Democratic Subversion in 2026 - Part 1
Newsletter #497 — October 12, 2026
The United States is about to hold what could be, but hopefully won't be, another election in which the validity of the results are hotly contested and never fully accepted. If this happens, we may find ourselves living through one of those worst-case election scenarios that many people are worrying about. This could precipitate the kind of crisis that would threaten the viability of U.S. democracy. Hopefully, the many people who have been working so hard to ensure the integrity of the election will be able to prevent this from happening.
Still, as we have been thinking about how close we are coming to this eventuality, we found ourselves revisiting a set of newsletters that we posted in June of 2024. These newsletters (Newsletter 245 and Newsletter 246) highlighted three articles that, from differing perspectives, reflected on a former KGB1 agent's description of a Cold War-era Soviet plan to subvert and ultimately destroy Western democracy. What was so chilling then, and what remains terrifying today, is the degree to which the U.S. and many other Western democracies seem to be collapsing in accordance with the Soviet plan.
While it's unclear how much of democratic erosion is attributable to the actions of our geo-political rivals, it is clear that, at the very least, we are, ourselves, doing many of these things that they imagined doing to us. The moral of this story is pretty clear. If we are doing the self-destructive things our enemies want us to do, we should stop.
This two-part newsletter reprints the earlier two posts with some October 2026 updates and modifications. (The second newsletter is Newsletter 498 and will be coming out Thursday. The link won't work, though, until that Newsletter is released.) What follows is text from 2024, except when otherwise noted. To make it even more clear, the text added now (in October 2026) is italicized. The quotes from 2024 are italicized too, but we think it is easy enough to tell the difference.)
Every once in a while, we read articles that are so important that we feel a need to give them more attention than a listing in our Colleague, News, and Opinion Links Newsletters. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's2 June 4, 2024 article in the Free Press "We Have Been Subverted," is one such article, and it reminded Heidi of an earlier similar Medium article she had read by Andy Atwood entitled "Is this Russia's 4-Step Long-Game to Destabilize the USA? Atwood draws heavily on yet another article by Gil Duran and George Lakoff which appeared February 29, 2024 in Framelab, entitled Putin failed to conquer Navalny or Ukraine. He's had better luck with Trump’s GOP.
It is important to recognize that this is not just Cold War-era spy fiction. The most recent (October 6, 2026) edition of Foreign Affairs includes this passage from an article entitled: The Triumph of Tech-Fueled Propaganda: America Isn’t Ready for the Next Wave of Foreign Influence Operations.
Sophisticated states such as China, Iran, and Russia routinely combine overt public messaging with covert influence and mix broadcast channels with social media platforms. State media outlets, official government accounts, paid influencers, fake personas, hacked accounts, and bot armies are parts of the same system. This integrated approach, which we call “full-spectrum propaganda,” is now the norm for U.S. adversaries trying to spread their message abroad.
Readers should also note that the process of subversion described here isn't just something that geopolitical rivals like Russia, Iran, or China use to advance their interests. It is also a process that is being used within democracies by unscrupulous actors seeking to subvert democratic constraints and seize ever more power. Readers may remember that, in earlier newsletters (42, 43, 162 and 165), we started to describe our evolving theory of the "bad-faith actor" problem. One of the reasons that we have yet to finish this series is that we keep reading articles like these that are forcing us to adapt our thinking in ways that better account for the presence of even more sinister forces than we originally imagined. If we are going to save democracy, we have to do more to learn how to more constructively handle our own internal conflicts. And, we are going to have to defend the whole system from the kind of subversive attacks outlined here.
Defining the Problem
All three articles focus on the notion of "subversion" of democracy and Western values, as initially presented by Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB1 agent, who became disillusioned with the Soviet system and defected to the West. In a 1983 lecture, Bezmenov explained how the Soviet Union had a very long-term, four-step program for destroying America from the inside. Hirsi Ali, Atwood, and Duran and Lakoff all assert that this subversive plan has, to a large degree, successfully implemented without Americans even noticing (which is a key component of the plan because it minimizes pushback.) Each of these authors/articles have a somewhat different interpretation of how this has happened, who is involved, and what might be done about it. But all have different insights of value, so we want to weave the three together here, first focusing on what the problem is, and then what we can do about it.
We should be clear that the subversion tactics described here are, by no means limited, to what the Russians are doing. A wide range of other actors including the Iranians, the North Koreans and the Chinese may well be doing something similar. One can also make a pretty strong case that Donald Trump's effort to consolidate the many authoritarian tendencies of his administration follows a similar playbook.
