How Propaganda Works
Demagogic speech does not just occur under the Nazis. Even those of us who live in states guided by liberal democratic ideals are all familiar with the confusing effects of propaganda. In a recent article in the popular press, Jonathan Chait writes about the phenomenon with respect to political discourse in the United States of America. Chait explains the recent history of Republican Party propagandists, who explicitly set out to connect conservative vocabulary and ideals with implicitly racist messages, so-called dog whistles. As a result of this effort, when conservatives assert their beliefs in ordinary discussion they are invariably accused of racism by liberals. Chait betrays understandable perplexity when he writes: Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism.... Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane ... advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.
Chait rightly points out the efforts of propagandists to tie the language of poverty and aid to the supposed inferiority of American citizens of African descent have made democratic deliberation about how to handle poverty impossible. He expresses befuddlement about how that happened, and cannot explain the rationality of the charges of racism that inevitably emerge from attempts at deliberation of this sort. Chait is drawing our attention to the effects of propaganda on democratic deliberation. But Chait lacks the theoretical apparatus to explain it. The challenge facing the task of explaining how propaganda undermines democratic deliberation is to provide the relevant theoretical apparatus that lets us understand individual cases, such as this example.
The argument is as follows. A certain form of propaganda, associated with demagogues, poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. The nature of liberal democracy prevents propagandistic statements from being banned, since among the liberties it permits is the freedom of speech. But since humans have characteristic rational weaknesses and are susceptible to flattery and manipulation, allowing propaganda has a high likelihood of leading to tyranny, and hence to the end of liberal democracy.
To label something as “applied” in philosophy is to marginalize its study. Ethics is “pure” philosophy; applied ethics is “impure” philosophy, fit for those who cannot absorb the discipline in its pure form.
Charles Mills has developed this point into an objection to the very methodology of ideal theory:
But it is a not uncommon view in political and social science that the complexities of administration make democratic accountability too difficult to be realistically managed by a society substantively guided by democratic norms.
The liberty granted by democracy gives tyrants the power of illusion over the masses. Democracy suffers from “an excess of liberty” that “seems destined to end up in slavery” (564a).
In book 1 of The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau poses a question: “Is a method of associating discoverable, which will defend and protect, with all the collective might, the person and property of each associate, and in virtue of which each associate, though he becomes a member of the group, nevertheless obeys himself, and remains as free as before?” Rousseau’s solution is the social contract. There is a tacit agreement between members of a civil society to place themselves under the same laws, which “place the same burden on everybody.” What results is a “collective moral body,” which Rousseau calls a Sovereign Power. The sovereign is a state that “consists exclusively of the individuals who are its members” and hence “has no interest that goes against theirs, and cannot possibly have such an interest.”9 Rousseau calls the freedom humans have in the state of nature natural liberty. Natural liberty, for Rousseau, is a person’s “unlimited right to anything that [she] is tempted by and can get.” The problem Rousseau seeks to answer is how, in civil society, humans can remain free, despite losing their natural liberty.10 Rousseau’s solution is to motivate a distinct kind of liberty. Natural liberty, for Rousseau, is more often than not mere “motivation by sheer apatite.” Genuine liberty is, for Rousseau, different than this; it is what he calls civil liberty. By being a citizen in a sovereign power, one gains civil liberty. It is “obedience to self-imposed law,” of the…
About the method of deliberation, Rousseau writes, “Men who are simple and upright are hard to deceive.”12 But Rousseau is clear about the risks to a Sovereign Power: “If ... debates drag themselves out, if counsels are divided, if voices are raised, this heralds the ascendancy of private interests and the decline of the state.”13 A mark of the declining state is when “the people, swayed by intimidation or flattery, now acts by acclamation rather than by casting votes; it has ceased to deliberate, and either worships or damns.”14
Demagogic propaganda, in the form of “intimidation or flattery,” leads to acclamation rather than “casting votes.” This is a classic statement of the problem propaganda poses for democracy.15
Huntington’s suggestion for handling the “excess of democracy” in the 1960s is to employ the vocabulary of scientific expertise in a political way, in effect using epistemic ideals as forms of coercion.
The chapter is structured around arguments against two claims about the nature of propaganda, which one might be tempted initially to adopt. The first claim about propaganda is that a propagandistic claim must be false. The second claim about propaganda is that a propagandistic claim must be made insincerely
It will turn out that, given the relation between ideology and propaganda, it will often not be clear at the time when a particular contribution to public debate is propaganda.
Charges of propaganda, and even demagoguery, will therefore invariably be political.
“There are Muslims among us.” The assertion is true; there are many Muslims in the United States. But the claim is clearly some kind of warning. The speaker is raising the presence of Muslims to the attention of his audience to sow fear about Muslims. Therefore, even demagogic claims can be true.
