It's Not Magic: Making Your Choice is Powerful
Just as authoritarian governments are not monolithic, politics in democratic societies should be a common effort; please vote!
Confronting a world they didn’t always understand, our ancestors sometimes chalked it up to magic. Overwhelmed by life’s complexity, we too sometimes long for simple answers. Our culture of sound bites and tweets invites us to reduce and oversimplify.
Looking at Russian and Chinese cyber threat actors, for example, it is tempting to categorize them as either monolithic and all-powerful government puppetmasters or profit-minded cybercriminal geniuses operating in a vacuum. Here at Natto Thoughts, we have tried to portray a more complex picture of the human motives and political dynamics behind cyber threats.
Similarly, as citizens of democratic societies, we might fall into magical thinking about our own government – whether accusing it of directing hurricanes or expecting it to provide simple solutions to knotty problems like inflation and Middle East peace.
Governing is difficult, grinding day-to-day work of responding to dilemmas and tough choices, with clashing values and interests at stake, in an attempt to find the least worst alternative. Politics is the art of the possible. The public servants we elect are people, not magicians. They need all the wisdom that we fellow citizens can provide.
Historian Timothy Snyder described some examples of magical thinking that are not necessarily healthy for our body politic – discussed in the Natto Thoughts posting “History and Hope.” The types of magical thinking Snyder described include
The Politics of Inevitability: the idea that history is inevitably progressing toward a liberal utopia. When reality falls short of expectations, disillusionment may tempt some to embrace...
The Politics of Eternity: the attempt to go back to an idealized state of past greatness.
When problems seem too great, some embrace the Politics of Catastrophe: the idea that things are so bad that it is not worth even trying to change them.
Snyder offers a healthier alternative, what he calls the “Politics of Responsibility.” He views history as contingent and unpredictable. Individuals can make a difference, he says. Values, ideas and choices matter. People embracing the “Politics of Responsibility” help create a better future by working together and thrashing out competing values and ideas in search of solutions to practical problems of the present.
Russia, China and Iran are all trying to influence the US elections, according to intelligence analysts. Each country pursues its own interests; Russia supports Trump, Iran supports Harris, and China dislikes both presidential candidates but has tried to undermine politicians in local races who are hostile to China. While it is unlikely that foreign adversaries could technically manipulate ballots,1 they help sow doubt in the results as they seek to undermine our faith in American democracy. Covert efforts include discouraging citizens from voting in the first place.
If you are an American and have not already made a plan to vote, it is not necessarily too late. Some states offer same-day voter registration on Election Day. If you can’t make it on November 5, many states offer early in-person voting between now and then. Nonpartisan resources such as a US government voter information website or the independent Ballotpedia Encyclopedia of American Politics can help navigate the logistics of voting and the policy positions of the candidates. To verify what you read online, you can try VoteSmart’s The Facts page or the fact-checking sites listed in the Natto Thoughts series on disinformation.
“The election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), assured the American public. First, voting machines are not connected to the Internet, so malicious actors cannot hack into the machines technically. Second, over 97 percent of Americans live in jurisdictions that use paper ballots, which can be traced and verified. Third, multiple layers of safeguards have been put into place, including physical security and cyber security to protect election infrastructure, pre-election testing for accuracy and post-election audits. Finally, elections are decentralized and run by states. This adds resilience, because each state has its own election process and no threat actors can make a difference at scale.
Thank you for describing different ways people respond to confusion around politics and elections.