Very often, as I’m working on these ‘Commentator’ posts (a round-up of the news stories of the week), I have the sense that the news bifurcates into two parts. There are the stories that don’t really matter but that everybody cares about - and there are the stories that actually matter that almost no one can be bothered with. I’m of course no different from anybody else about this - have to will myself to scour the web for stories about Iran or Pentagon budgets - and I’ve been spending a decent amount of time wondering why this is the case, why everybody’s eyes glaze over when they hear about the Pentagon’s $858 billion spending but are all in for George Santos’ mysterious $700,000. That’s all a much larger topic - some of it has to do with the paralysis of large numbers; but most of it is about the power of narrative, that certain stories are relatable and hook us, and other stories, which actually affect us far more, lack the human touch, don’t connect to recognizable archetypes.
So, with a story like Santos, the question becomes what it’s really about. And what it’s not really about, of course, is ethics charges against, or the possible unseating of, a freshman congressman. As Robert Zimmerman, Santos’ defeated opponent, said, when asked by The New York Times of why local press didn’t take Santos’ resumé-fabrication more seriously, “One person said to me, there are 60 to 80 crazy people running, we can’t investigate them all.” In other words, it really was a crazy field. Since Santos wasn’t at or near the Capital on January 6th, like some other GOP candidates, his candidacy seemed less-than-outrageous - and it’s a sort of victory lap for the Democrats, a way of celebrating their non-disaster in the midterms, to zero in on a single one of the elected Republicans. The shoe that everybody’s expecting to drop is the revelation of where the money for Santos’ firm Devolder was really coming from - and The Washington Post does seem to be on the right track, finding that a chunk of Santos’ support was from businessman Andrew Intrater, who in turn was fronting money from his cousin, the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. That stream of cash - which had been spent lavishly on Trump - may have found its way to right-wing candidates like Santos. Or else Devolder was simply a sort of escape hatch for money that had escaped the asset-freezing of Harbor City, a Ponzi scheme that Santos had previously been associated with.
But what the Santos story is really about is resumé fabrication - the idea that it’s possible, in 2023, in plain sight, to come up with a completely concocted life story - and to get away with it for a very long time. From that perspective, there’s something genuinely charming about Santos - it’s like the straight arrows get suitably represented in Congress; why shouldn’t the grifters have their representative as well. And charming, too, is the image of how people want to present themselves - they want to have worked for Goldman Sachs, to have a degree from NYU, they want to have been involved with an animal rescue shelter that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats (although without, needless to say, having actually done any work in animal rescue), they want to have an upwardly mobile immigrant success story, and, most interestingly, to be able to play the victim card, to have grandparents who survived the Holocaust, a mother who survived 9/11, employees who survived the Pulse nightclub shooting. A fraud is always a mirror of the collective psyche, and Santos’ reveals the culture to be in a truly odd place - on the one hand, obsessed with the trappings of success (Goldman, the unending campaign lunch at Il Bacco), on the other, with a strong self-pitying streak, a self-identification as an outsider. What’s so interesting about Santos is that his hucksterism, if more extreme and more creative, isn’t all that far off from the experience of other young professionals in a freelance, institutionally-loose economy - resumé-inflation, careers that are more zig-zagging than vertical, adherence to the wonderfully-useful adage ‘fake it till you make it.’ In the contemporary freelance economy, legitimacy, security, are always a long way off, it’s easy to fall into the idea that some runaway success will effectively launder all of one’s previous disappointments. It’s completely fitting for our era that Santos’ first job job is that he actually is a duly-elected United States congressman.
And same goes for the other massively circulating story that doesn’t really matter - Prince Harry. I’ve been paying as little attention as possible to it, but it does strike me as one of these stories that’s really about something and that it can be a little elusive naming what that is. And what I suspect it really is is that a royal prince is a role, like a congressman, that we expect to be filled by somebody who isn’t exactly human, isn’t exactly like us. On the one hand, that’s preposterous - everybody is human. But any system that’s survived for centuries, like a constitutional monarchy, has a degree of genius in it, and the genius there is that we all collectively divest ourselves of our desire for power, our own latent aspirations to be kings or queens. We place all of that energy in a single person, or family, but with the caveat that, having taken on so much of our aspiration, we want it to wear heavy on them. The coronations are so long, so intense, because we want to see the royals wrapped tight in ermine - we want them to never forget it. And - as per the genius of a constitutional monarchy (as opposed to the older absolutist model) - we want them to have none of the things that we have, want them to, say, never be able to win an election; want them to never achieve anything. Harry’s perspective, from the few excerpts I’ve read of Spare, is that the public essentially broke its contract with the monarchy though the tabloids and the paparazzi, by relentlessly intruding on the privacy of the royals. There probably is something to be said for that - it doesn’t sound like a very nice life, actually, in the royal family - but none of us, really, want to hear it. We all feel overlooked and ignored in our lives; we take that out as a form of aggression by relentlessly staring at the royals. And, above all, what we don’t want is for royals to forego their own contract, we don’t want to them to suddenly be free, don’t want them to have hopes and aspirations. If the royals start wanting to be like us, then some collective buffer is breached, then we all start asking ourselves why we can’t be just like the royals.