Fourth, as will also emerge, too many utterances at least indirectly convey something false. So the falsity condition does not really explain what is distinctive about propaganda.
in the marginThis is weak and dumb
Jews and “maggots in a rotting corpse” is propaganda in this sense, then by definition Hitler didn’t believe that the analogy was a good one (since, by definition, he would have been engaged in deceit, that is, making an analogy he believed to be poor).
in the marginLikke a dog vs like a puppy. Both analogies. Neither poor
In his book The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann writes, Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform. The making of one general will out of multitude of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery, as so many social philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders, politicians and steering committees. It consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.19
Propaganda is manipulation of the rational will to close off debate.22 This is what I will call the classical sense of propaganda.
Propaganda is speech that irrationally closes off certain options that should be considered. This is related to the classical sense of propaganda, but does not require as a goal immediate action. Action could be reached by several steps of propaganda, in the sense of biased speech. I shall call this propaganda as biased speech.
It is not atypical to redefine “democracy” so that it does not include equal respect, but rather market efficiency. It
But I speculate that it is the propagandistic use of the liberal democratic vocabulary that is responsible for many cases in which we do not notice gaps between ideals and reality.
Propaganda in the sense of this book essentially exploits an ideal.
The essence of political propaganda on my approach is that it is a kind of speech that fundamentally involves political, economic, aesthetic, or rational ideals, mobilized for a political purpose.
Propaganda is in the service of either supporting or eroding ideals.
Undermining Propaganda:
in the marginNegative feedback biochemistry
It does so not by directly providing a reason that increases the probability of the truth or virtue of the political ideal. It does so indirectly by seeking to overload various affective capacities, such as nostalgia, sentiment, or fear.
These emotional effects can lead to the discovery of reasons, reasons that in turn will support the political ideal in a characteristically rational way.
in the marginExistence precedes essence
Vehicle of Propaganda: An institution that represents itself as defined by a certain political ideal, yet whose practice tends to undermine the realization of that ideal.
Advertising: A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, but in the service of a goal that is irrelevant to those very ideals.
In the Kantian sense, propaganda, regardless of goals, is not morally acceptable. The ethical basis of Kantian philosophy has an undeniable purchase on our intuitive moral judgments, and this is no doubt the source of the sense that propaganda, regardless of its goal, is morally problematic.
So, for example, Black refusal to take menial jobs is not a form of deviant “laziness,” but a rejection of an unjust social order.
The clearest possible example of propaganda is therefore the use of ideals like “one man, one vote,” together with the appeal to voter fraud, to motivate restrictive voter ID laws.
Undermining Demagoguery: A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of a worthy political, economic, or rational ideal, but is in the service of a goal that tends to undermine that very ideal.46
that the political ideal should be reinterpreted to be consistent with the desired goal. If a political ideal must be reinterpreted to fit the goal that it is being used to advance, what that simply means is that the goal is not consistent with the original meaning of the political ideal.
Accusations of propaganda will therefore often be sincerely viewed as politically motivated.
The goal of the introduction of the expression “job creator” was to defend cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans. The expression appeals to the economic ideal of a thriving economy for all citizens. The reason it is effective is because of the widely held belief that the wealthy use their money to start small businesses.
Structural features of our society might prevent us from accessing the facts that would help us determine whether or not an accusation of propaganda is true. This limits the political usefulness of the characterization of propaganda I provide, but it does not eliminate it.
Insofar as the facts are under dispute, so too will be many claims about what falls under the category of propaganda. Accusations of demagoguery in particular will invariably be political, because many people with flawed ideologies do not accept that their ideologies are flawed. Some charges of demagoguery will be intentionally strategic, and others will be taken to be intentionally strategic, even when they are not.
An example of nondemagogic propaganda of this latter sort is explicitly nationalist rhetoric in the service of helping the physical environment of the country. A representation of the United States as the most physically beautiful country in the world is an expression of nationalist political ideals. A representation that elicits feelings of nostalgia for the land, with the goal of motivating an audience to protect its natural resources, is propaganda.
I may firmly believe the doctrines of my religious cult, which maintain that everyone not in the cult will burn in the lake of fire forever. On this basis, I may kidnap your children, on the grounds that it is the most reasonable thing to do for their overall welfare. But kidnapping your children is not consistent with the ideal of the welfare of children. Only the flawed ideology of my religious cult leads me to believe that it is.
Because of one’s own political participation in the formation of the policy, abiding by that policy is not a genuine sacrifice of liberty.
