The Political Economy of Government Propaganda
THE IDEAL PROTECTIVE STATE
To understand a world with government-produced propaganda, we first consider a hypothetical situation where it does not exist. To do so, we begin with a baseline model of an ideal protective state. In this model, the property rights of citizens are well defined, and the purpose of the government is to protect and enforce these rights from internal and external threats.1 This includes protection from domestic and external threats to individual rights through the operation of police, courts, and the national security state, which includes the military. This ideal model is also characterized by the existence of effective mechanisms allowing citizens to directly monitor, reward, or punish politicians for their actions.2
This first-best scenario is representative of how many economists, and social scientists more broadly, model the activities of democratic states, especially as it pertains to matters of national security. Discussing how economists model and study government military and defense activities, J. Paul Dunne notes that “the neoclassical approach to military expenditure . . . is based on the notion of a state with a well-defined social welfare function, reflecting some form of social democratic consensus, recognizing some well-defined national interest, and threatened by some real or apparent potential enemy.”3
In this ideal model, elected politicians engage in protective activities only when it is in the interests of citizens. In doing so, elected officials employ, monitor, and reward or punish bureaucrats who serve as value-added inputs in the productive process of protecting citizens’ person and property. There is no space for waste, fraud, corruption, or abuses of power because political actors are assumed to be ideal civil servants solely focused on advancing society’s welfare. Further, in this first-best situation, it is assumed that the relevant information about the activities of the protective state is available to citizens, meaning that there is symmetric information between political actors and the citizenry. Citizens know what political actors are doing, and political actors know that citizens have this information. In addition to having access to the necessary information to monitor political actors, the ideal model assumes that people also have access to effective mechanisms to punish politicians by removing them from office if they fail to act to advance citizen interests.
Within the model of the ideal protective state, there is no room for political opportunism. Instead, politicians act in the public interest because, in the presence of symmetric information and effective punishment mechanisms, any deviations from advancing the public welfare will result in discipline by well-informed and motivated voters. This means that within the parameters of the ideal-state model, there is no government-produced propaganda because there is no space for deception due to the manipulation or concealment of information by politicians. Political actors do not need to persuade citizens through propaganda because they are already doing those activities—and only those activities—that advance social welfare.
Unfortunately, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that real-world democratic politics does not comport with the ideal baseline model presented above. In stark contrast, actual democratic politics is characterized by significant deviations from these ideal conditions, creating space for political opportunism. This space is especially expansive in matters of foreign affairs and national security because these state activities are highly centralized and a monopoly over information is tightly maintained by those in power. This allows political actors to expand their influence and power over citizens through the design and dissemination of propaganda. Instead of citizens being the main driver in political matters, members of the state become the driving force in politics.
DEVIATING FROM THE IDEAL: THE REALITIES OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
The ideal model of the protective state assumes that political representatives have strong incentives to engage in activities producing outcomes aligning with the interests of citizens. In reality, this incentive is much weaker than suggested by the first-best model.4 To see why, consider the well-known principal-agent problem.5 This problem arises when ownership of an asset is separated from control of the asset. The principals, or owners, hire agents to represent their interests and manage their property. In an ideal situation, where incentives are perfectly aligned, the agents would appropriately represent the interests of the principal by being good stewards over their property.
A principal-agent problem emerges, however, when there are deviations from this ideal because agents may engage in opportunistic behaviors and exploit the principals rather than faithfully serve their interests. These types of problems occur frequently in a number of contexts. Publicly traded companies, for instance, are owned by shareholders who must rely on those hired to manage the firm to serve their interests. A lawyer hired by the firm to represent its interests (the “agent”) may encourage additional legal procedures to increase their income even though it may not be in the best interest of their client (the “principal”). Similar problems potentially exist in medical situations between doctors and their patients.
Principal-agent problems also exist in democratic politics in which citizens are the principals and political actors—both elected and appointed—are the agents who are supposed to represent the interests of citizens. The problem can be mitigated if citizens have the incentive to acquire information and to act on that information to reward or punish their representatives. This, of course, assumes transparency—that the relevant information is available to principals if they choose to obtain it—and that effective punishment and reward mechanisms exist to appropriately incentivize agents. In practice, however, these conditions often fail to hold.
