The Crumbling Facade of US Democracy: Russian Resurgence Amidst US Moral Decay within Russian Media Coverage of the US Election

Chapter 5 contextualizes the gravity of the 2016 US presidential election for the Russia Federation, and its attempts at diminishing the legitimacy of US-led global democracy. This chapter overviews the mounting political tensions between Russia and the US, and the manifestation of those tensions in defining Russian identity and the threat posed to that identity by Western-led globalism. The US election provides an ideal theater for Russian media to bolster its own system, while simultaneously degrading both US soft-power and the legitimacy of Western democracy. US democracy is shown as globalist driven, inequitable, hypocritical, and an altogether messy, and even an unstable, affair; aiding, by way of indirect contrast, the authoritarian, more ethnocentric and stability focused leadership offered by the Russian state. US decision-making in virtually all areas of international affairs is shown to be just as deeply self-serving and flawed as its election process and its presidential candidates. The result is a picture of Western democracy that both destabilizes itself and, because of its inherent flaws, destabilizes the areas in the world in which it operates. Russian media used the election to create an image of itself as a survivor against Western corruption and a sensible alternative to US-led chaos. The outcome of a 2016 US presidential election, at least post-World War II, holds significance for nations across the globe as US policy typically guides most of the Western world and implicates virtually all sovereign nations across a broad spectrum of factors on global security, economics, trade, immigration, and humanitarian aid, to name a few. The path down which both nations have traveled to arrive at such dramatic shifts towards one another based on who assumes the office of US President, is a long one and is filled with incoming US administrations continually seeking a reset of relations with the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation. Reflective of the political developments covered, Russian media has recently become an active force attempting to shape domestic and international audiences’ images of Russia itself, as well as the US-led international order.