In the introduction, we saw that propaganda poses a special problem for democratic states. Reflecting on the fact that democratic ideals centrally include ideals governing political speech, we can explain this. Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic. It is antidemocratic because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation. Such propaganda is demagoguery. In a democracy, even if one’s goal is laudable, it is still impermissible to engage in demagoguery. It is impermissible because it is illiberal; though it may serve a goal beneficial in some way to society, it threatens the democratic status of that society. The danger, as we saw in the first chapter, is that deliberation will then be replaced by “acclamation,” in which case, as Rousseau warned, citizens should not be considered as voting at all.
On Aristotle’s view, one’s true desires are the ones one arrives at via a process of deliberation with one’s fellow citizens in the public square. On this conception, it is in following policies mutually agreed upon by a deliberating body of citizens that one is actually following the path of liberty.
It is because of their different conceptions of democracy that Plato concluded that it was the least stable political system and Aristotle concluded that it was the most stable political system.
A norm of impartiality demands that the force of the reasons offered, and policies proposed, is not perspective-dependent. If someone is offering impartial reasons, their reasons “must be grounded in something that is independent of their stance, namely what is the case believer-neutrally.”13 This is the standpoint of the impartial observer. According to the ideal of impartiality, the claims politicians make in political debate must be from the standpoint of the impartial observer.
If theoretical rationality is the normative ideal of public reason, then one paradigm class of cases of propaganda in a democracy will be uses of language that are masked as objective but that have a polemical effect. They have the effect of appeals to passions to cut off rational debate, in many cases without making a rational contribution to it.
There, Rawls argues that the correct way to establish the principles of justice for a society is by imagining oneself into an “original position,” where one does not know one’s place in society, one’s race or religion, or even one’s intellectual and physical capacities. The laws governing the society will be the laws agreed upon by agents who are fully practically rational and have imagined themselves into “the original position.”
in the marginVeil of ignorance
The impartialist conception of public reason forces the elimination of any claim that has its source in self-interest that does not contribute to impartial reasons. And that is the right result, because claims that have their source in self-interest and are not useful from an impartial standpoint are paradigmatically the kinds of claims made in illegitimate attempts to gain power for a particular interest group.
Information about the self-interest of various parties is often indirectly relevant to debates about policy. So expressions of self-interest can be legitimate in political discussion, even if impartiality is the norm of public reason.
It is because those who created the laws did not have empathy for some of those subject to them, namely, their Black fellow citizens. The lack of empathy meant that the laws were crafted in such a way that did not reflect respect for the viewpoints of Black citizens;
benevolently paternalistic society is one in which the policymakers have empathy with those who are subject to the policies, but do not treat them with equal respect. The difference between benevolent paternalism and a democratic culture is indicated by Du Bois’s comments about the need in a free democratic society to take into account the “respectful presentation” of the perspective of alternative
She recommends, in making assertions that apply to everyone, the “safeguard” of changing “you” into “I.” That way, one can more easily see that the policy one is prescribing to others is a reasonable one. Stebbing is thereby suggesting that there is a norm of equality to public discourse. It is this that distinguishes mere paternalism from democracy.
The difference between benevolent paternalism and a democratic attitude is that the latter presupposes the regular employment of this sort of imaginative capacity.22
A different strategy is to take cognitive empathy as an affective ideal, which may function to regulate mutual policymaking, without ever being actually embodied, or capable of being embodied, in practice. According to this strategy, the norms of public reason are ideals.
Propaganda exploits all potential norms of public debate, whether they are realizable or not.
Reasonableness requires any contribution to political discussion, for example, in the form of a proposed policy, to be “justifiable” to all of those under whose purview it falls. Regarding a reason one gives as justifiable to another presupposes “taking the role of the other” in some relevant sense.
in the marginavoids defining justity
If I think of our bargain in terms of rational self-interest, then it is rational to offer you $1 a day, knowing that you have no other prospects. But I am clearly not being reasonable. I am not imagining someone in your situation, and then asking what would seem fair from that perspective.
The importance of reasonableness as a norm for public discourse, and empathy as its foundation, is clear from the advice of successful propagandists.
“[p]ersuadables won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Show Empathy for BOTH sides!”
He suggests finding a way to communicate that Abbas “was appointed to his current position by Arafat, which is suspect,” and that he “has denied the Holocaust.” Luntz’s advice for Israel reflects the understanding that reasonableness in negotiations, undergirded by empathy for one’s negotiating partners, is the expected norm of public discourse.
The goal of a democracy should be to allow maximum freedom to develop along an individual path consistently with being reasonable toward one’s fellow citizens. Thus, there must emerge, in a democracy, multiple reasonable full moral conceptions.
On this view, it is not permissible for you to draw on your Christian beliefs in public debate, because, if you are reasonable, you are aware that Christian doctrine is not reasonable from my perspective.
