victory of a Russian-backed candidate could be less important, in the long run, than the evolution of the system as a whole away from democracy.

When Russia acted against American democracy, the American system was already becoming less democratic. In the early 2010s, as a new system was consolidated in Russia, the U.S. Supreme Court took two important decisions that shifted the United States towards authoritarianism. In 2010, it ruled that money talked: that corporations were individuals, and their campaign spending was free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This granted real companies, front companies, and various fake civic entities the right to influence campaigns and, in effect, to try to buy elections. It also prepared the way for Trump to claim, as he did, that in an American oligarchy Americans could only be safe if they elected their own oligarch: himself. In fact, Trump was a creature of Russian cyberwar who never demonstrated that he had any money. But his argument from oligarchy was plausible in a political atmosphere where American voters came to believe that money counted for more than their own preferences.

In 2013, the Supreme Court found that racism was no longer a problem in the United States, and issued a ruling whose consequences proved the falseness of that premise. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had required states with a history of suppressing the votes of African Americans to clear changes in their voting laws with the courts. Once the Supreme Court ruled that this was no longer necessary, American states immediately suppressed the vote of African Americans (and others). Throughout the American South, polling stations disappeared, often without warning, right before elections. Twenty-two American states passed laws designed to suppress the voting of African Americans and Hispanics—laws that materially affected the 2016 presidential election.

In the election of 2016, in the state of Ohio, some 144,000 fewer people voted in counties with large cities than four years before. In 2016 in Florida, some 23% of African Americans were denied the vote as convicted felons. Felonies in Florida include releasing a helium balloon and harvesting lobsters with short tails. In 2016 in Wisconsin, some sixty thousand fewer people voted than in the previous presidential election. Most of the attrition was in the city of Milwaukee, home to most of the state’s African Americans. Barack Obama had won Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin in 2012. Trump won all three states by narrow margins in 2016, Wisconsin by only 23,000 votes.

American race relations presented Russian cyberwarriors with an obvious target. Russia ran a site arousing the emotions of friends and families of policemen who were killed in the line of duty; a site exploiting the emotions of friends and families of African Americans killed by police; a site portraying blacks brandishing weapons; a site encouraging blacks to prepare themselves for attacks by whites; a site where fake black activists used a slogan of white supremacists; and a site where fake black rappers referred to the Clintons as serial killers. Russians seized on Native American protests against a pipeline that crossed a burial ground. Although the posts in that campaign were sometimes obviously not native (the promotion of Russian vodka by Indian activists, for example, was inconceivable), the sites gained followers.

Barack Obama’s race was important in Russian popular culture. In 2013, a deputy of the Russian parliament shared a doctored photograph on social media that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama staring longingly at a banana. On Barack Obama’s birthday in 2014, Russian students in Moscow projected a laser light show on the U.S. embassy building, portraying him performing fellatio on a banana. In 2015, a grocery store chain sold a cutting board featuring two parent chimpanzees with Obama’s face inserted for the face of a baby chimpanzee. In 2016, a car wash chain promised to “wash away all the blackness,” making its meaning clear with a picture of a frightened-looking Obama. The year 2016 was by Chinese reckoning the year of the monkey; Russians commonly used the term to mean Obama’s last year in office. The popular news outlet LifeNews, for example, titled a feature article “Slamming the Door on the Year of the Monkey,” with a photograph of the American president to remove any doubt as to what was meant.

Race was on the Russian mind in 2016. Russian leaders had occasion that year to observe as race opened a tremendous gap between the executive and legislative branches of the American government. In February, one of the nine supreme court justices died. The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made clear that the Senate would not consider any nominee of Barack Obama. This broke one of the most important conventions of the federal government of the United States, and was commented upon in Moscow. The Russian press quite rightly noted the “paradoxical situation” of a president unable to exercise his normal rights. It did not escape the attention of the Kremlin that the Republican leaders of Congress declared, almost a year early, that Barack Obama no longer enjoyed the usual prerogatives of the president of the United States. At that moment, Russia began its email hack of Democratic politicians and activists.

