By AMANDA TAUB and MAX FISHER
Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, announcing the indictment of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
As international conspiracies to undermine the world’s last remaining superpower go, the Russian-led plot revealed by a Justice Department indictment on Friday can seem, in its particulars if not its intent, audacious but, as revealed so far, somewhat narrow.
The conspirators stand accused of spreading falsehoods online, hiring Hillary Clinton impersonators at rallies and starting Facebook groups that tried to convince minority voters to stay home or cast their ballots for Jill Stein.
That these efforts might have actually made a difference, or at least were intended to, highlights a force that was already destabilizing American democracy far more than any Russian-made fake news post: partisan polarization.
“Partisanship can even alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgment,” the political scientists Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira wrote in a recent paper. “The human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news” — a danger cited by political scientists far more frequently than orchestrated meddling — “poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning.”
It has infected the American political system, weakening the body politic and leaving it vulnerable to manipulation. Russian misinformation seems to have exacerbated the symptoms, but laced throughout the indictment are reminders that the underlying disease, arguably far more damaging, is all American-made.
How Polarization Shapes Reality
The false information and political advertisements that the Russians are accused of spreading could ring true only to those already predisposed to suspect the worst.
One Instagram account targeting voters on the right, for instance, implied that Black Lives Matter activists were assassinating police officers. Another targeting black voters implied that the government had implicitly supported the Ku Klux Klan by dismantling the Black Panthers.
If this had any effect, research suggests it did so by tapping into existing polarization, rather than creating new divisions.
A recent study found that the people most likely to consume fake news were already hyperpartisan and close followers of politics, and that false stories were only a small fraction of their media consumption.
Americans, it said, sought out stories that reflected their already-formed partisan view of reality. This suggests that these Russians efforts are indicators — not drivers — of how widely Americans had polarized.
That distinction matters for how the indictment is read: Though Americans have seen it as highlighting a foreign threat, it also illustrates the perhaps graver threats from within.
An Especially Toxic Form of Partisanship
Russian interference tended to focus on telling the targeted group to fear and distrust the other side. Posts that targeted Republicans, for instance, portrayed Mrs. Clinton as a threat to the Constitution and public safety, and in one memorable example said that her election would be a victory for Satan himself.
In taking this approach, the Russians were merely riding a trend that has been building for decades. Since the 1980s, surveys have found that Republicans and Democrats’ feelings toward the opposing party have been growing more and more negative. Voters are animated more by distrust of the other side than support for their own.
This highlights a problem that Lilliana Mason, a University of Maryland political scientist, said had left American democracy dangerously vulnerable. But it’s a problem driven primarily by American politicians and media outlets, which have far louder megaphones than any Russian-made Facebook posts.
“Compromise is the core of democracy,” she said. “It’s the only way we can govern.” But, she said, “when you make people feel threatened, nobody compromises with evil.”
The claim that, for example, Mrs. Clinton’s victory might aid Satan is in many ways just a faint echo of the partisan anger and fear already dominating American politics.
Those emotions undermine a key norm that all sides are served by honoring democratic processes; instead, they justify, or even seem to mandate, extreme steps against the other side.
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Fracturing by Race and Party
The Russians’ apparent focus on heightening racial division touched on something much deeper than even the Russians may have understood.
American democracy can function only when its citizens accept the right of all others to participate regardless of their background.
That applies to party divisions. But, increasingly, partisan identity is aligning with racial and religious identity, according to research by Dr. Mason. This, along with deepening partisan distrust, is creating one of the worst possible conditions in a multiethnic democracy: a growing belief that elections are a zero-sum contest for control among racial and religious groups.
Russian misinformation hit repeatedly on this fear, spreading fake news and even rally posters that declared the allegiance of Muslim Americans to Mrs. Clinton.
Polarization by race, building since the 1990s, poses “the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction,” the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write in their book, “How Democracies Die.”
The idea that all demographic groups must cooperate rather than compete is one of the most important norms for a multiethnic democracy like that of the United States. The claims pushed in Russian posts demonstrate, precisely because they are so implausible, how rapidly that norm is weakening.
Weakened Guardrails and Guardians
The Russian campaign targeted not just democracy’s guardrails — the norms of cooperation and inclusion — but also political parties, which are supposed to function as democracy’s guardians. For instance, posts and individuals alleged that the Democratic Party was outright stealing the primary for Mrs. Clinton — well beyond what actually occurred — and attempted to sow infighting among Republicans.
Although parties compete by design, they also play a stabilizing role, weeding out candidates with anti-democratic or extreme views, for instance, and ensuring that legislators’ individual interests don’t crowd out the state’s ability to govern. Or they’re supposed to, anyway.
But the Russians entered a political scene already defined by the parties’ weakness and inability to control their own field.
“The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong,” Julia Azari, a Marquette University political scientist, wrote the day after the vote.
It may have been party weakness that even gave the Russians a Trump campaign to support. Though the G.O.P. tried repeatedly to halt Mr. Trump’s advance in the primary, it failed, revealing both its powerlessness and its unpopularity with its own voters.
Fox News had displaced the party’s power over Republican voters, according to Vanessa Williamson, a political scientist who is the co-author of the definitive academic book on Tea Party politics, which revealed that shift long before the Russians arrived. Though the foreigner-pushed posts may be more striking than homegrown partisan media, it is a reminder that the latter plays a far greater role in weakening parties.
Turning Against Institutions
“Hillary Clinton has already committed voter fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus,” announced a 2016 Facebook post allegedly written by the Russians named in the indictment.
Warnings of voter fraud were a frequent theme, and one with some irony; the Russians, it seems, sought to undermine American democracy by suggesting it had already been undermined.
But if Americans were susceptible to messages seeking to discredit democratic institutions, it was because many already believed them.
The Tea Party movement, for instance, rose on a fear that Barack Obama was more dictator than president, and that his health care reforms would send elderly Americans to “death panels.” Mr. Trump rose on the lie that Mr. Obama is secretly foreign-born. Some supporters of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic senator, suspected that Mrs. Clinton had engineered the primary vote against him, a notion later hit upon by Russian misinformation.
And if institutions behave in ways that partisans dislike, for example by issuing a court ruling or releasing a vote tally that hurt their side, those partisans can come to see the institutions as threats to democracy rather than its bedrock foundation.
Mr. Trump, for instance, has attacked the F.B.I. as part of a “deep state” seeking to unseat him from office. In several states, lawmakers unhappy with unfavorable court rulings are increasingly responding with calls for limiting the powers of the judiciary.
This can lead partisans to believe that by attacking those institutions, they are saving democracy from its enemies within. To the other side, this only affirms suspicion that their opponents are innately anti-democratic and must be excluded. It is a self-perpetuating cycle, one that Russian meddling may have only sped up a bit but that remains almost entirely American-driven.
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