Coming back to Stanley’s definition of propaganda, the next important thing he covers is an effort to dispel this idea that propaganda is necessarily insincere. Stanley says the following:
Understanding that propaganda can be sincere is necessary to understand the relation between propaganda and ideology.
There are many examples of propaganda that is inherently insincere, propaganda of the sort that could be characterized as “the product of conscious intentions to deceive by interested parties” (Stanley quotes Rosen with this definition). These are not the focus for Stanley. Instead, he wants to turn our attention to cases where statements are made with sincerity and should still be considered propaganda.
Stanley pushes further on this link between ideology and sincerity when it comes to propaganda:
The genuine problem with the insincerity condition is that it fails to respect the connection between propaganda and ideology. Flawed ideologies characteristically lead one to sincerely hold a belief that is false and that, because of its falsity, disrupts the rational evaluation of a policy proposal; as Rosen notes about Hume’s notion of of irrational belief, a flawed ideological belief leads to “an unwillingness to amend immediate judgment in light of reflection.” Many paradigm demagogic claims are statements sincerely asserted by someone in the grip of false belief caused by a flawed ideology. Presumably, much Nazi propaganda was of this sort.
I want to grab that Rosen quote from the middle there and dissect it a bit, because it puts a tighter focus on an idea I brought up from earlier in the book. It’s this idea that flawed ideologies can become part of someone’s identity, and from there, can result in shutting down rational pathways and closing off any openness to a change of mind. Propaganda becomes the tool that strengthens those ideologies. It does not have to contain the falsehood or come from a place of insincerity - all it has to do is strengthen the hold that flawed ideology has on an individual. This provides us with a good self-test in my opinion. It is not an ironclad self-test to be sure, but it’s a valid gut check. Ask yourself the question: am I willing to change my mind? Am I open to new information changing the judgments I’ve made about specific things or issues? If the answer is no in certain cases, it might be worth taking a look at what it is that you’re holding so tightly to.
Stanley goes on to point out that the real problem in liberal democracies is that most of the time, propaganda occurs masked. There is an assumption, even an outright statement at times, that democracies don’t allow propaganda. This is where the threat really appears for us, propaganda in the US is often not recognized as propaganda at all. The problem we have to untangle is learning to identify the propaganda that lurks in apparently non-propagandistic claims.
From here Stanley states what the focus of his book really is:
This is the species of propaganda that centrally concerns me in this book, the kind that characteristically masks the gap between the given ideal and reality by the propagandistic use of that very ideal. Failures of democracy could be hidden by the propagandistic use of the very vocabulary of liberalism.
More on that later…