In June 2016, Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, was discussing Russia with his fellow Republican congressmen. Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy expressed the belief that Donald Trump was paid by Russia. Ryan reacted by asking that such suspicions be kept “in the family”: an embarrassment within the party was more important than the violation of the sovereignty of the country. The possibility that a Republican candidate for president (who was not yet the party’s nominee) was the creation of a foreign power was less worrisome than an awkward press conference at which Republicans would tell citizens what they suspected themselves. This level of partisanship, where the enemy is the opposing party and the outside world is neglected, creates a vulnerability easily exploited by hostile actors in that outside world. The next month, Russia began to release the hacked emails of Democratic politicians and activists. If Moscow’s calculation was that Republican leaders would not immediately defend their Democratic colleagues from foreign cyberattack, that was correct.

As Republicans realized that Russia was attacking the United States, the fury of partisanship became the desperation of denial and then the complicity of inaction. That September, McConnell listened to the heads of American intelligence agencies report on the Russian cyberwar, but expressed his doubts as to their veracity. It is unknown what the heads of intelligence said, but it is unlikely to be very different from their later public statement: “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” McConnell let it be known that Republicans would treat the defense of the United States from Russian cyberwar as an effort to help Hillary Clinton. At that point, Russia had been at work in the United States for more than a year. After McConnell categorized the Russian attack as partisan politics, its scope expanded. A massive Russian bot offensive began right then.

At the crucial moment, it was unclear who had more influence over the Republican Party: its human leaders or Russian robots. When indisputable evidence appeared that Trump considered it appropriate to sexually abuse women, McConnell asked him to apologize. But Russian bots and trolls went immediately to work to defend Trump from the charges, and to direct Americans to a disclosure of emails engineered to change the subject. Moscow was attacking, and Congress declined to defend the country. The Obama administration might have acted on its own, but was afraid to deepen partisan divisions. “I feel like we sort of choked,” as one of its officials put it. Russia won, which is to say that Trump won. Later, Trump named McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, to his cabinet as secretary of transportation.

To be sure, a number of Republicans had portrayed Russia as a national security threat to the United States. Back in 2012, the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, had been virtually alone in both parties in portraying Russia as a serious problem. While competing for the 2016 Republican nomination, Ohio governor John Kasich, who was knowledgeable about east European politics, was quick to associate Trump with Putin. Another Republican rival for the 2016 nomination, the Florida senator Marco Rubio, claimed that the weakness of Obama’s foreign policy encouraged Russian aggression.

Senator Rubio’s accusation, which was plausible enough, disguised a more profound problem. Though Obama’s response to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine was indeed very cautious, in 2016 Obama did at least recognize that Russian intervention in a U.S. election was a problem for the country as a whole. Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America.

That is how wars are lost.

—

The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Americans were vulnerable to the politics of eternity because their own experiences had already weakened inevitability. Trump’s proposal to “make America great again” resonated with people who believed, along with him, that the American dream was dead. Russia had reached the politics of eternity first, and so Russians knew the techniques that would push Americans in the same direction.

It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics. Rather than discuss reforms, eternity politicians designate threats. Rather than presenting a future with possibilities and hopes, they offer an eternal present with defined enemies and artificial crises. For this to work, citizens have to meet eternity politicians halfway. Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion. They must stop thinking about a better future for themselves, their friends, and their families, and prefer the constant invocation of a proud past. At the top and throughout society, material inequality creates the experiences and the sentiments that can be transformed into a politics of eternity. When Ilyin was portrayed as the heroic opponent of the Russian Revolution on Russian television in 2017, it was with the message that the promise of social advancement for the Russian people was a “Satanic deception.”

In 2016, Russia was described by Credit Suisse as the most unequal country in the world, as measured by distribution of wealth. Since the end of the Soviet Union, only Russians who have managed to reach the top 10% of annual earners have made any meaningful gains. Russian oligarchy emerged in the 1990s, but was consolidated as the kleptocratic control of the state by a single oligarchical clan under Putin in the 2000s. According to Credit Suisse, in 2016 the top decile of the Russian population owned 89% of the total household wealth. In the report, the United States had a comparable figure: 76%, and rising. Typically, billionaires control 1–2% of national wealth; in Russia, roughly one hundred billionaires owned about a third of the country. At the very top of Russia’s grotesque upside-down wealth pyramid were Vladimir Putin and his personal friends. Most often they gained wealth from Russia’s sale of natural gas and oil, without any effort on their part. One of Putin’s friends, a cellist, became a billionaire for no reason that he could provide. The appeal of the politics of eternity to such men is all too understandable. Far better to shackle a nation and rattle the world than to risk the loss of so much.

