America was palpably vulnerable to Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. We had it coming. As Henry Farrell points out in a brilliant essay, "a loose collective of Russians, with incredibly meager resources, have been working together in a disorganized way to probe American democracy for weaknesses" — and they only succeeded because America was so vulnerable in the first place. Farrell's essay raises many questions, among them how to patch up America's democratic institutions, and not just to prevent this sort of foreign meddling in the future.