If reasonableness is the central norm governing public debate, paradigm cases of propaganda will be ones that are presented as reasonable, but that subsequently make it more difficult for the participants in the debate to be reasonable. That is, paradigm cases of propaganda will be ones that represent it to be reasonable not to take certain perspectives into account.
A community is reasonable if it is governed by norms of mutual respect and mutual accountability. A community governed by the normative ideal of reasonableness is one in which citizens have mutual respect for everyone else in the community and take their actions to be accountable to everyone else in the community. Possessing such an attitude requires, at least among humans, empathy or the capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes.31 One can therefore expect a characteristic form of propaganda in a liberal democracy to be a claim that is presented as reasonable, but that has the effect of eroding empathy for a targeted group.
Second-personal attitudes thus centrally involve the notions of dignity and respect. If the adoption of second-personal attitudes is a precondition governing public deliberation in public political forums, then speech that is an affront to the dignity of other members of society runs counter to these ideals, and hence is the kind of speech that one expects to find masked paradigmatically by propaganda.
We have seen Du Bois develop the point that overcoming barriers to democracy requires something like rhetoric or propaganda. W.E.B. Du Bois is plausibly taken to be appealing to the need for undermining propaganda, as works that directly address the distorted conception of Black fellow citizens will not sell. But it is also possible to take Du Bois as calling for particularly effective supporting propaganda that reveals Black humanity. This is a part of a classic debate he had during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s with the philosopher Alain Locke.
In this sense, “propaganda” refers to a method of appealing to emotions to increase reasonableness. Locke’s criticism of Du Bois’s call for Black artists to engage in propaganda in this sense is that it places an undue burden on Black artists to advocate for themselves with the dominant white population, which is yet another burden stifling their freedom of expression.
Rogers argues that Du Bois used rhetoric, of whatever kind, to force his audience to be accountable to Black citizens. It induced its audience to recognize their moral obligation to grant equal political participation to a group that had been invisible. The function of the discourse is therefore not to contribute to the rational resolution of a debate, in the sense of deciding the truth or falsity of the claim at issue. Its function is instead to force a reimagination of the presumed boundaries of that concept.36
in the marginPropaganda to force accountability
Du Bois is certainly not in the business of giving a defense of rhetoric based on its motivational powers to circumvent rational debate. Instead, he is, as Melvin Rogers rightly points out, defending the “aspirational” powers of rhetoric. A contribution to a debate can improve the subsequent reasonableness of the debate, even though the contribution itself is not a rational contribution, in the sense that its informational content contributes to the debate’s resolution.
Assuming reasonableness as an ideal governing public speech, aspirational speech in Rogers’s sense is, structurally, precisely the opposite of demagoguery.
in the marginOpposite of demagoguery
The Selma to Montgomery March is a paradigm case of democratically acceptable propaganda: manipulation of the media to draw attention and empathy to the predicament of an otherwise invisible group.
But it is hard to see how deception is involved in these cases. No lying, for example, was involved in either case.
in the marginConflates lying w deception
The other function of ministries of propaganda is to bypass democratic deliberation to elicit support for a policy.
in the marginWhen was this defined
For example, in the first instance, linking Saddam Hussein to international terrorism after the tragedy of 9/11 raised fears that cut off rational debate. But it must be admitted that it is a possible explanation of why it was so simple to raise such fears in the absence of compelling evidence that Iraq was a threat to US security: these fears were embedded within a larger picture that excluded Arab Muslims from a framework of mutual respect.
As John Stuart Mill famously argued, we cannot expect rational deliberation (including about policy) to end in knowledge unless we allow free speech. The case for government openness is also based on the role public reason plays in democratic legitimacy. It is after all not plausible to arrive via deliberation at the best decision even about which representatives to elect without knowing what the government has been up to and what those representatives have done about it.
in the marginFree speach only in terms of governance
You start out in 1954 by saying, “[N-word], [N-word], [N-word].” By 1968 you can’t say “[N-word]”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites...“We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “[N-word], [N-word].”
Lee Atwater’s quotation shows that there was a deliberate attempt to appropriate the language of welfare to convey in a nonobvious way what racial slurs did in 1954. Subsequent research shows that the attempts of Atwater and those before him have been successful.
In this chapter, I have explained the form of propaganda in a democracy. To preserve the character of democratic deliberation, those deliberating in formal and informal debate over policy are subject to a norm of reasonableness, which requires them to take the perspectives of others into account. Characteristically, then, negative propaganda, or propaganda, will take the form of a reasonable proposal, a proposal that seems to take everyone’s perspective into account (for example, by calling attention to a public threat), in the service of a goal that, rationally speaking, erodes reasonableness. Civic rhetoric is an attempt to share the perspective of a group whose perspective has been made invisible, thereby preventing democracy; civic rhetoric is the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.
to take the perspectives of others into account.