Noam Chomsky has said that propaganda is to democracy as violence is to dictatorship. Democratic nations need propaganda much more than dictatorships do. That is because in an authoritarian society a critic can be silenced with little effort through torture or murder. Because democratic societies have free speech, their economic and political systems are vulnerable to public opinion. It is for this reason that propaganda is so essential to preserving private power concentration in societies like ours. The public is a threat to power. Therefore, the public must be indoctrinated with values that promote and protect the existing, capitalist power structure. While it’s possible for the public to survive without capitalism, capitalism wouldn’t survive without public support.
The power of propaganda was first grasped after World War I. The American public was not interested in joining that war. In fact, Woodrow Wilson was reelected partly on the strength of his slogan, “He kept us out of war!” To get the mass population on board a Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, was formed to change the public’s attitude. Leading figures in American public relations Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann used all of their skills to turn public opinion around. Bernays later bragged about how people would swallow the tall tales he helped make up about bloodthirsty Germans, marveling “The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed.” It didn’t take long for the business class to recognize propaganda's potential. They wondered if it would be possible to turn worker opinions around in the same way. Decades later Bernays wrote that business “realized that the public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and the same methods could do the job.”
What were those methods? Alex Carey makes it clear in his book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. According to Carey, creating effective propaganda is simply a matter of manipulating emotionally charged symbols or ideas. Instead of guilt by association it’s something more like pride by association. The trick is to associate the capitalist free-enterprise system with the things American people love like loyalty, patriotism, and freedom. Business wins the propaganda war by conflating the American Dream with sacred symbols like the Statue of Liberty, the flag, American individualism, and democracy. Propaganda helps create an imaginary union of private profits with the public’s wellbeing in people’s minds. Things that threaten business profits like regulation, taxation, liberalism, or communism are smeared with profane, negative imagery. Carey writes,
“By associating welfare provisions and other (selected) government interventions with Socialism/Communism and conversely the Free Enterprise System with Loyalty, Patriotism, Freedom, the American Dream, the American Way of Life, propagandists are doing no more than manipulating appropriate Satanic and Sacred symbols.”
The idea is simple, everything that helps business is associated with the emotionally charged things that we love about America. Everything that could successfully challenge the stranglehold business has on our society, like unions or active government oversight, is villainized as tyrannical, oppressive, and so subversive that it threatens everything we love. Communism is, of course, the biggest of big bads in this century-long propaganda campaign.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that a huge source of the strength and power of business and the rich is the state support they get from our government. If and when business or the rich should lose that support, if government isn’t there to back them up and fight for their needs instead of ours, the rich can be as weak and helpless as a newborn kitten. If propaganda is all they have, it’s possible to ignore it or even laugh at it. Our American ancestors, the ones who survived the Great Depression, had some really amazing armor protecting them from the propaganda of the rich and business. That armor was their own lived experience. Our grandparents and great-grandparents could see with their own eyes the difference between their interests and the interests of the elite classes. They knew that there was no shared benefit between the stockholders of U.S. Steel or Standard Oil or any bank and themselves. They could see from their own lives that helping the rich did nothing for the public. This is the strongest armor that exists. And if you’re living in America today, you may possess that armor yourself. If you lived through the financial collapse of 2008 or the Covid-19 pandemic, you probably have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about. Propaganda doesn’t have to work on us. It’s possible to become resilient to it or even ignore it entirely as our ancestors once did.
In my next series I will take a deeper look at propaganda, how it is used to support capitalism and negate support for anything that challenges capitalism... especially communism.
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