The case of the billionaire cellist, like so much else about oligarchy, came to light thanks to the work of investigative reporters. In the 2010s, some of the best of them, in revealing projects such as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, showed how unregulated international capitalism was creating sinkholes for national wealth. Tyrants first hide and launder their money, then use it to enforce authoritarianism at home—or export it abroad. Money gravitates towards where it cannot be seen, which in the 2010s was in various offshore tax havens. This was a global problem: estimates of just how much money was parked offshore, beyond the reach of national tax authorities, ranged from $7 trillion to $21 trillion. The United States was an especially permissive environment for Russians who wished to steal and then launder money. Much of the Russian national wealth that was supposed to be building the Russian state in the 2000s and 2010s found its way to shell corporations in offshore havens. Many of these were in America.

In June 2016, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Paul Manafort met with Russians in Trump Tower to consider Russian offers to hurt the Clinton campaign. One of the intermediaries was Ike Kaveladze, who worked for Aras Agalarov, the Russian real estate developer who had organized the Miss Universe pageant for Trump in 2013. Kaveladze set up anonymous companies in Delaware (at least two thousand). This was legal, since the state of Delaware, like the states of Nevada and Wyoming, permitted the foundation of companies by ghosts. In Delaware, 285,000 distinct entities were registered at a single physical address.

Russians used shell companies to purchase American real estate, often anonymously. In the 1990s, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in New York City to allow anonymous purchases of apartment units, an opportunity that the Russian mob quickly exploited. Wherever anonymous real estate purchases were allowed, Russians bought and sold apartments, often hiding behind shell companies, as a way to transform dirty rubles into clean dollars. These practices impoverished Russian society and consolidated the Russian oligarchy during the Putin years—and allowed Donald Trump to claim to be a “a VERY successful businessman.” In this particular way, the American politics of inevitability, the idea that unregulated capitalism could only bring democracy, supported the Russian politics of eternity, the certainty that democracy was a sham.

—

The American politics of inevitability also prepared the way for the American politics of eternity more directly: by generating and legitimizing vast economic inequality at home. If there was no alternative to capitalism, then perhaps yawning gaps in wealth and income should be ignored, explained away, or even welcomed? If more capitalism meant more democracy, why worry? These mantras of inevitability provided the cover for the policies that made America more unequal, and inequality more painful.

In the 1980s, the federal government weakened the position of trade unions. The percentage of Americans in unionized jobs fell from about a quarter to under 10%. Private sector union membership fell still more sharply, from about 34% to 8% for men and from about 16% to 6% for women. The productivity of the American workforce grew throughout the period, at about 2% a year, but the wages of traditional workers increased more slowly, if at all. Over the same period, the pay of executives increased, sometimes drastically. At the same time, the United States was very weak on the basic policies that stabilized middle classes elsewhere: retirement pensions, public education, public transport, health care, paid vacation, and parental leave.

The United States had the resources to give its workers and its citizens these basics. Yet a regressive trend in taxation policy made this more difficult. Whereas workers paid an increasing tax burden through payroll taxes, corporations and wealthy families saw theirs drop by half or more. Even as the percentage of income and wealth at the top of the American distribution increased, the percentage of tax expected from the most fortunate decreased. Since the 1980s, the tax rates paid by the top 0.1% of American earners fell from about 65% to about 35%, and for the top 0.01% from about 75% to below 25%.

During the presidential campaign, Trump asked Americans to remember when America was great: what his supporters had in mind were the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, decades when the gap between the wealthiest and the rest was shrinking. Between 1940 and 1980, the bottom 90% of American earners gained more wealth than the top 1% did. This condition of growing equality was what Americans remember with warmth as the time of American greatness. Unions were strong until the 1980s. The welfare state was expanding in the 1950s and the 1960s. Wealth was more evenly distributed, thanks in large part to government policy.

In the era of inevitability, all of this changed. Inequality of income and wealth grew drastically from the 1980s through the 2010s. In 1978, the top 0.1% of the population, about 160,000 families, controlled 7% of American wealth. By 2012, the position of this tiny elite was even stronger: it controlled about 22% of American wealth. At the very top, the total wealth of the top 0.01%, about 16,000 families, increased by a factor of more than six over the same period. In 1978, a family in the top 0.01% was about 222 times as rich as the average American family. By 2012, such a family was about 1,120 times richer. Since 1980, 90% of the American population has gained essentially nothing, either in wealth or income. All gains have gone to the top 10%—and within the top 10%, most to the top 1%; and within the top 1%, most to the top 0.1%, and within the top 0.1% most to the top 0.01%.