The reasons are provided by public choice economics—principal-agent interactions under democracy are characterized by the limited effectiveness of voting, rationally ignorant voters, vote-seeking politicians, special-interest groups, and a deep state that is beyond electoral accountability. These features of democratic politics weaken, if not entirely thwart, the potentially incentive-aligning features of democracy. A deeper consideration of the various groups of actors in democratic politics and the incentives they face will make the frictions, and the resulting space for propaganda, clear.
The Limits of the Voting Booth
In democratic politics, voting is seen as a central check on elected officials. The logic is simple. If those in office do not perform as voters expect, they can punish the official by electing someone else at the next election. There are two key factors that weaken the effectiveness of the voting booth as a disciplinary device and increase the payoff to state-produced propaganda.6
The first deals with the information possessed by voters. In order to solve the principal-agent problem in democratic politics, citizens must have the incentive to acquire the information necessary to monitor, reward, and punish elected officials. Unfortunately, this incentive is often weak. Since the chances of any one vote influencing the outcome of a federal election in a population the size of the United States are minuscule, citizens tend to remain rationally ignorant, or uninformed, of many of the behaviors of elected politicians.7 This is because individual voters lack the incentive to gather the appropriate information to make highly informed choices about their representatives.8
This does not mean that voters are entirely ignorant of all aspects of politics, but rather that their incentive to obtain detailed information is often weak. American voters probably know that their government is engaged in a global “war on terror,” but they are unlikely to know the specific details regarding the nuances of that war. Fully aware that voters are not attuned to the subtleties and details of foreign policy, political actors can use propaganda to influence what information is available to voters and how that information is framed. In the context of rational ignorance, the purpose of propaganda is to create systematic bias among voters in favor of the desired government policy by attempting to influence recipients to over- or underestimate certain details and likelihoods to advance the goals of the propagandists.9
The second factor is the substantial time between elections for federal offices (president, vice president, U.S. Congress). Each U.S. voter, over each six-year period, has a maximum of nine votes over four national elections.10 The time between regular elections has two consequences.
First, even if voters identify clear links between specific elected officials and abuses of power, they might have to wait years to exert recourse for that behavior. Further complicating the situation is that in many cases it is difficult if not impossible for voters to identify a clear connection between a specific elected official and opportunistic behaviors given the internal complexities of the American government. Are failures in foreign policy due to the president, to members of Congress (and, if so, which ones), to some confounding factor outside of their control, or to some combination?
Second, assuming that voters are able to anticipate potential abuses of power or identify actual abuses of power by the time elections do arrive, it may be difficult if not impossible to undo the undesirable outcomes created by narrow self-interest in the interim period.11 There was no way for voters who selected George W. Bush as the forty-third president of the United States during the 2000 presidential election to anticipate the September 11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response, which included the use of widespread surveillance and torture. Voting during the 2000 election cycle could not serve as feedback regarding these unanticipated future activities, and there was no way for citizens to provide feedback through direct voting until the next presidential election in 2004.12
Even then, the various government activities that constitute the very broad and complex war on terror could not simply be undone if voters had so desired. Changes to the national security apparatus and the social and political fabric of domestic life tend to be sticky and hard to reverse.13 The implication is that even if voting punishes a specific politician, it is an ineffective way to undo the harm caused by that politician’s opportunism.14 Various precedents and concrete changes to institutions will remain even if misbehaving politicians are removed from office.
Together, these factors weaken the voting booth as a disciplinary device to check undesirable behaviors by elected officials and the perverse consequences on domestic life. The result is that political leaders have space to pursue their narrow self-interest, including the use of propaganda to achieve their goals. Propaganda influences what voters know and how they perceive that information when making voting decisions. Moreover, given the substantial time between elections, voters are limited in their ability to punish or reverse the course set by those currently wielding political power.
A special-interest group refers to a collection of voters who join together in the pursuit of a common cause. In contrast to individual voters, who often have an incentive to remain uninformed about the nuances of national security, special-interest groups have strong incentives to invest in collecting information regarding policies and the behavior of elected officials that affect their members. By banding together around a common cause, special interests are able to leverage their collective political power by exchanging their support—campaign contributions, endorsement, and block of votes—for policies and political favors that benefit their members.15
Special-interest groups pose a dilemma for the ideal model of democratic politics because they have the potential to influence policy to concentrate benefits on their members while dispersing costs across a large number of individual voters. This flies in the face of the conventional view that democratic politics is “for the people,” which is meant to suggest that democratic outcomes advance some notion of the “national interest.” In stark contrast, the logic of special-interest groups suggests that policies often reflect the interests of a small group of voters at the expense of the broader populace. The point is not that special interests have unilateral power to shape all policies as desired but rather that in democratic politics there are numerous margins where interest groups can influence policies in a way that narrowly directs benefits to group members while dispersing costs on the broader populace.
