Global information war preys on democracies (Letter to Morning Call)

America's problem is not President Trump. The problem is not Trump's supporters. The problem is global. Hungary and Poland have illiberal democracies, and France, Britain and Germany (and others) are feeling the pressure as well.

We are under asymmetric assault in what the military would call the information battle space.

The attack is originating from autocratic state actors (mostly Russia) who are deeply threatened by the ideals of the western liberal democratic alliance but who lack the conventional military capability to challenge us.

So the attack uses our own democratic pillars (majority rule, minority rights, limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and judicial review) to weaken those pillars, fracture the Western alliance, and set citizen against citizen.

This being the case, the solution is to strengthen these democratic pillars as well as democratic civil norms of tolerance, respect, fairness and restraint in order to narrow the gap between our democratic ideals and their imperfect realization, which will rob the aggressors of the conspiratorial thinking and feelings of victimization on the part of our fellow Americans that make us vulnerable to the infection of right-wing populism and the temptations of autocracy.

Bill Bekkenhuis
Bethlehem