In the 20th century, Communist Party propaganda was overwhelming and inspiring, or at least it was meant to be. The future it portrayed was shiny and idealized, a vision of clean factories, abundant produce, and healthy tractor drivers with large muscles and square jaws. The architecture was designed to overpower, the music to intimidate, the public spectacles to awe. In theory, citizens were meant to feel enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. In practice, this kind of propaganda backfired, because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.
A few autocracies still portray themselves to their citizens as model states. The North Koreans continue to hold colossal military parades with elaborate gymnastics displays and huge portraits of their leader, very much in the Stalinist style. But most modern authoritarians have learned from the mistakes of the previous century. Most don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, apathetic and afraid, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade their own people to stay out of politics, and above all to convince them that there is no democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong. The democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.
That’s an excerpt from my most recent Atlantic cover story, The New Propaganda War, which is in turn an excerpt from my new book, Autocracy Inc which will be published in July. In essence, it’s an argument about how and why Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and other states came to repeat and promote one another’s narratives: the stability of autocracy, the degeneracy of democracy. I also talk about how a part of the Republican party has pushed back against the academics and researchers who try to understand these narratives and describe how they spread:
Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.
The whole article is here again: THE NEW PROPAGANDA WAR .
I was very struck, in the days before it finally came out (Atlantic cover stories are finished long before they actually appear online) by how many other stories are now covering some of the same ground. A New York times article recently described how Russia, China and Iran are using the campus protests in the US in their own propaganda and messaging. Catherine Belton at the Washington Post described the specific Russian campaign against President Zelensky, in Ukraine as well as Europe and the U.S. The Economist also ran an interactive article showing how completely false stories about Zelensky’s wife, Olena, were laundered into the mainstream by figures on the American far-right.
We are all accustomed now to these kinds of stories, or at least have been since 2016. Yet there are more of them, not less. And we don’t, as democratic societies, yet talk much about what we should do about it. My book will, I hope, begin that conversation. Stay tuned…
Spot on Anne, the fact that so many Americans today, but also historically, have been wedded to authoritarians who have anything but their interests at heart, is deeply demoralizing, but also an impetus for action. Some of my family and friends might wish I would get off my soap box, but I see things much like you do, we have to speak up for our democracy if we want to keep it, and if we want those who follow us to be able to inherit it. As long as I have breath in my body I'm going to be speaking to those willing to listen. I'm well educated, but at 77 I'm amazed at how much I don't know, so I feel like a sponge sometimes. I'm thrilled to be learning more today than at any time in my past. We can defeat this danger if we stay united and on message, when I look around me I don't see anyone that really wants to live in an authoritarian country, similar to Russia or North Korea, you would have to be insane to wish for that. Thank you for the encouragement you provide.
The Atlantic article's great, Anne.