TEMPEST IN A TEA BOT - ON 2016
As for stories that matter, I’m very startled by the revelation, from an NYU study published in Nature Magazine, that Russia’s bots had essentially no impact on the 2016 election. “We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior,” write the study’s authors.
At some level I sort of knew this, but it does take the NYU study for it to really sink. It is true that Putin attempted to influence the election. It may well be true that Trump knew of and encouraged Putin’s influence. The NYU study does not mean that Russiagate was a ‘hoax.’ But it does counteract a narrative that had been gospel among liberals for the last six years - our quieter version of ‘stop the steal,’ that 2016 was a doctored election, that Trump was never truly elected by the American people because he had so much help from outside.
What emerges from the NYU study is something, however, that contrarians were saying from the beginning - that the Russian bots just weren’t likely to have made that much of a difference and were very far from being, as The New York Times wrote in 2016, “a perfect weapon.” As the NYU authors note, “exposure to Russian disinformation was heavily concentrated” - with 1% of users accounting for 70% of exposures. In other words, the accounts circulated among a small number of hardcore Republicans who were highly unlikely to vote for Hillary Clinton in any case. That does align with common sense. Electoral politics is the art of persuasion - candidates and campaigns are expected to have a deep knowledge of cultural norms and to find levers for tipping undecided voters. The idea that bots, from toll farms on the other side of the world, could do that persuasive work better than the campaigns themselves is fanciful. As The New York Times had to concede in its 2016 coverage, “The Russian efforts were sometimes crude or off-key, with a trial-and-error feel, and many of the suspect posts were not widely shared.”
Looking back, what I remember of 2016 - and I certainly never came across a Russian disinformation post throughout the campaign - was an incomprehension at how wrong the polls had been and a sense that an extra piece of input, like Russian disinformation, could help to explain the polls’ shortcomings. But, actually, it was easy enough during the 2016 campaign to spot that Hillary was struggling. She was awkward on the campaign trail. Her debate responses sounded like gobbledygook. It turned out that the polls were inaccurate because 2016 was an anomalous year - Trump was an unusual candidate and prompted shifts in voting behavior; and there was a tendency for people who were planning to vote for him to lie to pollsters. The base reality was that the Democratic establishment was losing contact with the mood of the country, and, in the real terror of the 2016 defeat, there was a temptation to not look the defeat in the face and to try to blame it on outside intervention.
Speaking of trolls, The Intercept has a surprisingly moving profile of Guccifer, a Romanian-born hacker who cracked various politicians’ e-mails, including revealing the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail account. Guccifer - real name Marcel-Lehal Lazar - ended up serving four years in prison and is now back in Romania working on a memoir. As he tells The Intercept, his story was basically admiration gone wrong. “For guys from a Communist country, United States was a beacon of light. In the time after 2000, you come to realize it’s all a humbug. It’s all a lie, right?” he said. “So, you feel the need, which I felt myself, to do something, to put things right, for the American people but for my soul too. This is the reason why I did it, not for some other shady reason.” But, unfortunately for him, the answers couldn’t be found in private e-mail accounts - the elite weren’t actually particularly perfidious. “The inbox fishing expedition for the darkest secrets of American power instead mostly revealed their mediocre oil paintings and poorly lit family snapshots,” The Intercept writes, and Lazar had to concede that “my whole Guccifer project was, after all, a failure.”
The average of the two - the NYU Twitter bots study and Lazar’s confession - seems like a reasonable-enough place for closing the books on America’s turn-towards-the-weird in the mid-2010s. The country wasn’t actually manipulated by Russian bots or by satanic elites - Lazar in his Guccifer days was a bit loose in referring to the political elite as ‘The Illuminati.’ Everything was a bit more pedestrian than how it might have seemed at the time - a bipartisan consensus that broke down gradually and then suddenly; a savvy operator who tapped into a vein of resentment.
IRAN’S EXECUTIONS
The story that’s most meaningful and moving is Iran’s continued crackdown on protestors. There is startlingly little about it in the news at the moment - a testament to how difficult it is to report on Iran. Der Spiegel, which has been leading the pack among Western media, manages to piece together a few of the stories of condemned protesters from social media posts. Sometimes the trials are broadcast on state TV, sometimes families do not learn of the executions until after they have taken place. Der Spiegel estimates, based on “documents acquired by an Iranian hacker group” that the Iranian judiciary is currently prosecuting 80 people on the death penalty-charge of ‘enmity against God.’ As Der Spiegel writes, several of the executed appear not to have been particularly active protestors at all: “Often, though, it is enough for a demonstrator simply to have been present or to have expressed solidarity with the protests on the internet.”
There is Niloofar Hamedi whose principal crime was taking a photograph of the embracing parents of Jina Mahsa Amini. During her incarceration her husband , who had been training for a marathon, ran laps around her prison walls. And Mohammad Mahdi Karami, who, choking back tears, begged his father to not tell his mother when the death sentence had been handed down. And Hossein Mohammadi, an actor, whose personality is discernible from his social media posts - above all this one, wishing his mother a happy birthday.
