Lots of people in the US have the idea that there’s something vaguely 1930s about our current politics. And not only in the US, but across much of the world. Mostly these conversations revolve around the potential re-emergence of fascism. But another component is the uses and abuses of propaganda in the Internet age. Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself in her recent book What Happened, are particularly interested in the idea that Russia funds right-wing propaganda to influence politics in the US and elsewhere.

Is there anything to this?

I’ve never published any articles on propaganda, though I’ve developed material on it over the years. And I’ve delivered a few presentations. Mostly notably at the Iowa Lyceum, a summer program on philosophy and critical thinking for pre-college students.

What stands out to me most about propaganda, and what most people misunderstand about it, is the issue of who it targets. You can learn a lot about propaganda by discerning its audience. And so, I’ll say a bit about that.

What is Propaganda?

Here’s a question I’m not going to say a lot about. I get that philosophers are often interested in metaphysical questions. And that’s fine. But I don’t think we have a ton to learn by speculating on the nature of propaganda. In some appropriately broad sense, it’s just using information to support some political cause. Historically, people thought about this as more or less neutral rather than distinctly negative. Everyone knows Nazi Germany had a propaganda ministry, but fewer people know that anarchist Spain did, too. That’s the history. When people talk about propaganda now, they’re usually only talking about information that’s biased, misleading, emotional, or otherwise non-logical.

What’s of more interest is a split between psychological and sociological conceptions of propaganda. We can think about it as something that people do to direct individual beliefs or attitudes. Or we can think about it as serving certain kinds of functions in certain kinds of societies. I think this latter route is more productive. The field of science studies is a great example of where people have put this method to good use. Science studies scholars situate science within technological and historical contexts. Likewise, to understand propaganda, I think we have to situate it within democratic or quasi-democratic, technologically advanced, neoliberal capitalist societies. It does particular things in those societies.

For what it’s worth, Jacques Ellul was probably the first scholar to take this approach. His book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes is worth a read.

Propaganda and the Truth

Philosophers are particularly interested in the truth. Sometimes to the exclusion of other things that are arguably more important. It’s an occupational hazard. We thus tend to care about propaganda insofar as it impacts the truth.

But there’s a question of how it does so. One possibility is that it’s full of lies, distortions, et al. People criticize Trump, for example, because he’s lied 10,000+ times in office. Another possibility is that propaganda operates with a total disregard for the truth. The propagandist indiscriminately cranks out material in favor of their point of view. Maybe they’re telling the truth and maybe they’re lying. They don’t really care which it is.

This kind of disregard for the truth is something we might call ‘bullshit.’ The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a book about it called On Bullshit. Whether Trump is a liar or a bullshitter is itself an interesting issue.

The Targets of Propaganda

But what I’m most interested in is who propaganda is trying to convince, and what it’s trying to convince them to do. It comes in various forms: posters, newspaper articles, videos books, memes, et al. Who’s this stuff aimed at? Through whom does it operate? Answering these questions is key to figuring out how propaganda functions.

Subordinate or Dominant Groups?

One possibility is that propaganda targets members of subordinate groups. The idea here is that it’s a vehicle to drive people to act against their self-interest. We see this sort of reasoning a lot in US politics. Thomas Frank used it in his book on the 2004 election, What’s the Matter with Kansas? We also see it in articles claiming that Trump’s policies hurt Trump voters. In the philosophical literature, Jason Stanley comes closest to holding this view in his book How Propaganda Works. Readers of this blog probably won’t be surprised to discover that I think this view is misguided, given that I’ve written in the past on how people who make claims like this misidentify Trump’s base.

A second possibility is that propaganda targets members of dominant groups, or groups with advantages by race, gender, socioeconomic status, et al. The idea here is that these people are prone to intellectual errors that serve to justify to themselves their privileged position in society. Rich people, for example, might adopt meritocratic propaganda because this ideology makes them believe they earned their wealth in a fair and upright manner.

Standpoint Theory

The philosophical background to this latter possibility is standpoint theory. And I think Rachel McKinnon best explains this in her article, The Epistemology of Propaganda. McKinnon argues that members of subordinate groups are in relatively better position to come to know the falsehood of propaganda that aims to get them to act against their own interests. This is because these members often must struggle against this stuff to get along in daily life. And so, she gives us good reasons to reject the first possibility. It’s less clear whether she accepts or rejects the second.

I’ll say a bit more about this below, but I think both possibilities stem from the wrong questions. What’s important is who has the power to act. And this varies quite a bit from one context to the next. And so, I don’t think there’s any set group here, though, for various reasons, dominant groups are more likely than subordinate groups to be the target most of the time.

Who Has the Power to Act?

Here’s what I think is going on. Propaganda’s target is highly contextual. If we’re talking about political propaganda, it’s almost certainly voters. And it’s probably particular types of voters, e.g., white voters, black voters, religious conservatives, etc. If we’re talking about advertising, it’s probably people with the money and cultural background the company wants to buy the product. And if we’re talking about memes, it’s probably the people familiar with the cultural themes the meme utilizes.

Here are the questions to ask: Who’s producing the material? Where did they publish it? What do they want the viewers to do? Which viewers have the power to do those things?

Those latter people, the people with the power to act, are the targets. And, again, this is highly contextual. If we’re talking about racist videos on the Internet, the target is probably white power groups and/or whites harboring racist attitudes. But if we’re talking about an editorial in the New York Times, the target is probably relatively wealthy, college-educated people with resources. And, finally, if we’re talking about Teen Vogue, the target is probably relatively wealthy young women.

This is broadly similar to what I’ve had to say about pornography in the past. In both cases, it’s about social impact through interaction with different kinds of audiences.

The Manufacture of Consent

I’ll close with a references to what is, I think, one of the best applications of the study of propaganda. I’m talking, of course, about Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent. Their thesis, based in part on a historical reference to Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, is that mass media manipulates public opinion through certain filters. They call it the propaganda model.

This takes us full circle back to the sociological study of propaganda. To get at what’s going on, I think we have to look at the technological manifestations of propaganda in the contemporary world. The Internet enabled much more specific targeting of material, and social media and social chat apps take this a step further. This makes studying propaganda much more complicated than it was 30 years ago. And even 30 years ago, it was much more complicated than studying propaganda in, say, the Roman Empire.

With these complications comes, to some degree, the breakdown of the Herman and Chomsky model. I mean, it still more or less works. But as media are increasingly fragmented, the details get much messier.