In the 2010s, the United States approached the Russian standard of inequality. Although no American oligarchical clan has as yet captured the state, the emergence of such groups in the 2010s (Kochs, Mercers, Trumps, Murdochs) was hard to miss. Just as Russians used American capitalism to consolidate their own power, Americans cooperated with the Russian oligarchy with the same purpose—in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, for example. Most likely, Trump’s preference for Putin over Obama was not just a matter of racism or rivalry: it was also an aspiration to be more like Putin, to be in his good graces, to have access to greater wealth. Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism. American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations. At the top of the wealth ladder, the temptations of the politics of eternity will be much the same in America as in Russia. There is little reason to expect that Americans would behave better than Russians when placed in similar situations.

For many Americans, oligarchy meant the warping of time, the loss of a sense of the future, the experience of every day as repetitive stress. When economic inequality suppresses social advance, it is hard to imagine a better future, or indeed any future. As an American worker put it during the Great Depression of the 1930s, fear “does distort your outlook and your feeling. Lost time and lost faith.” An American born in 1940 was almost certain to make more money than his parents. An American born in 1984 had about a fifty-fifty chance of doing the same. Billy Joel’s 1982 song “Allentown,” which was really about the neighboring steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, caught the moment. It spoke of men of a second postwar generation without the social advancement attained by their fathers, of workers betrayed by narrow nationalism. The fate of the steel industry, like that of the American labor market generally, had much to do with changes in the world economy. The number of manufacturing jobs decreased by about one-third between 1980 and 2016. The problem was that American leaders took globalization as the solution to its own problems, rather than as an invitation to reform the American state. The globalization of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s coincided instead with the politics of inevitability and the generation of economic inequality.

Inequality means not only poverty but the experience of difference. Visible inequality leads Americans to reject the American dream as unlikely or impossible. Meanwhile, more and more Americans are unable to change residences, which also makes better futures hard to imagine. In the 2010s, more Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four lived with their parents than in any other configuration. A young person who became a teacher and took a job in a public school in San Francisco could not afford to buy a home anywhere in the city. In other words, an American who completes an education and takes a job of the highest public value is not sufficiently rewarded to start what was once considered a normal life. A sense of doom pressed down especially on youth. More than a fifth of American families reported owing debt for college in the 2010s. Exposure to inequality persuaded American teens to drop out of high school, which then in turn made it very hard for them to earn. Children down to the age of four suffered in testing if they were raised in poorer families.

As Warren Buffett put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Americans die in this war every day, in large numbers, in incomparably greater numbers than in wars abroad or as a result of terrorism at home. Because the United States lacks a functional public health system, inequality has brought a health crisis, which in turn has accelerated and reinforced inequality. It was in counties where public health collapsed in the 2010s that Trump gained the votes that won him the election.

The factor that most strongly correlated with a Trump vote was a local public health crisis, especially where that crisis included high rates of suicide. About twenty American military veterans killed themselves every day in the 2010s; among farmers, the rate was still higher. Believing that tomorrow will be worse than today, Americans, especially white Americans, engaged in behaviors that were likely to reduce their life span. The association between declining health and Trump voting was strong in important states that Obama had won in 2012 but which Trump took in 2016, such as Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. When life is short and the future is troubled, the politics of eternity beckons.

—

A spectacular consequence of the American politics of inevitability in the 2010s was the legalization and popularization of opioids. For hundreds of years it has been known that such chemicals are addictive. Yet in the absence of normal institutions of public health, and in an atmosphere of unregulated capitalism, such basic wisdom could be overwhelmed by marketing. In effect, the United States declared an opium war against itself, making normal life impossible for millions of people and normal politics much more difficult for everyone. American citizens in the 1990s, already the test subjects in a grand experiment in inequality, were simultaneously exposed to the uncontrolled release of manufactured opioids. Oxycontin, which works like heroin in pill form, was approved for prescription in 1995. Marketing representatives for the company that produced it, Purdue Pharma, told doctors that a miracle had occurred: the pain-killing benefits of heroin without the addictiveness.

