OF MARTYRS AND ROBOTS: PROPAGANDA AND GROUP IDENTITY

Abstract

1 R O F M A R T Y R S A N D R O B O T S P R O P A G A N D A A N D G R O U P I D E N T I T Y M E G A N H Y S K A A concern with propaganda has animated American liberal discourse in a new way since the run-up to the 2016 election. On virtually any day since at least July 2016, a naive observer set in front of a bank of screens streaming center-left national news coverage might quickly glean the following: that ‘‘propaganda’’ had something to do with illegitimate attempts to influence an electorate, and that standing accused of this illegitimate conduct were both foreign actors (Russia) and domestic ones (broadcasting bodies like Fox and Sinclair, websites like Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Gateway Pundit, and Infowars). Perhaps less obvious is what this observer would conclude concerning why this messaging was supposed to be illegitimate. In some cases, the messaging in question was made possible by breaking the law; illegitimacy here would seem easy to place. Russian interference and misinformation campaigns, for instance, involved the clearly illegal hacking of Democratic National Convention servers. Another of this campaign’s elements, the purchase of targeted ads on Facebook, inhabited murkier legal terrain, though the fallout has seen Facebook investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and served a criminal search warrant by the 2 H Y S K A Y Mueller probe on the strength of suspected elections law violations . Generally though, our observer would surely conclude that an attempt to influence does not need to violate a law to count as propaganda. When the messaging in question is false, and known by its purveyors to be so, this is of course also su≈cient to ground its illegitimacy. But from here, the reasons for regarding some messaging as illegitimate become murky. Many are likely to feel about the illegitimacy distinctive of propaganda as Justice Potter Stewart did about pornography: we don’t have a definition ready at hand but we ‘‘know it when we see it.’’ Those cases of propaganda that we take as paradigmatic tend to work via conspicuous mechanisms: explicit assertion; exaggeration of negative or positive traits in the subject of visual depiction; emotionally evocative slogans. Nazi posters caricature Jews and proclaim that ‘‘Der ist Schuld am Kriege!’’ (The war is his fault). Contemporary pro-natalist campaigns in Italy depict a white, plausibly ethnically Italian woman, one hand on abdomen, one holding an hourglass, and declare, ‘‘La bellezza non ha età, la fertilità sì’’ (Beauty has no age, fertility does). Reconstruction-era ads from the former Confederate states of the United States depict black freedmen indolently consuming the fruits of white laborers’ toil; as sexually aggressing against white women; or as succumbing to lynching at the hands of a Klansman in vaguely GrecoRoman dress. A theory of propaganda necessarily proceeds from examples, both contemporary and historical, whose status as propaganda is agreed upon, and aims to say what these examples have in common . The theory of propaganda embodied by contemporary liberal discourse, working from examples like those listed above, has the following underlying form. First, and most often implicitly, it asserts a norm for the deliberation of political agents; standardly, that agents should be rational, should be independent minded, should be educated and curious, should perhaps take as a premise that others in their political community are entitled to a certain sort of respect. Second, it describes the way that propaganda undermines this state: say, by misinformation, by incitement to cowardice , or by application of strategic pressure to the loaded mousetrap of self-serving bias. O F M A R T Y R S A N D R O B O T S 3 R En route to considering whether something like this account is correct, we might start by considering one fact that any account of propaganda must reflect. This is that propaganda’s mission of belief change has only instrumental value to its wielder. Political belief is simply a more directly manipulable antecedent of political (in)action, which...