Examples of special interests abound in the national security state. Perhaps the most well known is the “military-industrial-congressional complex” (MICC), which refers to the interlinkages between the government’s military apparatus, Congress, and private industry.16 These connections create room for members of the private sector to influence and shape the government’s security and military policies, which are supposed to align with and advance the interests of the populace.
One specific manifestation of the logic of special interests is what political scientist John Mueller refers to as the “terrorism industry,” which includes members of the government, private industry, and the media involved in shaping the U.S. government’s terrorism policy.17 In order to secure resources, the members of the terrorism industry have the incentive to attempt to shape public opinion and government policy to inflate national security threats relative to their actual potential for harm. Where effective, this strategy results in a wedge between the policies adopted and the realities regarding actual threats.
In general, the existence of special interests creates room for political opportunism because political actors can cater to interest groups at the expense of the broader citizenry, which lacks the incentive to be informed of specific policies and the activities of special interests. As political scientist Murray Edelman notes, “not only does systematic research suggest that the most cherished forms of popular participation in government are largely symbolic, but also that many public programs universally taught and believed to benefit a mass public in fact benefit relatively small groups.”18 Propaganda is a crucial input into this process because it frames policies as serving “the nation” while, in reality, they benefit only a small segment of society with the costs borne by the broader citizenry, all under the guise of reflecting the “will of the people.” In many cases, special-interest groups are active participants in influencing the content and distribution of propaganda to establish and entrench their position.
Vote-Seeking Politicians
In order to succeed in democratic politics, elected politicians must secure the votes necessary to win (re)election. Responding to the incentives inherent in democratic politics, elected officials will adopt policies that reflect some combination of the preferences of the median voter—the voter in the middle of the ideological distribution, which is critical in majority, winner takes all elections—and well-informed special-interest groups. The costs of these policies will be spread among the masses of taxpaying citizens.
Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense who served under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, succinctly captures the dynamics of these incentives when summarizing his firsthand experience with Congress. He writes,
I was more or less continuously outraged by the parochial self-interest of all but a very few members of Congress. Any defense facility or contract in their district or state, no matter how superfluous or wasteful, was sacrosanct. I was constantly amazed and infuriated at the hypocrisy of those who most stridently attacked the Defense Department as inefficient and wasteful but fought tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in defense activities in their home state or district.19
As Gates’s experience suggests, elected representatives respond to incentives, which in the national security sector include ensuring their narrow pool of constituents, as well as the special-interest groups who influence their re-election, are rewarded, even if those rewards come at the expense of “the nation’s” well-being. As Gates highlights, each representative is looking out for the interests of those in their district or state even if those interests are at odds with the welfare of citizens residing in other areas of the country.
In general, compared with the ideal model of the protective state, democratic politics does not generate policies that maximize some notion of the “national interest.” Instead, policies benefit some groups of voters at the expense of others. This reality is masked by government-produced propaganda that presents the state’s national security activities in the opposite light. From the perspective of this propaganda, the state’s national security activities put domestic political issues aside for the greater good of the whole in the name of patriotism and defending the rights of Americans. A careful review of the evidence, however, reveals that in practice, the experience described by Robert Gates, and not the hypothetical situation described by the ideal model of democratic politics, is reflective of reality, hence the importance of government propaganda to convince the masses otherwise.
Bureaucracy
Beyond voters and elected politicians, bureaucrats, or nonelected political actors, also play a crucial role in democratic politics. In the ideal model of politics, bureaucrats are disciplined by elected officials who, in turn, represent their constituents. In this model, there is a tight link between principals and agents throughout government operating as follows. Voters select elected officials as their agents and monitor and punish them accordingly through the voting booth. Elected officials, in turn, select bureaucrats to provide goods and services to voters and reward and punish them through the budgetary process and the passing and enforcement of laws that delineate agency powers. We have already discussed why the link between voters and elected officials is not as tight as represented in the ideal model of democratic politics. Similarly, there is reason to believe that the link between bureaucrats and elected officials contains significant slack, allowing for opportunism.
