More thoughts from Jason Stanley’s “How Propaganda Works”.
Stanley is primarily focused on propaganda in the context of a liberal democracy. Defining that structure is important:
A system is only a democratic system if it places some conception of liberty as its highest value and allows for political equality.
By extension, we can assume that structure exists and have it imperiled by the propaganda itself:
The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality.
Doubling down, Stanley goes on to say that:
masking the undemocratic nature of a state with democratic vocabulary is an existential threat to a democratic regime.
Put differently, propaganda can be used to mask the fact that we’re actively operating in an undemocratic state.
This reflects a lot of our current reality from where I sit.
We’re under the illusion that we have a functioning democracy, but much of what actually goes on is remarkably undemocratic, and the propaganda we’re all swimming in is actively dressing it up as “hey look! This is democracy!”
Some of this comes back to some of what our “democratic republic” promises to fix but fails to deliver on.
More on that later…