Please do forgive my laughter over the suggestion that Russian Twitter trolls swung the election against Hillary Clinton. For consider what it is that was actually found: Some 13 people stirred the pot a little, to an effect no one can calculate. That is what has been discovered so far, and no more.
Obviously, this is an outrage! But we might want to consider who has intervened where and when in other elections. For example, I’m pretty sure the U.S. had something to do with Saddam Hussein no longer being “elected.” The Marines helped United Fruit Company more than once with pesky local politicians.
But that’s being facile, of course, it’s closer to war than electoral malfeasance. Russia, or perhaps the Soviet Union, has been trying to swing American elections since 1917 at the latest. The American Communist Party took part in elections, and was at least partly funded from Moscow. So this isn’t a new phenomenon at all. Then there was that quite gorgeous attempt by the Guardian in 2004, Operation Clark County. They suggested that non-Americans should write a personal letter to swing voters in a swing county in Ohio, exactly and precisely to try and swing the election. Those attempts are missing Twitter and Facebook to be sure, but Facebook was small and Twitter didn’t exist.
But what’s really causing my guffaws is that I spent most of the 1990s in Moscow, including a bit of unofficial shepherding around of international election observers. We all knew, and agreed that, vast sums of American and other foreign money were being shoveled into backing Boris Yeltsin and making sure the damn commies couldn’t make a comeback. Sure, it would have been bad if the communists had been able to revive themselves, but it’s still a bigger intervention into democratic elections than anything that’s being alleged today against the Russians, isn’t it?
As the New York Times pointed out back in the day:
As President Clinton and President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia began their first summit meeting today, Mr. Clinton presented the Russian leader with some $1 billion in American aid programs intended to support Russian democrats and spur the Western allies to make Russian reform their top foreign policy priority.
“Russian democrats” there means “not the commies.” So why is it OK for us to do it to them, and not for them to do it to us?
But there’s still a bit of irony here. Clinton (Bill) backs Yeltsin in elections, which is what leads to Putin ending up in power. Putin (allegedly) backed interference in the American elections, in order to keep Clinton (Hillary) out of power.
Personally, I think both sets of elections went the right way, and I have no problem with those thumbs on scales — but that is purely an individual opinion.
But allow me to close with a more serious question just for a moment: Why is doing something to an American election immoral, when the same thing done by Americans about an election is not?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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