Foreign election interference has a long history

It’s crunch time.

With the deeply divisive U.S. presidential election less than a week away, propaganda is of the greatest value because of the lack of time to rebut it.

As for such propaganda? Foreign interference in U.S. presidential elections goes back to the early 1800s and even decades before then.

The methods may have changed, but not so much the strategies.

These were some of the key takeaways from panelists at the recent 11th George Washington Leadership Lecture Series at Mount Vernon in Washington, D.C.

Held in person and online Oct. 22, the event featured two guests: New York Times correspondent David E. Sanger and historian Tyson Reeder.

Lindsay Chervinsky, Ph.D., a presidential historian, and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, moderated the 70-minute discussion.

“Republics are uniquely exposed to foreign meddling because we allow our citizens liberties — notably, free speech — that foreign powers exploit,” said Reeder, assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University whose research focuses on early American transnational and international history.

Sanger has an award-winning resume of writing in newspapers and books about foreign meddling in U.S. politics. His latest book, “New Cold Wars,” details China’s and Russia’s simultaneous confrontations with the U.S. in recent years.

“The U.S. complains about foreign meddling, but we do this all the time,” Sanger pointed out.

Madison’s misdeed

Both Reeder and Sanger discussed Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to sabotage the campaign of Hillary Clinton and boost that of Donald Trump through a hacking and misinformation campaign on social media. 

Some things never change.

Reeder detailed how President James Madison, the “Father of the U.S. Constitution,” misused public funds for the purpose of obtaining potentially incriminating information on his political opponents while seeking reelection in 1812.

Foreign shadow diplomats had convinced Monroe that they had the goods to sink his enemies, the Federalists, who supported Great Britain and opposed Revolutionary France.

Turns out a French con artist had hatched the scheme, Reeder said.

Like a game of chess

It’s no surprise, Sanger said, how Russia, China, and Iran have ramped up efforts to influence U.S. politics.

“They have a huge amount riding on it,” said Sanger, adding, “Rising powers always come into conflict with top powers.”

The journalist used chess as a metaphor to compare meddling now to how it played out in Madison’s time, when the U.S. was a far much weaker power.

Back then, it was like moving pawns on a board, Sanger said. Today, it’s like moving the king and queen.

“It’s now a much more complicated procedure,” he said.

Exploiting the system

The First Amendment right to free speech in the U.S. has made it easier for foreign powers to help influence U.S. elections, Sanger and Reeder said.

They achieve this my amplifying already divisive messages Americans are hurling back and forth at each other, instead of having to pen the messages themselves – something that is easier to detect.

“It’s a quite brilliant exploitation of our own system,” Sanger said.

“Republics are uniquely exposed to foreign meddling because we allow our citizens liberties — notably, free speech — that foreign powers exploit.”

Tyson Reeder

Reeder said this “conundrum we face in the U.S.” goes back to the time of Madison and Alexander Hamilton (father of the conservative Federalist Party), when a Spanish diplomat to the U.S. (among others) used newspapers to spread propaganda.

The foreign diplomats didn’t see this as meddling, Reeder explained. Rather, he said, they viewed it as merely engaging with the “sovereign people of the nation” as they tried to rally the voices of U.S. voters against their leaders.

Sanger agreed that little has changed.

“Nobody has really defined where foreign interference begins and public diplomacy ends,” he said. “And that’s a difficulty. If the Russians are taking the actual words of Americans and amplifying them, it’s a little hard to find the crime there.

“It may anger us; it may look like they’re putting their fingers on the scales — and they certainly are — but there’s a certain amount of this that we must learn to absorb and understand in our system. And the only way (we) can do that is by educating kids from their earliest time about what interference, what propaganda looks like.

“That shouldn’t be so hard because so much of it is happening on Tik Tok and X.”

Messed up is good 

So, how do you keep foreign powers from exploiting divisions in the U.S. political discourse?

Reducing polarization helps, the speakers agreed.

Sanger suggested keeping the “screwed up and weird” election system in the U.S. intact.

“Don’t do what others have done and nationalize the election system,” he suggested. “It’s very difficult to hack the U.S. election system because the system is run by the states, and every state uses a different technology and system. This makes it so complex that it’s safer.”

More about the George Washington Leadership Lecture Series

The annual George Washington Leadership Lecture Series at Mount Vernon is sponsored by the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.

The lecture series was established through a gift by Maribeth Borthwick (’73), vice regent for California of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the non-profit that preserves and maintains the Mount Vernon estate originally owned by Washington’s family.