I don’t have anything insightful to write. Iran’s protests are fading out of the news. The regime is cracking down harshly. There’s not a tremendous amount that anybody, from outside, can do. But it is worth remembering the costs that people suffer as they fight for freedom - or suffer just for being associated with that fight.
RUSSIAN ECONOMIC PLANNING?
Michael Marder’s op-ed on Project Syndicate is just that - an op-ed; an attempt to parse out various statements by the Russian nomenklatura. But the point is compelling and aligns with an instinct that I’ve had about Putin since early in the war - that he doesn’t particularly mind ostracism or the cessation of a great deal of international trade (although the loss of some of his personal wealth must be annoying). And, if the effective closing of the borders entails a return to a Soviet mindset and to something like a planned economy, that’s something that the Russian leadership structure thinks it can live with. Marder quotes the Russian economist Albert Bakhtizin of the Academy of Science’s Central Mathematics Institute as advocating for “a return an economic five-year plan, [defined as] strategic planning with a clear definition of goals and a system of socially significant indicators, in which the state should calculate what should be produced and when, and what is needed.”
Taken as a whole, that’s what Putin’s gambit in Ukraine amounts to. Russia decisively seals itself off from the Western order. There are severe limits on travel. Russia becomes a closed society, much as it was for over 60 years. From the perspective of Putin, and many Russians, that’s not all bad - there’s a sense of cozy self-sufficiency and an ethos of sacrifice and eternal struggle. Putin’s nostalgic comments towards the Soviet Union are well known - and accompanied always with the caveat that Putin’s revanchism seemed to leave Marxist-Leninism off to one side and to be closer to a return to tsarism. That’s been more or less my assumption, but, like most attempts to read Putin’s mindset, that may well be wrong. And now that Putin, whether he exactly wanted to be or not, finds himself in an increasingly isolated, closed state - looking more and more like the USSR - it stands to reason that he would start to implement economic reforms including a greater degree of centralization and state planning. He has already rolled back so much of glasnost; no reason to think he won’t roll back perestroika as well.
TRYING TO THINK THROUGH THE DEFENSE SPENDING BILL
And one more op-ed, on an important and under-discussed topic - runaway spending on defense. As N.S. Lyons, the piece’s pseudonymous author, notes, thinking in this way tends to bring one to a conspiratorial place - an idea that the bipartisan consensus on defense spending, when there is essentially no bipartisan consensus on everything else, is all part of an elaborate system of grafts and kickbacks between Congress and the defense establishment. As Lyons contends in the UnHerd piece, that’s not quite right. The issue isn’t so much grift as culture. “What I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers,” Lyons writes.
Although idealist is a somewhat strong word. Lyons, who claims to work in the ‘foreign policy community,’ is more describing a culture based on fear and conformity. “On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: ‘Well, is he a Serious Person?’” Lyons writes. To be ‘serious’ means to be distinguished from the ‘Wingnuts’ - and certain issues, like defense spending, are understood to be badges of seriousness. “Any given person in the Washington ‘Blob’….simply wants more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus,” Lyons writes.
Lyons is as perturbed by Washington’s conformity as the it’s-all-a-giant-kickback school of thought is upset by Washington’s greed. “The reality is more disturbing [than the Corrupt Conspiracy Model],” Lyons writes. But of course once we get into this conversation, the question becomes: what should we be doing differently. Clearly, it’s very difficult to make the case for reining in defense spending at a moment when Russia is a loose cannon, when China is increasingly belligerent, and when so many countries around the world have essentially outsourced their defense to the U.S. And 2022 really was an object lesson for me in the value of the United States’ national security system. As Jake Sullivan put it in recent, dour remarks on the administration’s vision for national security, “Even if our democratic allies and partners don’t agree with us on everything, they don’t want to see [the rules-based international system] vanish, and they know that we are the world’s best bet to defend it.” And there are no two ways around it - the United States’ military might is what has been keeping Ukraine alive in the face of an invasion by a capricious neighbor.
But, nonetheless, that $858 billion should be open to more scrutiny than we are giving it. As I’ve discussed earlier, the Pentagon is able to successfully account for about 40% of its own spending - a number that’s truly hard to comprehend. And that spending is not only vastly more than any other country spends on its military but is also a disproportionate share of the GDP compared to just about anybody else. In other words, almost every conversation we have about American politics is the wrong conversation. The real conversation - which almost no one ‘serious’ is willing to have - is about that chunk of federal spending and whether some portion of it could be put to better use elsewhere.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I thought just the other day, "I wish I had a way to write about news in my newsletter." If I did, I would've less-eloquently said exactly this.
Good analysis on Santos and Harry. I wonder too why we can't stop with these stories. I think it's also (in the Santos case) because so many of us go around with impostor syndrome and he's an extreme version of that. And I also feel bad for him sometimes--a fat effeminate gay kid raised by a single mother cleaning lady is going to face all kinds of social mobility issues. What's a girl to do but embellish? His only problem is he won. It's like in the Producers when their play is a hit.