Life among the propagandists
by Tom Sullivan
Airmen onboard the USS WASP, via tweet from Vivian Salama, WSJ.
The coming months promise to provide future academics a wealth of dissertation-worthy material in political science, sociology, and psychology. Already awash in propaganda, Americans can expect a gusher of it during the 2020 election season. Just do not ignore it, warns Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, “Call it out. Laugh at it. Recognize it for what it is: a sign not of strength but of fear.”
That is why the president felt compelled to stage a press event last week after news reports he had angrily walked out of a White House meeting with Democratic leaders on infrastructure. To counter the bad press, his team
stepped forward one by one to give their testimonies. Robinson writes, “Oh yes, Mr. President, you were sooooo calm and collected, they told him. I was afraid one of them might call him ‘Dear Leader.’”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in for Lin Biao and the Gang of 13 Angry Democrats (now grown to 18).
Robinson refutes many of Trump’s lies. However, repeating lies in refuting them, messaging experts caution, more firmly roots untruths. But that will not interrupt our reflex for refutation.
Nor will it disrupt the press’ reflex for repeating Trump’s lies. Catherine Rampell observes that Democrats have, in fact, passed a great deal of kitchen table legislation since gaining control of the House. Nonetheless, Trump insists Democrats have done nothing, so focused are they on impeaching him. The press aids him in catapulting the propaganda, Rampell explains, by asking them about impeachment to the exclusion of all else:
The topic dominated Sunday morning political shows this past weekend. In one particularly frustrating exchange, NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to address criticisms that the Democratic Party is too myopically focused on subpoenas and impeachment rather than “kitchen table” issues. He did this, of course, while only asking myopic questions about subpoenas and impeachment, and none about any of those “kitchen table” issues.
We can expect more red-baiting during the 2020 campaign. On the right, red-baiting is a reflex that never goes away. It is now a standard element of Trump stump speeches, Peter Dreier writes at The Nation:
House Republicans have even formed an “Anti-Socialism Caucus,” chaired by Representative Chris Steward of Utah, to “defend individual liberty & free markets and highlight the dark history of socialism.”
The right-wing-media echo chamber has adopted the same tactic, painting all Democrats with the same red brush. “It’s time to rise up and defeat the socialist left,” radio reactionary Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in February, warning that “liberalism is what led to Nazism, that liberalism is what led to the Soviet Union, that liberalism is what led to Cuba.” After Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced in February that she was redistributing her office budget in order to raise the salaries of her lowest-level staffers to $52,000, Fox News host Pete Hegseth described her action as “communism and socialism.”
Fortunately, those not already in the grip of the propagandists are not biting. Americans under 50 tend to associate socialism more “with social equality than with government control over the means of production,” Dreier writes, and with the social democracies of western Europe. That is, with “universal health insurance, childcare, paid family leave and paid vacations, more equality for women, and more progressive taxes and promote less poverty, a higher standard of living for working families, better schools, free universities, a cleaner environment, higher voter turnout, stronger unions, and a much wider safety net.”
The horror.
That horror will not stop Trump and his revanchist followers from preferencing white, democratic socialists from northern Europe over darker-toned immigrants from points south and east, even if equally Christian.
The right is not a no-spin zone but an irony-free one. Early in my tenure here, I wrote about pass-it-on lies, smears , and distortions that circulated among conservatives before they moved into social media:
Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.
Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.