immanence

Or, Why Ukraine- and Russia- literacy should now be mandatory studies for every voting American

One could start with another question: Why are both the politics of climate change and politics in general so polarized these days? Political polarization, after all, remains the main complaint of Americans, and it has made it impossible to make progress on many fronts. (I’ll leave the climate change issue aside, though I’ve discussed it many times before on this blog; e.g., here, here, here.)

“Ukrainianization,” or “netherworldization”

In a New York Times op-ed entitled “The United States is Starting to Look Like Ukraine,” long-time Ukraine observer and Wall Street Journal columnist (and neoconservative) Bret Stephens perceptively summarizes some trends that, while hardly exclusive to Ukraine, have flourished in the post-Soviet states since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The trends are real and deserve analysis. They include:

• “the criminalization of political differences” (“Lock her up” being exactly what Paul Manafort’s client Viktor Yanukovych did to his presidential rival Yulia Tymoshenko),
• the use of political office as a shield against prosecution and for personal enrichment,
• the “netherworldization of political life, in which conspiracy theories abound, off-stage figures wield outsized influence, and channels of formal authority are disconnected from the real centers of power,”
• and “covert Russian interference, usually facilitated by local actors.”

“Netherworldization” is an especially good term for the kinds of things that have long been evident in Ukraine, but also in some other corners of the post-Soviet world (including obviously Russia). Stephens’ point is that these same trends are becoming established in the United States; that the U.S. is effectively being “Ukrainianized.” (Knowing a little about Ukraine, I would take this term “Ukrainization” as mostly polemical, if usefully provocative in this instance.)

Authoritarian “smoke machines“

Of course the spread of these trends can be found much more widely than just in the United States. The global media system is evolving and media analysts are barely able to keep up with it. With its echo chambers and filter bubbles, social media has enabled political manipulation of a very sophisticated kind to become the primary cultural policy (and “political technology“) of authoritarian nation-states.

That said, it’s the U.S. instance that’s most curious. In a detailed and well-referenced analysis on Vox, climate and energy analyst David Roberts writes of the “epistemic crisis” the US faces as a result of the building of a right-wing media “machine” dedicated to creating a fog of confusion and doubt, very much akin to the “smoke machine” of climate denial (and related to the political resonance machines described by William Connolly and others).

I find Roberts’ description to be pretty accurate, and it suggests that U.S. politics is a kind of roulette wheel made up of variations of three options: Either you believe he is right, or that he is wrong and those he is describing (the right-wing media) are right, or that both are partly wrong and the truth is somewhere in between. Your answer to that question will tell us where you stand in relation to the future of the country. And the likelihood of your answering one way or another makes our chances roughly 2 in 3 that the forces he is describing will win the next election.

That is what those forces, writ large, are counting on. As Roberts puts it:

“[In] the modern media environment — a chaotic Wild West where traditional gatekeepers are in decline — it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what’s true and what isn’t, or what’s really going on. [. . .]

“Confusion and fear, not deception, are the ultimate goal.

“That is precisely the kind of machine the US conservative movement has built [. . .]”

The impeachment proceedings may therefore well be a comedy — one worthy of a second season, as Sonia Saraiya argues (getting only the pronunciation of Kyiv wrong — it’s actually not “keev,” but “ki-yeev,” two syllables, the first vowel as in “kick”, the second as in “Eve”). But it is also a way of informing the population at large about what is at stake, both politically and morally, in this struggle. And given that much of that population will not be affected by that information, this makes it a bit of a tragedy.

“Media literacy” and Ukraine- and Russia- literacy

This is where media literacy comes in. Where media literacy in the U.S. had once been the provenance of those willing to critique the mainstream media consensus — a consensus that was far from perfect (supportive as it was, over decades, of CIA coups and military ventures abroad) — today we face a situation where no such consensus exists anymore. Media literacy has itself become a terrain of struggle between competing narratives, with its cacophony of voices on the left and right, supported in complex and inscrutable ways by Russian, Chinese, and other state actors as well as (let’s not forget) by rival U.S. elites. We need not only be more literate about “the media”; we now need to be literate about rival definitions of what media literacy might mean.

Regaining a reasonable critical media consensus today therefore requires gaining an understanding of international actors that have hardly been studied in any depth before.

Given the current U.S. internal political crisis, a good place to start would be with some Russia- and Ukraine- literacy. For what it’s worth, here’s my handy reference guide to four key points about Ukraine and Russia that every American should have some understanding of.

1. Neither Russians nor Ukrainians are inherently problematic to us (i.e., to the U.S.). Both countries include people with diverse views on politics, including on the West and on the U.S. But state actors and their geopolitical interests need to be understood.

2. Despite economic challenges, Russia is a powerful state actor. It is a huge country with vast resources and with a wide geopolitical scope. It wishes to maintain a powerful hand in global geopolitics, including in military engagements (e.g., in the Middle East) and in access to and control over fossil fuel resources in the Arctic, the Pacific, and the Black Sea.