In the late 1990s in southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky, Purdue Pharma marketing representatives earned bonuses of more than $100,000 a quarter. In 1998, the first “pill mills” began to emerge in Portsmouth, Ohio; these were purported medical facilities where physicians were paid to prescribe Oxycontin or other opioids. Residents of Portsmouth and then other towns soon became addicts and began to die of overdoses. Some switched to heroin. Scioto County, Ohio, of which Portsmouth is the county seat, has a population of about 80,000 people. In a single year, its residents were prescribed 9.7 million pills, which comes to 120 pills for every man, woman, and child. Extreme though that might seem, such numbers became typical in much of the United States. In the state of Tennessee, for example, about 400 million pills were prescribed one year to a population of about 6 million, so about 70 pills per person.

In Russia and in Ukraine in 2014, 2015, and 2016, people often talked about “zombies” and “zombification.” During the Russian occupation of southern and southeastern Ukraine, each side claimed that the other had been “zombified,” drawn into a trance by the hypnotic power of its own propaganda. The Donbas was not so very different from Appalachia. Indeed, in the 2010s America had multiple Donbases, places of confusion and hopelessness where deep declines in expectations gave rise to faith in easy solutions. Zombification was as pronounced in America as it was in eastern Ukraine. People in Portsmouth with unwashed hair and gray faces could be seen tearing the metal objects from one another’s houses, carrying them through town, and selling them for pills. For about a decade, opioids served as currency in that city, as they did among soldiers or mercenaries on both sides of the war in Ukraine.

The opioid plague was not widely discussed during its first two decades, and so grew national. About half of the unemployed men in the United States have been prescribed pain medication. In the year 2015, some ninety-five million Americans took prescription painkillers. For middle-aged white men, deaths from opioid abuse, along with other deaths of despair, canceled out gains in treatment of cancer and heart disease. Beginning in 1999, mortality among middle-aged white males in the United States began to increase. The death rate from drug overdose tripled between 1999 to 2016, when overdoses killed 63,600 Americans. While life expectancy in developed nations increased around the world, it fell in the United States in 2015 and then again in 2016. When Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination, he did best in the primary elections in places where middle-aged white males were at greatest risk of death.

Anyone who suffers from pain knows that a pill can mean getting through a day, or even getting out of bed. But Oxycontin and heroin create their own special sort of pain through pleasure, overwhelming the mu-receptors in our spines and brains, creating in us a craving for ever more. Opioids hinder the development of the frontal cortex of the brain, which is where the capacity to make choices forms in adolescence. Persistent opioid use makes it harder for people to learn from experience, or to take responsibility for their actions. The drug colonizes the mental and social space needed for children, spouses, friends, jobs, the world. At the extreme of addiction, the world becomes a mute and isolated experience of pleasure and need. Time collapses into a cycle from this hit to the next one. The shift from the sense that everything is wonderful to the sense that everything is dark and foreboding becomes normal. Life itself becomes a manufactured crisis, one which seems to have no end except life’s end.

Americans were prepared by drugs for the politics of eternity, for the sense of doom interrupted only by the quick hit. At least two million Americans were addicted to opioids at the time of the 2016 presidential election, and tens of millions more were taking pills. The correlation between opioid use and Trump voting was spectacular and obvious, notably in the states that Trump had to win. In New Hampshire, traumatized counties such as Coös swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis. Mingo County, West Virginia, was one of the places in America most touched by opioids. A town in Mingo County with a population of 3,200 was shipped about two million opioid pills per year. Mingo County went Republican in 2012, but in 2016 Trump took 19% more votes than did Mitt Romney four years earlier. With one exception, every Ohio county in opioid crisis posted significant gains for Trump in 2016 over Romney in 2012, which helped him to win a state that he had to take to win the election. In Scioto County, Ohio, ground zero of the American opioid epidemic, Trump took a spectacular 33% more votes than Romney had.

It was in the localities where the American dream had died that Trump’s politics of eternity worked. He called for a return to the past, to a time when America was great. Without inequality, without a sense that the future was closed, he could not have found the supporters he needed. The tragedy was that his idea of governance was to transform a dead dream into a zombie nightmare.

—

The politics of eternity triumphs when fiction comes to life. A leader from the realm of fiction tells lies without remorse or apology, because for him untruth is existence. The fictional creation “Donald Trump, successful businessman” filled the public space with untruth and never apologized for lies, since doing so would be to recognize that such a thing as truth existed. On 91 of his first 99 days in office, Trump made at least one claim that was blatantly wrong; in the course of his first 298 days he made 1,628 false or misleading claims. In a half-hour interview, he made twenty-four false or misleading claims, which (allowing for the time the interviewer was speaking), is about one per minute. It is true that all presidents lie: the difference is that for Trump, telling the truth was the exception.

