“The polarization of American society has become a national security threat.”

So writes Fiona Hill in “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory,” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021.) Hill served as an intelligence officer dealing with Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In time, Hill writes, the United States has moved surprisingly close to Russia “as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy.”

Especially under President Donald Trump, the country moved in the direction of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump, according to Hill, admired Putin, who “adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin.”

Trump desired to do the same thing, she writes. “He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at his disposal.”

Americans must defeat the corruption of the American political system as well as deny Putin the ability to exploit America’s current dangerous divisions. Politicians should cooperate with the private sector, Hill says, “to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms.”

She suggests the importance of investing in people to tackle “inequality, corruption, and polarization.”

Keeping a democracy in this age of social media takes discipline: to read newspapers instead of tweets, to read a book instead of depending on visual media.

Democracy without discipline dies. It’s much easier to follow a Hitler or a Putin or a Trump, loud voices untethered to any life lived in the service of others.