Politically, Russia today is highly centralized and ruled by a powerful force — Putinism — that has consolidated its rule using authoritarian methods. Putinism’s longevity is questionable, but its support today remains strong in part through its ability to convincingly (for its subjects) identify a powerful global rival. That rival is the “liberal West,” led by the US (or its “deep state”) but with multilateral institutional arms that include NATO, the EU, and others. As long as this foe can be shown to be making inroads — including at Russia’s own borders in Ukraine — Putinism can hold itself up as a bulwark against this threat, its shortcomings being otherwise deemed negligible. The regime’s relative stranglehold on media and political institutions helps with this, but it is at best tentative.

The threat of the “West,” for most Russians, consists in part of fantastic elements, with gay rights, multiculturalism, Islamophilism, and other forces all seen as threatening Russian and/or Christian “civilization” and “traditional culture.” In this sense, Russian authoritarianism is making use of social conservatism in the same way that other forms of authoritarian populism (in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, and the U.S.) are doing the same.

3. Ukraine, by contrast, is not a very powerful state actor and is more divided in terms of its geopolitical affiliations. Contrary to some pronouncements, it is an independent nation-state with a distinctive history that, at times and in some but not all of its terrain, has overlapped with Russian history (much of it was part of the Russian empire for a few centuries), but that has also, and for centuries, has had its own cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. This internal division makes for a “weaker” state identity, though today that identity is arguably stronger than ever. It is, however, a large and resource-rich country and therefore is of great interest to other state actors, including (most obviously) to Russia.

Politically, Ukraine is a mix of forces, including a powerful but disunified oligarchic business class, but also a potentially powerful, yet still struggling, democratic-reformist movement. The oligarchic class has been largely concerned with maintaining its economic privileges, which it has done by manipulating the political system in various (and profound) ways, by owning and controlling the media (which, given its disunity, makes for a certain pluralism) and, at times, by appealing variously to pro-Russian, pro-western, nationalist, or other civic sentiments (reflecting that pluralism). The reformist movement has largely identified itself with Western political values and standards. It has (notably in 2014) entangled itself with certain forms of ultra-nationalism, but not nearly to the degree that Russia has portrayed this and not particularly more than is found in other European states. (Intelligent observers debate the latter point, but the scholarly consensus remains as I have described it. The simple fact that its current president, its prime minister until a few months ago, and its arguably most powerful oligarch today, are all Jewish-Ukrainians — something that could be said of no other country except Israel — speaks volumes.)

4. In summary, Russia’s geopolitical ambitions coupled with its relative economic (and to some extent military) weakness have motivated it to develop newer and less capital-intensive tools for influence. These include the tools of “information warfare” that much of the world, including the U.S., has been struggling to catch up with. Russia’s position as an informational actor on the global stage is perhaps its strongest geopolitical tool; its ability and interest in interfering in the affairs of other countries, including the U.S., is consequently large and still underestimated by some.

By contrast, Ukraine’s ability and interest in interfering with other countries, including the U.S., is limited in scope and technological capacity, and is largely inconsequential. That difference should frame the discussion of the current impeachment hearings. To the extent that it doesn’t (and yet that the discussion still focuses on the idea of external actors influencing U.S. democracy), to that extent we can judge the credibility of the sources we are reading.

Conclusion: A “new deal” for media

Reading Stephens’ piece on the “Ukrainianization” of the U.S., I couldn’t help thinking of Leonard Cohen’s 1993 song “Democracy is coming.” It is, of course, a “democracy” in scare quotes that’s coming — a “демократия,” as only the post-Soviet world has come to know it. (Little did Cohen know that the East European countryside his ancestors left would develop the model for the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more “демократия” we would be importing here.) 

There’s a sub-text here that Stephens does not mention. It is that “Ukrainianization” implies a certain inferior position in a relational dyad — Russia is, of course, the stronger partner, which accounts for its ability to take over Crimea (some would use a different, sexual metaphor) and to so seriously challenge Ukrainian sovereignty over other parts of its territory as to lead to a state of war in its easternmost provinces, with 13,000 victims and counting. If the U.S. is being “Ukrainianized,” just who is playing the part of the Russian “elder brother“?

But just as this “Ukrainianization” is hardly a democracy that’s coming, it’s also not just coming “to the U.S.A.” It is already here, everywhere, in a globally mediated world whose cultural integrity is being woven together through media that are evolving rapidly and that are largely controlled and guided by intangible economic interests. (There’s a clue to the “elder brother” question: those who control the global mediascape.) The stage for their action is global, even if they are largely behind the scenes, and even if those actors still consist, in part, of competing nation-states and their agents.

The response to that action should therefore also be global. What we’ll need (once we get some version of the “Green New Deal” that many are calling for) is a kind of New Deal for Media — a de-oligopolization (of the kind that, of today’s U.S. presidential candidates, only Elizabeth Warren is calling for) and a rendering transparent of the media landscape in its connections with politics, economics, and culture.

Whose media interests are informing our own political conversations? What do we want from our media institutions, including those social media that so many of us rely on for so much of our daily lives? What questions should we be asking about the sources of our media memes and feeds? What principles should underpin the algorithms that shape those media landscapes? And what are the political implications — national as well as global implications — of the lack of algorithmic transparency in these brave new worlds we inhabit?

This article was updated slightly at 1:30 pm on Monday, December 1.