In order to understand the realities of bureaucracy, it is important to appreciate that a central feature of government agencies is that they, in contrast to private firms, do not sell their output on a competitive market to earn revenue. This means that bureaus cannot rely on the profit and loss mechanism to gauge effectiveness. Absent profit and loss as a gauge of performance, other metrics must be used as indicators of success. One alternative metric is the size of a bureau’s discretionary budget, which refers to the budget beyond that necessary to satisfy the demands of budgetary gatekeepers (i.e., legislators).20 A larger discretionary budget allows bureaus to exert influence and power by expanding the portfolio of activities undertaken to shape policy.21 Absent constraints that limit how those in bureaus behave, there is a strong incentive to expand even if this growth does not provide voters with any added welfare.
In the ideal model of democratic politics, Congress serves as a constraint on the incentive for bureaus to engage in wasteful expansion. In this role, members of Congress monitor and discipline bureaus using some combination of budget allocations, administrative law, the political appointment process, congressional oversight, and the design of highly specific bills that limit space for discretion in implementation. There are, however, two factors that weaken the effectiveness of these checks in practice.
The first factor is information asymmetries between members of Congress and members of the agencies that they are tasked with monitoring. These asymmetries occur because the members of the bureau have context-specific knowledge of the agency’s activities. Members of oversight committees must rely on this specialized knowledge when making their performance assessments. This, however, allows members of the agency being monitored to control the flow and content of the information available to members of Congress, creating space for opportunism.
To provide a concrete illustration of these dynamics, consider that a 2016 report by Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon hid an internal study that found $125 billion in potential savings through reductions in waste.22 The reported motivation for this secrecy was that the leaders of the Pentagon were concerned that members of Congress would realize the magnitude of waste and reduce the Pentagon’s budget. These types of asymmetries make it difficult for members of Congress to evaluate the activities of agencies and prevent abuses of power. As this example illustrates, bureaucrats can frame and filter the information presented to members of Congress in a manner that reduces the effectiveness of oversight.
The second factor limiting the efficacy of congressional oversight is that the members of Congress responsible for oversight are often demanders of the goods and services produced by the agency they are tasked with monitoring. Consider the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, which is charged with overseeing the nation’s military and defense policy. As was recently noted, “the Armed Services Committee has a tradition of uniting its members on both sides of the aisle, since many have a military background or home-state interests in defense.”23 Members of Congress tasked with oversight often have a strong interest in seeing the agencies and interests they oversee maintain their current status and further expand. This pro-bureau bias weakens the effectiveness of oversight and reinforces the bureau’s incentive to grow. These dynamics exist across the agencies constituting the national security state and create significant space for political opportunism, which benefits the members of the agencies and those connected to its operations.
Precisely because bureaus possess information regarding their operations that is superior to that available to members of Congress and voters, they can reveal and frame information in a manner that serves the goals of those in the bureau and other areas of government. Effective propaganda creates a demand for government activities among voters. The issue is that given the control over information by specific government agencies, this demand can be cultivated and shaped even if those activities provide no additional value or even reduce citizen welfare.
Summing Up
The interaction between the actors discussed above reveals that democratic politics is, in practice, far from the ideal model discussed at the outset of this chapter. In contrast to the first-best view of democratic politics, the reality is that political interactions are often characterized by an intense competition to influence, secure, and wield power over others in the face of information asymmetries and perverse incentives. It is within this context that government propaganda plays a central role. Taking advantage of democratic pathologies, privileged political actors attempt to influence voters by justifying and legitimizing their actions through the strategic use of propaganda in the pursuit of their own goals.
THE SECRECY OF NATIONAL SECURITY: INFORMATION ASYMMETRIES AMPLIFIED
The information asymmetries that plague ordinary democratic politics are more severe in the realm of national security because of monopoly control of information and the prevalence of secrecy surrounding government activities in this area.24 As John Mearsheimer recognizes, it is easy for policymakers to deceive the public in matters of national security because “they control the state’s intelligence apparatus, which gives them access to important information that the public does not have and cannot get, at least in the short term.”25 Economist Roger Koppl summarizes the problematic features of this situation as follows:
The entangled deep state [Koppl’s term for the national security state] produces the rule of experts. Experts must often choose for the people because the knowledge on the basis of which choices are made is secret, and the very choice being made may also be a secret involving, supposedly, “national security.” . . . The phenomena intelligence experts report on are complex, uncertain, and indeterminate. And there is poor feedback between the global situation and any choices made on the basis of (possibly secret) expert opinions. The “intelligence community” has incentives that are not aligned with the general welfare or with democratic process. There is a problem of incentive alignment.26
This issue of incentive alignment is grounded in the principal-agent problem discussed above, which is intensified because of the opaqueness of the national security state. National security has always been associated with some degree of secrecy in order to keep critical information out of the hands of enemies. But in the United States, the secrecy associated with the government’s national security activities expanded greatly during the two world wars and was institutionalized in the wake of World War II.
