Foreign Influence on the Rise

People are usually willing to accept the verdict of democratic elections only when all parties share the same national loyalties. - Yuval Harari, widely published historian (emphasis mine)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 October 2019.]

Let’s consider what has become an issue of great concern for most Americans and their political leaders – the impact of foreign influence in our elections.  To be sure, since time immemorial, nations, kingdoms, and all manner of jurisdictions have sought to influence the inner workings of each other to their advantage.  America has been no exception.  In modern times with facile mass communications across the globe, such influencing has become an ongoing geo-political game among today’s nations.  (more here and here)

The political analysis journal Foreign Policy tells us (here) that “ever since the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of territorial sovereignty has been central to how most of us think about international politics and foreign policy. Although a huge amount of activity occurs across state borders, one of the chief tasks of any government is to defend the nation’s territory and make sure—to the extent it can—that outsiders are not in position to interfere in harmful ways. But for all the effort and expense devoted to keeping harmful influences out, sometimes countries wind up locking and bolting the windows while leaving the front door wide open.”

In the past the main paths for foreign governments to influence us was through enticing former prominent politicians with paid trips, ‘consulting’ contracts, and generous speaking fees.  Competent public relations firms would be hired to promote a candidate or cause.  There are, of course, platoons of professional lobbyists on K Street, and let’s not forget prominent DC think tanks and media journalists who can be bought and paid for with grants of special and/or exclusive access to the goings on and important people of the foreign power.  Finally, we have to include our universities that can be bought with appropriately fashioned ‘research grants’ to manufacture good reports about their benefactors.

Such well-oiled avenues of foreign influence have been focused on shaping our foreign policy to satisfy the interests of other nations.  We must always remember that the ultimate reason for messing with our elections is to influence our adoption of favorable foreign policies.  An important essay on such matters that reviewed how our own political parties become involved was published in the October 1932 issue of Foreign Affairs.  The procedural principles and political history recounted in ‘Political Factors in American Foreign Policy’ is especially apropos to today’s imbroglios between our political parties lobbing charges and counter charges of conspiratorial foreign influence on each other.

And the fear of foreign interference in our elections goes back even further, all the way to the founding of our Republic.  NPR noted in one of its documentaries (here) that “The fear of foreign interference was a driving issue in the conversations of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.”  They responded by incorporating several “guardrails” into our Constitution that required the president to be “natural born” and included the Emoluments Clause against a president accepting bribes.  In his farewell speech Washington counseled, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” 

The final takeaway from all this is that we will never be able to completely stop foreigners in their attempts to influence our elections.  Our only hope for minimizing the impact of such influences on election outcomes is to have an educated and involved electorate.  An electorate capable and willing to study the issues and candidates enough to make mature and sober decisions about what will benefit our nation and fellow citizens.  In recent years, we Americans have fallen far short of that requirement, and instead, most of us who vote are swayed by today’s last minute, media-fashioned sound bites designed to invoke reason-free emotions.  History shows and our Founders remind us that democracies don’t last long for such electorates.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Our leftwing readers have strongly opposed my descriptions of the portents and possibilities for the Great Divide.  They have shown their few and narrow sources reporting current events and attitudes, all which have greatly diminished their ability to contribute to a reasonable discussion of our nation’s political polarity and where that is taking us.  (I have even been called a traitor for suggesting such an outcome.)  Sadly these readers are not alone in thinking that I am alone to hold such sentiments.

My longtime thesis has been that America is now beyond the tipping point and in a societal state where the path of minimal resistance is to a Great Divide that splits the country into two major jurisdictions, one predominantly free market capitalist and the other centrally controlled and planned socialism.  How we get there remains to be determined.

But recognized political scientists, historians, and learned students of the human condition all agree that people continue to strongly prefer living among others who share their own values and mores, or what may more comprehensively be called a common culture.  Historian, best-selling author, and anything but a rightwinger Yuval Hariri (quoted above) gives voice to this in his 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2019) where he expands on people’s deep feelings to their nation-state.

The American Left has never shared the “national loyalties” enumerated and illuminated almost uniformly by our Founders and prominent Americans in the pre-Great Society era.  Most of us on the conservative, libertarian, conservetarian Right consider the political ideologies of our current progressives cum socialists cum communists to be definitely anti-American.  And I mean anti-American in the sense that today they overwhelmingly back and militate toward public policies that would precipitously and “fundamentally transform” America into an authoritarian, big government, socialist state.  The evidence for that has become overwhelming in the years since The Wall came down.  This especially when we consider the ‘leadership’ that has been provided by proto-socialist California.  The determined trashing of our urban areas with promoted human detritus, and the exodus of the state’s middle class to greener pastures provides support beyond reproach for such observations that portend our path to a thugocracy like Venezuela, Cuba, or Russia.

Comments

[Don Bessee]

PLEASE SEE MY MOST RECENT POST DROPPED IN THE SAND BOXS KITTY LITTER!

;-)

[Walt]

So LIBS,, just because Quid Pro Joe is running for office against Trump should make him immune from criminal investigation.. ANYWHERE.... Right? That's your stance?
He's on tape bragging about his shakedown, and used his office of V.P. to do it.
Yup, Trump has no right to do that.. Good luck making that argument stick.