1988 via focus group data:
1: “We should ship all our criminals to the college liberals in College Station [Texas].”
2: “Or Austin. Crime’s not statistics, honey.”
4: Dukakis supporter (37-year old male): “But Bush’s guy killed a pregnant woman, a halfway house, a parole place. That’s no different from Dukakis, Massachusetts.”
1: “That’s not his [Bush’s] fault.” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 32)
And that is that: in indignant language, Dukakis is symbiotically tied to Horton. Bush is, by assertion, remote from the federal furlough machine and thus exonerated. In this case, flak memes around Dukakis may have stuck more readily for their repetition across media channels during the fall of 1988—as well as for their tightly tailored fit with decades of right-wing discourse about “law-and-order.” It is an issue on which Republicans took ownership through aggressive repetition during the Nixon era—even as officials of Nixon’s government were ushered into prison. Massachusetts/Dukakisista policies on furloughs were unremarkable by national standards, but readily articulated to long-standing flak discourses of the right vis-à-vis crime.
Nineteen eighty-eight’s election witnessed startling memes, indirectly sourced through PACs then picked up by more mainstream media platforms; memes that were dishonest and played upon the audience’s vulnerabilities as concerns keeping facts straight in a media-saturated world. All of this was further complicated by audience members’ pre-standing ideologies. In each of these respects, the 1988 election’s flak campaign anticipated the state of play for contemporary flak. Nonetheless, the practices of flak are not static—and there are indeed striking contemporary imprimaturs on it in a new media environment.
The Twenty-First Century’s Planet of Flak
The 1988 campaign can be regarded in retrospect as a dress rehearsal for flak campaigns to come. A brief and necessarily partial look at the 2016 U.S. presidential election illuminates characteristics of the new flak order. Most obviously, the practices of flak have intensified since 1988. During the 2016 electoral debates, for example, Trump’s talking points consists of rote concatenation of already established flak memes toward Hillary Clinton—in contrast ←11 | 12→with Bush in 1988 who ran on rarefied rhetoric and largely left the flak to subordinates and PAC players. Moreover, flak has been fully intertwined with the ongoing “communications revolution” of new media platforms. Along with its quantity and higher profile, flak is also more globalized at present than in 1988 in ways that will quickly become apparent.
Deep-context accounts of the 2016 election have already arrived via journalism (Harding, 2017) and academic investigation (Snyder, 2018) that pull together a wider narrative than I am attempting here. For the eager student of contemporary flak, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the 2016 election is an original source of interest. The report was released in January 2017, two months after the 2016 election and weeks before Trump’s team assumed office. The report collates the judgments of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA). I do not take it as my “job” to valorize the work of the alphabet-soup agencies as I work in the (more transparent, if disorderly) environment of a university—but am mindful of the agencies’ research acumen, their formidable tools and workforce. In this case, their work clearly previewed the more elaborate findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report in 2019.
ICA’s report opens with blunt statements about the stakes around its investigation:
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. (original emphasis; Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. ii)
These are bracing statements about the ambition of Russian activities and objectives. It bears further mention that Russia is not Canada; the MI6 intelligence service of the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom, recently “reclassified Russia as a ‘tier one’ threat, alongside Islamic terrorism” by 2017 (Edwards, 2017, para. 1).
The U.S. intelligence community’s account of Russian activity also squares with the characterization of flak discussed earlier. To wit, ICA appraises the ←12 | 13→Kremlin as undertaking a delegitimization effort in support of Russia’s strategic objectives—and its flak targets were not only personalized vis-à-vis Clinton, but ultimately directed at the bigger target of fundamental faith in the U.S. electoral system that makes the nation governable. ICA’s further maintains that Russia, a hostile foreign power, assessed that Trump’s ascendency was compatible with Russian interests. While Russian agents hacked material from “some Republican-affiliated targets,” ICA concludes that Russia exclusively weaponized stolen material against Democrats (2017, p. 3).2
Had Clinton prevailed in the November 2016 election, Russia was also prepared to pour high-octane fuel on any brushfires of discontent in the United States over the result. Russian intelligence had already prepared the #DemocracyRIP hashtag to look like the work of indignant Americans, for the purpose of mobilizing doubts about Clinton, in particular—and the probity of U.S. electoral results, in general (2017, p. 2). Toward these strategic ends, Russian intelligence endowed its activities with the façade of being organic, U.S. domestic opposition, and not the work of a hostile foreign government.
Alongside cyber operations to spearfish and penetrate the Clinton campaign’s computer networks, ICA reports that the Russian flak offensive featured more “above board” flak tactics. RT (formally called Russia Today) was the Kremlin-sponsored, English-language television network that answered the call (2017, pp. 6–12). RT went to the ramparts for Trump and against Clinton with repetition on flak memes about “her leaked emails […], poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism” (2017, p. 4). RT’s most popular video, viewed more than nine million times, circulated under the flak claim, How 100-Percent of the Clintons’ Charity Went to … Themselves (2017, p. 4).3 RT ventured far beyond straightforward criticism of Clinton as claims were not only made in apparent bad faith but were loaded to delegitimize and even criminalize the target. Moreover, Russia’s campaigns were not rolled up after the election in 2016. ICA assess that Russia’s program of spearfishing U.S. government officials, thinks tanks and nongovernmental organizations continued, in the effort to gain advantages over the its foe, the United States (Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. 5).
Mueller’s GRU(e)some Indictment
A year-and-a-half later in 2018, The United States of America versus Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. presents further interesting reading for the student of flak around the 2016 election. A product of the Robert S. Mueller III special ←13 | 14→counsel investigation, the indictment provides operational detail about the activities flagged in the ICA’s report in 2017. Mueller (2018) mainly focuses on the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, known in the west by the acronym GRU; a notoriously severe outfit even by the standards of military intelligence. However, in this episode, GRU was more concerned with killing campaigns and reputations via flak than people.
According