Many Americans did not see the difference between someone who constantly lied and never apologized and someone who almost never did and corrected his or her mistakes. They were accepting the description of the world offered by Surkov and RT: no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them. That way lies authoritarianism. Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism. Trump made the move, copied from Putin, of claiming that it was not he but the reporters who lied. He referred to them as an “enemy of the American people” and claimed that what they produced was “fake news.” Trump was proud of both of these formulations, although both were Russian.

In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle. The point of spectacle is to summon the emotions of both supporters and detractors and to confirm and strengthen polarization; every news cycle creates euphoria or depression, and reinforces a conviction that politics is about friends and enemies at home, rather than about policy that might improve the lives of citizens. Trump governed just as he had run for office: as a producer of outrage rather than as a formulator of policy.

—

The politics of eternity tempts with a cycle of nostalgia and delivers a cycle of conflict. Trump arrived in the Oval Office at a moment when levels of inequality in the United States approached those of Russia. Wealth and income in the United States had not been so unevenly distributed between the top 0.1% and the rest of the population since 1929, the year before the Great Depression. When Trump spoke of “making America great again,” his followers thought of the decades after the Second World War, a time when inequality was shrinking. Trump himself meant the disastrous 1930s—and not just the Great Depression as it had actually happened, but something even more extreme and frightful: an alternative world where nothing was done, at home or abroad, to address its consequences.

The slogan of Trump’s campaign and his presidency was “America First.” This was a reference to the 1930s, or rather to an alternative America of increasing racial and social inequality that was not met with public policy. In the 1930s, the phrase “America First” was used to oppose both the welfare state proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the entrance of the United States into the Second World War. The public face of the America First movement, the pilot Charles Lindbergh, argued that the United States ought to make common cause with Nazis as fellow white Europeans. To say “America First” in the 2010s was to establish a point of mythical innocence in an American politics of eternity, to embrace inequality as natural, to deny that anything should have been done back then or could be done now.

In Trump’s politics of eternity, the Second World War lost its meaning. In previous decades Americans had come to think that a virtue of the war was the fight against Nazi racism, which in its turn offered lessons for improving the United States. The Trump administration undermined this American memory of “the good war.” In a speech to Navaho veterans, Trump permitted himself a racist reference to a political rival. He managed to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning Jews. His spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that Hitler did not kill “his own people.” The idea that German Jews were not part of the German people is how the Holocaust began. The politics of eternity demands that effort be directed against the enemy, which can be the enemy within. “The people” always means, as Trump himself put it, “the real people,” not the entire citizenry, but some chosen group.

Like his Russian patrons, Trump portrayed the presidency of Barack Obama as an aberration. Along with RT, Trump promoted the fiction that Obama was not an American, an idea meant to strengthen the notion that “the people” are whites. Like Putin with his monkey imitation, like Ilyin and his obsession with jazz as white emasculation, like Prokhanov with his nightmares of black milk and black sperm, Trump dwelled in fantasies of black power. When Trump won the presidency, Kiselev exulted that Obama was “now like a eunuch who cannot do anything.” Trump was the only presidential candidate in American history to brag publicly about his penis. His white supremacist supporters called Republicans who would not support Trump’s racism “cuckservatives.” The reference was to the pornographic meme of a white husband, cuckold to a white wife, who watches her perform fellatio on a black man. To sexualize the enemy was to make politics into biological conflict, and to trade the hard work of reform and freedom for endless anxious preening.

In an American eternity, the enemy is black, and politics begins by saying so. Thus the next point of innocence in Trump’s politics of eternity, after the 1930s-era racist isolationism of America First, was an alternative 1860s in which the Civil War was never fought. In actual American history, African Americans were enfranchised a few years after the American Civil War of 1861–1865. If blacks are to be excluded from “the people,” an American politics of eternity has to keep them in bondage. And thus, just as the Trump administration questioned the wisdom of fighting Hitler, it also questioned the wisdom of fighting slavery. Speaking of the Civil War, Trump asked: “Why could that one not have been worked out?” His chief of staff, John Kelly, claimed that the cause of the Civil War was the absence of compromise, suggesting that if people had been more reasonable the United States might have reasonably remained a country where black people were reasonably enslaved. In the minds of some of Trump’s supporters, the approval of the Holocaust and the endorsement of slavery were intertwined: in a major extreme-Right demonstration, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Nazi and Confederate symbols appeared together.

