As it turns out, it was an American, Edward Bernays, who wrote the playbook that Joseph Goebbels cribbed while serving as Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. Nearly a century later, propaganda still reigns supreme, but it now comes in two flavors: Hard propaganda is propaganda that is deemed as such by the dominant culture. Goebbels’ Nazi media campaign is an example of hard propaganda — it is out there for all to see. Soft propaganda, on the other hand, is those myths and narratives which are smuggled into the culture as the way things are. These are the entrenched beliefs of the professional, academic, and media elite, and they often pass for Truth. Russian interference in the 2016 election constitutes soft propaganda, as many credentialed experts in media, the university, and the judiciary pushed the line that Russia/Putin/The Kremlin gifted Trump his victory, despite overwhelming proof that this wasn’t the case. To apply this principle further, Donald Trump exists to hide the fact that the whole American political establishment is venal, corrupt, and insincere.
While it is accepted by the majority of the American left that the GOP relies on nativist propaganda to appeal to its base, Democratic voters are often unwilling to interrogate the DNC’s complicity in similar techniques. As mentioned earlier, because Democratic Party symbols and aesthetics are in tune with the current cultural and bureaucratic apparatuses, DNC propaganda does not come off as propaganda; it comes off as truth — and not only to Party members, but to the greater public at large. This is partly because, in recent memory, Democrats have been able to offer social and economic concessions, however scant, to its voter base, so pro-DNC propaganda was perhaps once valid, thus not seeming like propaganda at all. But what happens when the DNC, which now has corporate fundraising parity with the GOP, becomes wholly unable to offer material relief to the masses?
A couple months ago, LA Chargers running back Justin Jackson went on The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss a Twitter back-and-forth that the former had with AOC, regarding the forcing of a floor vote for Medicare For All. Jackson implored AOC and the Squad to withhold their votes for House Speaker Pelosi’s reelection unless Medicare For All be brought to a vote. AOC, who no less than two and a half years ago, ran for Congress on that same platform, heel-turned, claiming that the idea was untenable, given that “the Dem votes aren’t there yet,” and instead asked him to push for things that “*can* happen,” like a $15 minimum wage, which turned out to be one of Biden’s platforms anyway. As people were starting to wise up to what was happening, the push for a second Trump impeachment, this time for inciting the Capitol riot, took center stage, and AOC, responding to a question about the vote’s purpose, replied that “Sometimes it’s to get members on the record, so [people] can’t make excuses later.” This is the exact reason why Dore and Jackson wanted a vote forced — so that those Democrats voting against this bill would be revealed for who they are: enemies of the working class. AOC, who is beholden to the DNC, could not let that happen, which makes clear her giddiness to move forward with Trump’s second impeachment, a symbolic act encapsulating what the Democratic Party deals best in: illusions.
“The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth,” writes Chris Hedges, who likely would have called the Capitol incident a pseudo-event, a phrase coined by American historian Daniel Boorstin:
“Pseudo-events create their own semblance of reality…They are convincing enough and appear real enough to manufacture their own facts. The use of pseudo-events to persuade rather than overly brainwash renders millions of us unable to see or question the structures and systems that are impoverishing us and in some cases destroying our lives.”
This logic explains the public’s readiness to label the Capitol Event an “insurrection,” despite the fact that very few people using this phrase were at the Capitol and were directly threatened by these people. In reality (insofar as it exists), the Capitol Event was a widely syndicated and reported-upon expression of rage by a tiny segment of the population whose anger at left neoliberal politicians had been misdirected. The pseudo-event also explains the futility that goes into deciding whether or not AOC & co’s responses to the Capitol event were real or fake. They are real insofar as the Capitol event is real. That reality, which unfolded for most of us on television screens and Twitter feeds, better resembles hyperreality. Hyperreality, a concept espoused by Jean Baudrillard, refers to a media-simulated copy of reality that references but ultimately displaces access to the real. Baudrillard, in the early 1990s, was hired by a French newspaper to cover the Gulf War, and instead of going to the Persian Gulf, he stayed in his flat in Paris and covered the war through the events that unfolded on CNN. It is on the television, he believed, where the public would be made conscious of the war’s events, nevermind how true or fabricated the televised stories were. Thus, it is useless to debate the validity of the emotional expressions of politicians. However, it is useful to ask in what ways can those emotions be repurposed for political ends. If we have learned anything from the Iraq War, it is that human responses are consistently warped in order to manufacture consent for abuses of power that might otherwise be opposed by the public.
In a mass telecommunications culture, politicians seem more real than real, and that is because they are. They appear as friends, mentors, idols, and lovers — or antagonists worthy of our daily ire. At no point, however, do they remain for us anything other than an agglomeration of images and signs, blinking back to us a world built in the service of the economy. As our subjectivities approach a dizzying level of sameness, our inability to distinguish enemy from friend, paired with our inability to distinguish what is real from what seems real, disorients and confuses us, and this confusion makes us easier to control. We have reached such a cultural nadir that TIME Magazine can openly brag about “a well-funded cabal of powerful people [working on behalf of the DNC]” coming together to “fortify” the election. Of course, this coordinated effort “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, and control the flow of information” was in the service of “stopping fascism,” so it’s all well and good. However, one must wonder if the spectre of fascism exists to hide the reality of an extant fascism that cloaks itself in the language of democracy. Of course, if this fascism already exists (and it does), how would we even be able to tell?
