University of Michigan Law School professor and TV legal analyst (NBC News and MSNBC) Barbara McQuade cites an unusual combination of influences for her career path: the Detroit Tigers and Watergate.
Her lifelong dream, as a Sterling Heights kid born in Detroit, was to play shortstop for the Tigers, but as a young girl, she was warned that this would be impossible due to her gender.
“That caused me to feel a sense of betrayal, and seemed very anti-American,” writes McQuade in her book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America. “You want to do something to level the playing field.”
At around the same time, when McQuade was 9 or 10, the Watergate scandal broke.
“I had always thought of the president as this exalted leader, someone we should look up to, so I was deeply offended that he would do something so awful that he’d be forced to resign,” McQuade says. “I was also intrigued by the idea that reporters had exposed the misconduct that led to his resignation. So I think all of those things motivated my interest in news media … and my interest in law, especially in public corruption cases — protecting the public, and serving that watchdog role, from people who abused their authority.”
McQuade’s already impressive résumé — Barack Obama appointed her U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan (2010-17), the first woman ever in that role — recently got another entry: bestselling author, courtesy of Attack from Within, which debuted at No. 3 on The New York Times bestseller list earlier this year.
“I wanted to reach people of intelligence and good faith, but a [lay] audience, not lawyers or national security specialists,” says McQuade, who teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, and data privacy at U-M. “I thought that if people can identify [disinformation] and recognize it, then they are less likely to be susceptible to it.”
The idea for the book was born in part from discussions with her students about the 2019 Mueller report, which focused on the ways Russia planted disinformation online not only to influence the 2016 election in America but to ramp up conflict within our borders. Sadly, this foreign strategy was, in some ways, in sync with the way our own political system had begun to operate.
“It used to be that parties in the primary elections would seek to curry favor with the more either conservative for Republicans, liberal for Democrats, members of their base,” McQuade says. “Then, in the general election, they’d tack back toward the middle and try to persuade swing voters, moderates, and independents to vote for them.”
In the past 25 years, however, with more and better data at their fingertips, “political strategists instead determined that it’s a better strategy to double down on your base, because if you can motivate your base to show up, that is a vote that will reliably be in your column,” McQuade says. “If you excited the moderates, the independents, you don’t know how they might vote, … so a better strategy … is firing up the base by stoking the culture wars and portraying the opponent as a demon and an existential threat to life as we know it.”
Moderates, meanwhile, have only grown more cynical about elections because the options seem so extreme, so they are more likely to vote for a third-party candidate or not at all.
“Although this may be good for political candidates, it’s terrible for America, because we can’t accomplish anything when we’re so divided,” McQuade says “Political purity never achieved anything. … We’ve got big problems to solve in this country, and instead, we spin our wheels because we want to accuse the other side of all kinds of misconduct, or we want the other side to be unsuccessful. And that is the way disinformation is really harming our democracy.”
While promoting Attack at events across the country, McQuade got the sense that to some extent, her book is preaching to the choir, “but it’s also given me an opportunity to have good discussions with people who might not share my politics but who share a love for the country and our institutions of government,” she says.
Diving deep into a project about how quickly and broadly disinformation spreads online is sobering, to say the least. But McQuade thinks efforts to combat disinformation during this election cycle are helping, and she also places hopes on the young people sitting in her classrooms.
“These are smart, idealistic, hardworking, driven young people who want to make the world a better, more equitable place,” McQuade says. “They’re much more media literate than those of us who are not digital natives. The group that’s coming up next is going to be well equipped to help solve some of these problems.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Sept. 6.
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