Hirsi Ali has the best succinct explanation of Bezmenov's basic concept.
Subversion refers to a process by which the values and principles of an established system are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the existing social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. It involves a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system, often carried out by persons working secretly from within. Subversion is used as a tool to achieve political goals because it generally carries less risk, cost, and difficulty as opposed to open belligerency. The act of subversion can lead to the destruction or damage of an established system or government. In the context of ideological subversion, subversion aims to gradually change the perception and values of a society, ultimately leading to the undermining of its existing systems and beliefs.
Hersi Ali then lays out Bezmenov's four steps: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization, as does Atwood, who quotes directly from Dunam/Lakoff. We agree that the Dunam/Lakoff description is particularly insightful for events of today, so we will quote them too. They explain the four stages as follows:
1. Demoralization: This phase involves the long-term process of demoralizing the target nation. Tactics include the infiltration of, and influence on, the target nation’s educational system, media, politics, and culture. The aim: to alter the population’s perceptions of reality, creating a generation of citizens who are unable to recognize or resist the subverter’s ideology or objectives.
2.Destabilization: In this stage, the focus shifts to creating instability. This can be done through the manipulation of the target nation’s economy, politics, and society. Strategies include sowing discord, social unrest and polarization, usually by exploiting existing divisions. This phase might involve supporting radical groups, spreading disinformation, and undermining trust in the government and institutions.
3.Crisis: This stage is characterized by a significant upheaval or crisis that leads to a state of emergency or a situation that destabilizes society to a critical point. The crisis could take various forms, including economic collapses, riots, or significant political upheavals, leading to a high uncertainty and fear among the population.
4. Normalization: After the crisis, the stage of normalization begins, where the subverter seeks to establish a new status quo. This often involves the implementation of policies and measures that solidify the subverter’s control or influence over society, supposedly to restore order. The subverter’s power and the oppressive new conditions become “normal.”
The overarching objective of these tactics, they say,
... is to weaken a society from within, making it vulnerable to influence or control without a direct military confrontation. Bezmenov emphasized that success depends on the subverter's ability to keep the society in the dark about the manipulation process until it’s too late.
What makes this tactic so powerful and so threatening is its ability to harness the self-destructive and self-sustaining nature of escalation and hyper-polarization dynamics. Under normal circumstances, it is already easy for the conflicts to spin out of control. The subversion strategy focuses simply on inflaming and encouraging these latent tensions (and sometimes fabricating a few new ones). As is the case with arson, once the conflagration gets going, it's awfully hard to stop it. or even figure out what started it.
When Heidi originally read this list in Atwood's article, her reaction was "my gosh! We're done with steps one and two; three could easily come about in November after the (2024) Presidential election (no matter who wins), and then it is but a quick hop, skip, and jump into stage four and then American democracy is totally done." Today in 2026, it's clear that President Trump's decisive 2024 victory prevented the immediate crisis that she was worried about. But the danger has not passed. We are about to hold another hugely consequential election — one that, for the first time since 2020, President Trump could easily lose.
Hirsi Ali has a different take on how these steps have been carried out and by whom, but she sees the process as the same. She starts her article by describing herself as "a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant" She applies Bezmenov's stages not to Soviet/Russian/U.S. relations, but to the Israel/Hamas war [as it looked in June of 2024], saying that she "looks at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with fear and trembling." Then she explains why.
She was born in Somalia in 1969, just as the Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. She describes the repression and the brutality that eventually led to a civil war starting in 1990, from which the country has yet to recover. Her father resisted the oppression and was imprisoned — she doesn't say if he was ever released. She then recounts:
I never stopped longing for the kind of freedom my father had taught me about. And at the age of 22, I fled to the Netherlands seeking it. There — and later, in America — I discovered what we’ve come to call “Western” values" . . . a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles — radical ones — that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history. Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism.
This, according to Hirsi Ali, is what subversion is intended to destroy. As we explained in our big picture essay, "The Grand democratic Bargain — Humanity's Best Defense Against 'I'll Fight You for It' Rules," democracy is humanity's best defense against authoritarian rule and the dystopian horrors that go with it. To her horror (and ours, which is why her article so spoke to us) all of these values and the way of life they have enabled are being subverted and destroyed, from both within America (and other liberal democracies) and without. Rather than identifying the outside perpetrator as Russia, Hirsi Ali points to the twin threats of "expansionist political Islam" and "cultural Marxism" (which is her name for the woke identity synthesis that underlies progressive intersectional politics, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism).