To proclaim “America First” was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were “very fine people.” He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: “Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it’s the KKK he’s copying.” The great American social thinker and historian W. E. B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, “the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,” what we call oligarchy.

An American politics of eternity takes racial inequality and makes it a source of economic inequality, turning whites against blacks, declaring hatred normal and change impossible. It begins from fictional premises and makes fictional policy. Americans living in the countryside tend to believe that their taxes are distributed to people in the cities, although the opposite is the case. Many white Americans, especially whites who voted for Trump, believe that whites suffer more from discrimination than do blacks. This is a legacy of American history that reaches back to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when President Andrew Johnson defined political equality for African Americans as discrimination against whites. Believers in the politics of inevitability might imagine that, in the course of time, people will become more educated and commit fewer errors. Believers in public policy might try to design reforms that would help people to overcome inequalities regardless of their beliefs. A politician of eternity such as Trump uses false beliefs about past and present to justify fictional policies that reaffirm those false beliefs, making of politics an eternal struggle against enemies.

An eternity politician defines foes rather than formulating policies. Trump did so by denying that the Holocaust concerned Jews, by using the expression “son of a bitch” in reference to black athletes, by calling a political opponent “Pocahontas,” by overseeing a denunciation program that targeted Mexicans, by publishing a list of crimes committed by immigrants, by transforming an office on terrorism into an office on Islamic terrorism, by helping hurricane victims in Texas and Florida but not in Puerto Rico, by speaking of “shithole countries,” by referring to reporters as enemies of the American people, by claiming that protestors were paid, and so on. American citizens could read these signs. A Republican congressional candidate physically attacked a reporter who was asking him a question about health care. An American Nazi attacked two women on a train in Portland and stabbed two men to death when they tried to protect them. In Washington State a white man ran over two Native Americans in his car while shouting racial slurs. Teachers reported in multiple surveys that the Trump presidency was increasing racial tension in their classrooms. The word “Trump” became a racial taunt at school sporting events.

Insofar as the American politics of eternity generates policy, its purpose is to inflict pain: regressive taxes that transfer wealth from the majority of the country to the very rich, and the reduction or elimination of health care. The politics of eternity works as a negative-sum game, where everyone but the top 1% or so of the population does worse, and the resulting suffering is used to keep the game going. People get the feeling of winning because they believe that others are losing. Trump was a loser since he could only win thanks to Russia; Republicans were greater losers since he had trapped their party; Democrats were still greater losers since they were excluded from power; and the Americans who suffer from deliberately engineered inequality and health crisis were the greatest losers of all. So long as enough Americans understood losing as a sign that others must be losing still more, the logic could continue. If Americans could be induced to see politics as racial conflict rather than as work for a better common future, they would expect nothing better.

Trump was called a “populist.” A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sadopopulist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate. Encouraged by presidential racism, such people could understand their own pain as a sign of still greater pain inflicted upon others. The only major policy of 2017 was to increase pain: a tax regression law that created a budgetary argument against funding domestic programs, and which included among its provisions the deprivation of health care from many of those who needed it most. In Trump’s words, “I’ve ended the individual mandate” for health insurance. This means that the Affordable Care Act, which had extended health insurance among uninsured Americans, was in his words “basically dead over time.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care provisions of the 2017 tax bill will result in the loss of health insurance for thirteen million Americans. As an envoy from the United Nations warned, these policies could make the United States “the most unequal country in the world.” From an outside perspective, it was easy to conclude that pain was the purpose of such policies.

On one level, a poor person, unemployed worker, or opioid addict who votes away health care is just giving money to the rich that they do not need and perhaps will not even notice. On another level, such a voter is changing the currency of politics from achievement to suffering, from gain to pain, helping a leader of choice establish a regime of sadopopulism. Such a voter can believe that he or she has chosen who administers their pain, and can fantasize that this leader will hurt enemies still more. The politics of eternity converts pain to meaning, and then meaning back into more pain.

In this respect, America under President Trump was becoming like Russia. In strategic relativism, Russia hurt but aimed to make others hurt more—or at least to convince the Russian population that others were hurting more. Russian citizens took the pain of European and American sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine because they believed that Russia was in a glorious campaign against Europe and America and that Europeans and Americans were getting their just deserts for their decadence and aggression. A fictional justification for war creates real pain that then justifies the continuation of a real war. In winning a battle of that war, in helping Trump to become president, Moscow was spreading this very logic inside the United States.