The culture of secrecy within the U.S. national security state is perhaps best illustrated by the overuse of the government’s information classification system. The current system of classifying information was established in 1940 by the executive order (EO 8381) of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With the onset of World War II, its purpose was to enhance the ability of the government to protect information deemed crucial for the nation’s security. The classification of information existed earlier, but before 1940 it covered a very limited amount of information related to a narrow range of military and diplomatic matters.
This changed with Roosevelt’s executive order, which greatly expanded the scope of materials that could be classified.27 Executive Order 8381 covered “all official military or naval books, pamphlets, documents, reports, maps, charts, plans, designs, models, drawings, photographs, contracts, or specifications which are now marked under the authority or at the direction of the Secretary of War or the Secretary of the Navy as ‘secret,’ ‘confidential,’ or ‘restricted’ and all such articles or equipment which may hereafter be so marked with the approval or at the direction of the President.”28 In addition to expanding the scope of materials that were subject to classification, EO 8381 also granted civilian employees the ability to classify information, since it stated that information could be classified with the approval of the president. A subsequent executive order (EO 10290) issued by President Harry Truman in 1951 extended the peacetime classification system to “all departments and agencies of the Executive Branch.”29 The ability of nonmilitary agencies to classify information further expanded the scope of secrecy in the government.
The increased scope of classification combined with the fear that information would fall into enemy hands incentivized government employees to default to classifying information. The tendency to overclassify information became entrenched throughout the Cold War, as the accepted view in the government was that “the excrescence of international communism and the constant presence of total war, hot or cold, has made the keeping of national secrets an absolute necessity.”30 Fear of domestic infiltration by communist sympathizers further contributed to the push for secrecy within the government.31
This created a problem in terms of access to information regarding the activities of the national security state. While those in government can use expanded classification powers to protect crucial information, they can also be used to limit transparency and prevent citizens, watchdog groups, and others in government from monitoring those in power. Indeed, numerous investigations have identified the tendency for government agencies to abuse the classification system to overclassify information that is not crucial for the nation’s security.
In 1956 the Defense Department Committee on Classified Information, also known as the Coolidge Committee, concluded that “overclassification has reached serious proportions.” Subsequent investigations of classified information over the following decades—the Wright Commission in 1957, the Moss Subcommittee in 1958, the Seitz Task Force in 1970, the Stillwell Commission in 1985, the Joint Security Commission in 1994, the Moynihan Commission in 1997, and the 9/11 Commission—made similar findings and recommendations to prevent the abuse of classification powers.32 These recommendations were largely ignored. As Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, notes, “Over the past fifty years, generations of critics have risen to attack, bemoan, lampoon, and correct the excesses of government secrecy. Only rarely have they had a measurable and constructive impact.”33
Institutionalized secrecy and overclassification creates significant space for political opportunism.34 As one legal scholar commented, “the present security system [as of 1955] is susceptible to many abuses and that although such abuses are relatively infrequent, they do exist in substantial numbers.”35 Another noted that “a large amount of information concerning military affairs has been withheld by the military establishment since the end of World War II and continues to be withheld. Few in a position to know and assess the facts would deny that much of this withholding has either served no significant public purpose or the benefits derived are outbalanced by the public harm.”36
The collapse of the Soviet Union did nothing to end the culture of secrecy, and confidentiality remains a defining feature of the U.S. national security state. This became evident in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, when “the same objections to national security secrecy—relating to government accountability, transparency, and the rule of law—that were raised in the early Cold War era have been resurrected.”37 In the post-9/11 period, the secrecy enveloping the U.S. security state has manifested itself in numerous ways, including domestic and foreign surveillance, the use of drones for targeted killing, the use of torture, and the government’s tendency to employ its state secrets privilege regarding its activities as part of the war on terror. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 further reinforced secrecy by granting the U.S. government and military the ability to determine which sensitive information was subject to nondisclosure as part of the war on terror.38
The secrecy that permeates all aspects of the national security state exacerbates the information asymmetries that exist in ordinary democratic politics and results in even further deviations from the ideal model of the protective state presented at the beginning of this chapter.39 This amplification occurs because mechanisms fostering transparency and the flow of information regarding government performance, which are already highly imperfect under normal democratic politics, are especially weak or altogether absent in the realm of national security. Secrecy, which is a defining feature of the U.S. national security state, empowers and incentivizes political actors to strategically control information flows, which limits the ability of outsiders to effectively monitor and punish politicians. A recent example will illustrate this logic.