These philosophies, she asserts, are increasingly causing people in the West, particularly on the political left, to turn against these fundamental Western values, charging that they are "oppressive" or "colonialist." Although she doesn’t point this out, this has been going on for some time, forming the basis, for instance, of critical race theory, and the New York Times' 1619 Project which "aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery at the very center of our national narrative." The project seems to be part of a broader effort to reframe the lofty democratic ideals that Hirsi Ali celebrates as little more than a tactic for sugarcoating the United States' racist past.
Though this weakening of Western liberal values may have been under the radar before, it became particularly obvious after Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, Hirsi Ali asserted, as the attack was seen by many Western liberals (particularly students at American universities and many of their faculty members) as a brave move by oppressed people to fight back against Western oppression. Gleeful supporters of Hamas cared not about Hamas' unspeakable brutality, but rather lionized it and extended (apparently) their hopes for a repetition in the U.S. when they chanted "Death to America!" in the same breath that they were chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!" (hence Israel will be no more).
The above paragraph was written in 2024. Since then, the war between Israel and Hamas has metastasized into a much wider conflagration that has been accompanied with a global collapse in support for Israel, an epidemic of antisemitism, and an embrace of efforts to drive Israel and Israelis into the sea.
Looking back at America before October 7, Hirsi Ali notes that "many [Americans] refused to believe that anything was actually wrong." They looked at their individual problems, and attributed them to momentary bad leadership that could be changed. They saw the sense of hopelessness that so many of their fellow citizens felt as simply a normal manifestation of economic shifts away from industrialism to the digital and now the AI era.
What Hirsi Ali, and we, found so stunning about the aftermath of the October 7th attack was the number of people, including those at some of America's most elite institutions, who automatically assumed that the villain in this story was Western European Civilization (a civilization with which they associated Israelis). The key philosophy, which we learned about for the first time, was anti-colonialism — the belief that anything associated with European colonialism was automatically evil, and should be opposed. (This was a philosophy that did not, however, seem to have a problem with the ongoing brutality of Iranian and Islamist expansionism.) It wasn't a question of trying to look at the good and bad aspects of both civilizations — it was simply a binary good versus evil way of looking at the world (and putting Western Liberal Democratic Values on the "evil" side).
In short, the events that followed October 7 revealed the degree to which elites in western democracies had lost confidence in the entire liberal democratic experiment and the extent to which society had progressed through the demoralization phase of the subversion process.
Who is Responsible Our for Democratic Decline?
While there is widespread agreement that democracy is in serious trouble, the left and the right see the causes of our troubles differently. The right blames the left for abandoning liberal values and discrediting American history, as well as implementing anti-democratic policies (favoring some races over others, for example.) The left blames the right, pointing to the many anti-democratic actions President Trump has undertaken. What is also unclear is the degree to which the subversive forces of geopolitical rivals have amplified and strengthened these divisive voices (although the Foreign Affairs article we quoted above suggests that that foreign influence is likely a big part of the story.)
In their 2024 article Dunam and Lakoff take the left's view of the problem, as is evidenced by their title "Putin failed to conquer Navalny or Ukraine. He's had better luck with Trump’s GOP." They present various events as evidence that it is the Right that is trying to subvert American democracy. Our 2024 post had a long list of examples, but most have been eclipsed by what has happened recently. We will be devoting a full post to such a list soon, so we will not include it here.
But Hirsi Ali points out that the Left is also posing serious threats to Western values and American democracy, which became blatantly clear following Hamas's October 7 attack.
One of the key insights Bezmenov expresses about a subverted society is that, for a while, there is only a passing sense that something is wrong. It’s a mood — a vibe. I believe that’s what many of us have been witnessing for several years now, maybe even as long as a decade or two.
The pressure makes society rumble like a volcano, quiet one minute and flaring the next. Then, finally—and seemingly suddenly—the revolution bursts into view.
When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford — students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demands for a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.
Yes, that was written in 2024. But those demands are just growing in Europe, and a pro-Palestinian agenda is becoming increasingly mainstream in the United States, as we'll discuss in the next newsletter. That newsletter will also continue our discussion of how we got to this point, and most importantly, how we might get out of it.
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1 KGB was the Soviet Union's much feared internal and external security apparatus.
2 Hirsi Ali now directs the Restoring the West Project which publishes a thought-provoking Substack that explores the complex, controversial and critically important relationship between Western civilization and democracy.
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