Moscow won a negative-sum game in international politics by helping to turn American domestic politics into a negative-sum game. In the Russian politics of eternity, Russian citizens trade the prospect of a better future for the vision of a valiant defense of Russian innocence. In an American politics of eternity, white Americans trade the prospect of a better future for the vision of a valiant defense of American innocence. Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.

If people who support the government expect their reward to be pain, then a democracy based upon policy competition between parties is endangered. Under Trump, Americans came to expect the administration of pain and pleasure, the daily outrage or triumph. For supporters and opponents alike, experience of politics became an addictive behavior, like time spent online or on heroin: a cycle of good and bad moments spent all alone. Few expected that the federal government could generate new and constructive policies. In the short term, a government that does not seek to legitimate itself with policy will be tempted to do so with terror, as in Russia. In the long term, a government that cannot assemble a majority through reforms will destroy the principle of rule by majority.

Such a turn away from democracy and the rule of law seemed to be Trump’s preferred course. Trump was the first presidential candidate to say that he would reject the vote tally if he did not win the election, the first in more than a hundred years to urge his followers to physically beat his opponent, the first to suggest (twice) that his opponent should be murdered, the first to suggest as a major campaign theme that his opponent should be imprisoned, and the first to communicate internet memes from fascists. As president, he expressed his admiration for dictators around the world. He won the presidency, and his party its majority in both chambers of the American legislature, thanks to the undemocratic elements of the American system. Trump was keenly aware of the fact, tediously repeating that he did not really lose the popular vote, even though he had done so by a wide margin. His Russian supporters tried to make him feel better: Pervyi Kanal falsely reported, for example, that Clinton had only won the popular election because millions of “dead souls” had cast their ballots for her.

The electoral logic of sadopopulism is to limit the vote to those who benefit from inequality and to those who like pain, and take the vote away from those who expect government to endorse equality and reform. Trump began his administration by naming a voter suppression committee with the mandate to exclude voters from federal elections, evidently so that an artificial majority could be constructed at the federal level in the future, as is already the case in some states. Without the work of such commissions at the state level, it would have been harder for Trump to win in 2016. The hope was apparently to hold future elections under still more restrictive conditions, with ever fewer voters. The dark scenario for American democracy was the possible combination of some shocking act, perhaps one of domestic terrorism, with an election that was then held under a state of emergency, further limiting the right to vote. More than once Trump mused about such a “major event.”

The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all. If all the federal government did was maximize inequality and suppress votes, at some point a line would be crossed. Americans, like Russians, would eventually cease to believe in their own elections; then the United States, like the Russian Federation, would be in permanent succession crisis, with no legitimate way to choose leaders. This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia’s problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalization of Russia’s syndromes by way of contagion.

Politics is international, but repair must be local. The presidential campaign of 2016, the biography of Donald Trump, the anonymous businesses, the anonymous real estate purchases, the domination of internet news, the peculiarities of the Constitution, the astonishing economic inequality, the painful history of race—to Americans, all of this can seem like a matter of a special nation and its exceptional history. The politics of inevitability tempted Americans to think that the world had to become like the United States and therefore more friendly and democratic, but this was not the case. In fact, the United States was itself becoming less democratic in the 2010s, and Russia was working to accelerate the trend. Russian methods of rule appealed to America’s would-be oligarchs. As in Russia, the risk was that fascist ideas would consolidate oligarchy.

To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others. To avoid the temptation of eternity, we must address our own particular problems, beginning with inequality, with timely public policy. To make of American politics an eternity of racial conflict is to allow economic inequality to worsen. To address widening disparities of opportunity, to restore a possibility of social advance and thus a sense of the future, requires seeing Americans as a citizenry rather than as groups in conflict.

America will have both forms of equality, racial and economic, or it will have neither. If it has neither, eternity politics will prevail, racial oligarchy will emerge, and American democracy will come to a close.

^* Russian leaders saw the revolution in Ukraine in these terms: If Ukrainians did not want Russian domination, then someone else must be fighting an information war against Russia, and that someone else could only be the United States. Hence the miscommunication between a Kremlin obsessed with Ukraine and a White House that hardly noticed it: the longer the silences of the Americans, the more the Russians assumed that the enemy was working in secret. And so Russia fought the war against the Ukrainian army as an information and cyberwar against the European Union and the United States.