When hard words break democracy’s bones

For many years now, the concept of propaganda has appeared to be a kind of sabre-toothed lion in political life. Most of us have heard about it and in school we were taught about its lethal qualities and detrimental impacts. Yet most liberal-minded Europeans and Americans had thought of it to be precisely that – namely, an extinct phenomenon, an accessory of a past and something that is gone for good. But alongside other shots of the past, like antisemitism, Nazi-like ideologies, mass radicalisation against those of other faith and skin colour, propaganda is making a triumphant comeback. And like any other predator in the history of humankind, we better get to know what damage it can cause and how to respond if we are to survive.

Rolling blocks of stone

Jason Stanley, a philosopher from Yale University, provides a very useful toolkit to guide us through the propaganda offensive of the past number of years. Despite his background in philosophy, he draws illustrative examples from numerous fields, ranging from modern history to social psychology, and sometimes going beyond the dimension of social sciences and quoting works of neurobiologists and clinical psychiatrists. His book is a powerful historical account of how propaganda was employed by totalitarian regimes in the past, but it reaches way beyond that. Perhaps this is Stanley’s greatest achievement throughout the book, though for some it might come across as surprising, to say the least.

In his book, simply titled How Propaganda Works, Stanley dedicates a considerable part of it explaining the mechanisms of propaganda and how they function in established liberal democracies – a place where, in line with conventional wisdom, there should be no room for propaganda at all. As Stanley rightly defined it, propaganda is in most cases simply equal to political rhetoric which deprives citizens of their identity as individuals and turns them into, what he calls, “rolling blocks of stone”. In other words, any instance of public policy based upon flawed ideology or belief is, in fact, state-of-the-art propaganda. The Third Reich’s ideology of Arian racial supremacy and the hatred towards Jews is the clearest example.

Stanley highlights less clear examples as well, such as the view that a public education system should be based on the conviction that only a fraction of society deserves, or are apt enough, to undertake liberal education, while the rest needs to pursue vocational training. The author illustrates this point with a speech made by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1913 at a conference of schoolteachers and school headmasters, concluding with a remarkably descriptive phrase that “manual tasks and those requiring muscles are infinite”, so the US cannot afford not to produce a substantial quantity of those using their muscles for the country’s greater good. 

Flawed ideologies

Drawing considerably on the work of Viktor Klemperer, a German Jewish lawyer and a Third Reich survivor, Stanley very early in the book lays out an operational definition of political propaganda. He conceptualises it as the “employment of a political ideal against itself”, ushered by people presenting the subjective value of self-interested goals as objective scientific ideas. As already mentioned, the prime objective for politically driven propaganda is to paralyse the individual citizen as an independent agent and to turn the collective into a uniform mass of obedient social units. In most cases, as Stanley shows with examples from the Soviet Union, pre-War Japan and ancient Greek polis, propaganda is employed at the service of what he defines as flawed ideologies. These, in turn, emerge with societies characterised by unjust conditions.

The unfair distribution of rights, wealth, resources or even mere rhetorical cleavages (such as the perceived intellectual elites in many liberal democracies of today), Stanley argues, could become fertile ground for propaganda. When such conditions occur and propaganda is utilised, it becomes a kind of a vicious circle. Flawed ideologies use propaganda to capitalise on existing inequalities, while effective propaganda exploits and strengthens these ideologies. Interestingly, he attributes a propaganda-like characteristic also to the US civil rights movement. However, as he himself later clarifies, civil rights rhetoric has the potential to repair flawed ideologies and could act as a remedy for whatever is wrong at its core.

It is not too difficult to understand why Stanley devoted a large part of the book to the role of propaganda in totalitarian societies. As many lessons of history have taught us, these were systems where propaganda yielded the deadliest results. Stanley, however, provides a rather unexpected answer as to why this was the case. The most dangerous feature of propaganda in totalitarian regimes, he argues, is that it is not taken seriously by the citizens. It is so all-encompassing and omnipresent that hardly anyone perceives it as anything more than normalised, everyday political discourse. The risk this situation carries is enormous for the stability of any democratic institutional design, mainly because propaganda, by definition, bypasses the will of the nation. As a result, elections soon become obsolete and irrelevant. A lesson to be drawn at this point, and a very relevant one for today, is therefore the danger of normalisation. If a liberal-minded society allows itself to get by with words of aggression and exclusion, this is when it practically lies down the arms of self-defence against an anti-democratic regime to come.

In service of illiberals

The same applies to liberal democracies, though the risk itself appears under a different nature. Stanley writes that the most dangerous propagandistic condition for a democratic society is when citizens do not recognise propaganda for what it is. That was the case with the abovementioned speech by Woodrow Wilson, among others, but also with numerous American public policies targeting African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. How can we therefore tell propaganda from other political messages? Stanley does not really provide an answer to this question, maybe for the very reason that one might not exist at all. Instead, he presents the reader with a plethora of symptoms which should allow us to make a right diagnosis.

One of the key heralds of propaganda at the service of an upcoming non-democratic political force is a gradual introduction of slurs into everyday public language. Slurs are relevant to the emancipation of illiberal norms in a democracy. A clear example of this is the radicalisation of public language taking place in light of the Europe’s migrant crisis. Words that were recently thought of as highly offensive have now made their way into parliamentary debates and political television programmes. Stanley, however, urges us to take a step back and see the process in its nascent phase. Using the example of Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government, he makes the valid point that the breakdown of democracy becomes visible in public discourse when there is an increased frequency of using words that are not slurs per se, but the political context makes them so.

A flagship example of such modality is the usage of the word “welfare” in Anglo-Saxon societies or, to look for more recent instances, the term “migrant”, which has now come to be inherently associated with Islamic extremism and threats to national security. By introducing slurs into the common language and sanctioning those who criticise them, Stanley writes, antidemocratic regimes pave the way to crush the civic foundations of democracy.

Although grim in its predictions and sometimes too complex in his wording, Stanley provides an impressive, holistic overview of what propaganda has been historically and how it mutates in the service of today’s illiberals. As with every enemy, one needs to be able to recognise it first in order to resist it. And for that reason, it is worth reading Stanley’s stellar work on propaganda.

Mateusz Mazzini is a visiting doctoral scholar at the University College of London. He is also a regular contributor to the Polish and international press, including Gazeta Wyborcza, Przegląd, Polityka, Foreign Affairs and Pacific Standard.

Book review, Jason Stanley, propaganda