Within two days of each other, two highly significant events took place: 1) it was confirmed - including by the Senator himself - that Russian intelligence-sponsored troll accounts are interfering in the Democratic primaries to support Sanders; and 2) Sanders won in the Nevada caucus by a landslide. Thus, we are one step closer to a scenario in which the two major party contenders in the 2020 U.S. presidential election are also the two individuals Vladimir Putin's interference campaign has backed since 2016. Sanders v. Trump: the two Putin-approved candidates, going head-to-head.
Of course, there are some crucial moral distinctions between the way Sanders and Trump have responded to this situation. The Senator did not try to deny the truth of reports about Russian interference to bolster his campaign, for one thing, once they became public. He also denounced these efforts to influence the U.S. election and described Putin as an "autocratic thug." He made clear that any "assistance" from troll accounts in the primaries was unwanted and unwelcome.
There is a world of difference between that approach, on Sanders' part, and Trump's long propaganda war of obfuscation and denial, when confronted with the fact that bogus social media actors had supported his candidacy.
Still, we have to ask what it says about our country, and the state of our democracy, if the two major party nominees to square off against one another in 2020 end up being the two people Russian intelligence specifically asked its hired social media accounts to back in 2016. As the Internet Research Agency ordered its team of trolls, in an internal memo cited in the Mueller report: "Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest except for Sanders and Trump — we support them."
In such a world, it feels increasingly like we are trapped in Palpatine's Clone Wars. Putin, like the Sith lord, has set up a scenario in which it's heads he wins, tails we lose. This doesn't mean everyone playing a part in the scheme is faking it. No doubt, people with sincere convictions fought on both the Republic and the Separatist side of the great conflict of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. But ultimately, this didn't change the fact that it was a shadow war. Both sides were in thrall, however unwittingly, to the same master. Palpatine had orchestrated the conflict, and stood to benefit from the chaos and loss of legitimacy it caused, regardless of the outcome.
Putin will be sitting in much the same position, if the 2020 election takes the form it now seems increasingly likely to take. We think we are in a race, but Putin has backed both horses. We are like Jonathan Swift, bought off to defend the Tory government from the charge of disloyalty, while all the time not being told that in fact Oxford and Bolingbroke were hedging their bets with the Pretender across the channel.
Again, I do not think Bernie Sanders is himself to blame for all this. I continue to appreciate him as a human being, and I think he is outstanding in his usual role of independent leftist senator from Vermont. But he, along with all the rest of us, ought to feel insulted at being used as a pawn in a contest in which Putin has been supporting both sides - engineering a situation in which the only electoral choice left to us is between the two candidates whom Russian intelligence preselected as the ones that would be - in their view - maximally polarizing and destabilizing to our democratic process.
Sanders himself has been morally clear-eyed about all this. He has made plain time and again that he sees Putin as a dangerous authoritarian. He also acknowledges that his disputes with the other Democratic challengers are not of ultimate importance, compared to the larger need to ensure Donald Trump does not win another term as president. He has said that he would back any Democratic challenger to Trump, if he were to lose the nomination, for the sake of the country's good.
The same, however, cannot be said of all of Sanders' supporters on social media - some of whom may indeed be false Russian-sponsored accounts. These ostensible followers are simply the mirror image of the hate-spewing Trump backers on the same platforms. In their misogynistic bullying, their comparing of Elizabeth Warren to a snake, their conspiratorial denunciations of some semi-fictional "Establishment" that is allegedly sabotaging their candidate, they share many of the same tactics, language, and ideas in common with the alt-right that formed and mobilized around our current president.
In a person like Glenn Greenwald, for instance, with his constant excuse-making for the Russian government and his total silence on Putin's authoritarianism and crimes against human rights, we see the outlines of a match that we must all have suspected, in our darkest moments, to be a real possibility. I refer to a potential ideological union between alt-right and alt-left as two sides of the same coin - Trump supporters and Sanders supporters, brought together at last - a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for our time, a "marriage of heaven and hell" between the two factions within their respective parties that Putin decided would have the most damaging impact on the legitimacy of our system of government.
Robert Frost speaks in one of his poems of "the uncertainty/Of judging who is a contemporary liar—/Who in particular," in the politics of his day, and surely that is the same difficulty we face now. This Russian interference campaign has made it hard to trust the honesty of anyone's intentions, and that of course is Putin's point: to show to us that we are no better than him, no different from his paid actors on social media.
It is the same tactic he has used to great effect in Russian domestic politics, where he often stages conflicts between potential challengers and rival parties, all of whom in fact are in his pocket. It is a reality TV series writ large, in which the producers engineer disputes between contestants who proceed to go after each other with a fury that is half-genuine and half-kayfabe.
If we allow this to become the norm in our politics, if we allow our next presidential election to be fought out on those terms, there is in fact no way for democracy to win. Heads or tails, Republic or Separatist, Sith or Jedi, we still lose. Begun this clone war has.
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