The concept of propaganda as distinct from persuasion is a semantic game. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ¨I know it when I see it¨. Propaganda usually amounts to persuasion someone doesn’t like. It is hazily defined as something on its own, and has been used in ways most reasonable people would agree are acceptable. The proper use and misuse of propaganda is how propaganda is used, not in whether to use it. Propaganda becomes more important in modern mass society to coordinate behavior for collective efforts like war and serves to instill certain values in the population. The objectors to propaganda speak of its ill effects on public discourse, therefore it is their responsibility to demonstrate exactly what abuses of propaganda are doing, and who they are harming.
The most common objection to propaganda is that it is dishonest. Propaganda distorts the truth at best and downright lies at worst. Propaganda is seen as a deliberate form of deception, made only for the goals of whoever is behind the propaganda. Scholars identify two basic types of propaganda, white and black propaganda. White propaganda does not hide its source, while black propaganda conceals it. White propaganda then cannot be criticized as inherently deceptive. The source and thereby its intention are clear. Obviously obscuring the source is not the only means to distort the truth. Even with the source revealed, the portrayal of information can be misleading, as in the tactic known as card stacking where certain facts which are contradictory to the message are withheld. The fact of life is that even the honest use certain facts and not others. Not all facts are relevant to a certain case, just because two things happen does not mean there is a connection. The misleading use of certain facts has to be proved since the act of persuasion is one of exclusion.
Critiques over the use of propaganda are mostly concerned about its effects on democratic participation. If the people’s will is the source of government’s legitimacy, propaganda manipulates what the many want for the benefit of the few. On the contrary, the people do not speak with one voice and agree what their interest is. Some level of propaganda is necessary for a free society to function. The greatest problem with public opinion in a democracy is reaching consensus, as public opinion is a cacophony of competing interests. James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #10 that division is ¨sown into the nature of man... zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points¨. Madison’s remedy is to have a democracy of groups which can reach a consensus on behalf of their members. This makes the dilemma of consensus easier by reducing the amount of voting parties, but retains the antagonism of interests by inducing competition into decision making to ensure representation of different groups, like the states through the Senate (originally) and the popular vote through the House. The problem is that groups do not act, their leaders do. Democracy works in the real world paradoxically through elites. It is from this reality that propaganda can be justified as facilitating the public’s choice of democratic elites.
The theory of democratic elitism recognizes that the state is a separate institution from elites in a democratic society. Joseph Schumpeter elaborated democratic elitism in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as ¨that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote¨. Having an electoral system of wide franchise in some fashion divides political power from economic power, when each citizen’s vote is equal. Even a democratic socialist state without external economic elites will have elites because it remains a state. If voters opt for socialist policies, they do not enforce them. If the people enforced every law themselves, it would be a voluntary organization and not a coercive state. To give government the autonomy to work, a socialist state would result in an ever increasing unelected bureaucracy having control over voters lives. Even in socialist states like the USSR the people remained separate from the party apparatus who claimed to be the vanguard of the people. Increasing power to the state and allowing it to act as a state does takes power away from voters, an argument made by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and put pithily by Winston Churchill as a socialist state “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo”. The existence of the state presupposes the existence of an elite as groups act in politics by accepting leadership.
Given that democracy is a competition over which elite will rule over citizens, it is the members of the elite who run for office who must use propaganda to present the clearest alternatives to voters. The separation of political power into the hands of voting individuals means that a political leader’s job is not to create opinions, but to sell them. Public opinion is a blessing for the various opinions emerging from public discourse, with the leader as the midwife. This conundrum was realized by Woodrow Wilson as a young scholar in his writings on the American system of separation of powers. To bring cohesiveness to American democracy while accepting the reality of its constitutional structure, he proposed the idea of rhetorical leadership. The square of public debate is outside the realm of politics, politics is about action. The politician’s job is to make these inchoate ideas comprehensible to voters. In Leaders of Men Wilson described this ideal of leadership as ¨The men who act stand nearer to the mass of men than do the men who write; and it is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds¨. The role of a politician is to mold public opinion, to persuade them that their program is in their best interest. It is not manipulation of public opinion because without leadership there is no public opinion. It is a convoluted mess of competing interests. Propaganda can only sell what others are willing to buy, in the absence of their desire or ability to run for office. ¨The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put...men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader¨.
Propaganda is not good or bad in itself, it is really just persuasion writ large. It is called into use in the era of mass communication and the leveling of political legitimacy. The fundamental reality of power remains intact underneath. Propaganda in democracy is persuasion of how power will be used.
(From a paper I wrote for a media & propaganda class)
No comments:
Post a Comment