The Russians Manipulated Our Elections. We Helped.

When Russian intelligence officers plotted their campaign to destabilize American politics in 2016, they had nearly a century of experience in covert manipulation to draw upon. The Internet had given the Russians new tools for this mischief. But their secret weapon was us — an open, divided, angry America.

That’s the lesson of Thomas Rid’s superb new book, “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.” The manipulators were opportunists: They poked at the holes and fissures in our political life and helped turn our simmering rage into a boil. But we did most of the work for them, as we amplified Moscow’s leaks and lies in the aftermath of its 2016 covert action and agitated ourselves into a state of near-hysteria. Russia set loose a virus, but we journalists and citizens, ever more obsessed with Russian “meddling,” were the mules who carried it.

The Russians had us pegged. Consider “John Davis,” one of their most popular fake conservative accounts on Twitter. His biography said he was from “Texas, USA” and listed his credentials: “Business owner, proud father, Christian, patriot, gun rights, politically incorrect. Love my country and my family . . . #WakeUpAmerica.” His profile picture showed a white guy with a pit bull on his lap, in front of a banner image of a Smith & Wesson 45. After a shooting in Orlando, he posted “IslamIstheProblem.”

But “John Davis” (and his equally stereotyped African American counterpart, “@BlacktoLive”), along with the hundreds of other Russian fake accounts, didn’t win the 2016 election for Donald Trump. Their goal, according to a Russian internal document quoted by Rid, was to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.” I guess you could say the Russians succeeded. But they had good material to work with; the American body politic was rotting from the inside out.

Rid’s achievement in this book is that he places our crazy, upside-down politics in a coherent historical context. The digital tools of our adversaries may be new, but the mission of manipulation is as old as the spy business. Make your enemies doubt and disable themselves, so you can win without fighting. As Rid explains, “The goal of disinformation is to engineer division by putting emotions over analysis, division over unity, conflict over consensus, the particular over the universal.”