An accurate and transparent accounting of U.S. troop deployments in various global locations is one important piece of information for voters and the legislature to monitor the members of the national security state and to make informed political decisions. Information regarding troop deployment, however, is purposefully obscured by the Department of Defense.40 When the Department of Defense recently reported on global troop deployments, it listed the location of forty-four thousand deployed soldiers as “unknown.”41 Further, the White House has excluded troop deployment numbers for ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria when it reports to Congress on the status of the government’s activities in these countries.42 Note that this is total troop deployments and does not include any sensitive information about the allocation of those forces within specific countries or the specific military strategies being employed. By purposefully obscuring the number of troops abroad, the members of the U.S. government limit the ability of those outside the national security state to be informed and critically monitor state activities.
The broader implication of this example is that even if voters desire to be informed about foreign affairs and the operation of the national security state, they are severely limited because crucial information is simply not available for public consumption. There was no way for the discerning citizen to review the complete evidence regarding the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run up to the U.S. government’s invasion. Instead, citizens were solely reliant on the information that the Bush administration chose to reveal. Likewise, when the government disseminates information regarding potential terrorist threats, there is no way for citizens to verify the accuracy of these threats because the information underlying the claims is not publicly available.
The government’s monopoly over national security information also allows it to neuter the media as a check on political misbehavior. This is done by limiting media access to information or to conflict zones through the issuance of “voluntary guidelines” to publishers, as during World War I, or by providing talking points to experts who work with media agencies. Members of the media face a strong incentive to avoid being overly critical of the national security state in order to maintain access to key policymakers. And as history demonstrates, members of the media have often been active participants in disseminating government’s war-related propaganda.43
The significant information asymmetries that characterize the operations of the national security state in conjunction with the pathologies of ordinary democratic politics set the stage for the production and dissemination of government propaganda. Because those operating under the national security umbrella possess monopoly control over information, they can regulate the flow and content of public information. This monopoly control creates the opportunity for those in positions of power to disseminate biased, partial, or incomplete information through state-produced propaganda. Walter Lippmann, a reporter and political commentator, noted that in order to produce effective propaganda, “there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.”44 He went on to argue that “military censorship is the simplest form of barrier” because of the state’s centralized control of information.45 Since the U.S. national security state is shrouded in secrecy, the information made public is difficult, if not impossible, for interested outsiders—ordinary voters or highly skilled experts outside the national security state—to verify at the time it is presented. This allows political insiders to produce and disseminate propaganda in pursuit of their ends irrespective of whether they align with those of the broader citizenry.
The messages contained in propaganda can gain traction in society if (1) they fall within the frame of behaviors deemed acceptable by recipients or succeed in shifting that frame, and (2) there are enough people who believe the credibility of the government and its message. Other, less credulous citizens may go along with the message as long as they have an incentive to coordinate with their fellow citizens to avoid negative social repercussions from deviating from what is viewed as socially acceptable beliefs and actions.46 This is especially likely in matters of foreign affairs and war, which historically has a unifying effect in an American society grounded in patriotism.47 Public deviations from the government narrative are, therefore, viewed as “unpatriotic” and are met with scorn. This incentivizes some who may actually disagree with their government’s foreign policy to show support, at least outwardly. Under this scenario, propaganda can effectively coordinate citizens around supporting the militarism of government even if those actions are grounded in half-truths or outright deception that lead to undesirable policies.
THE MYTH OF “NOBLE DECEPTION”
One justification for propaganda is that it may be used by those in power to promote and protect the national interest in instances where ordinary people are either unable to access the truth or incapable of handling the realities of that truth to advance their interests. Journalist Irving Kristol captured the essence of this position when he noted that “there are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”48 Under this scenario, the “highly educated” political elite can strategically use propaganda in a noble and benevolent manner to nudge the public toward certain behaviors for their own good. This “noble deception” justification, while perhaps attractive in principle, is highly problematic in practice for three reasons.
First, there is no reason to believe that systematic incentives exist to consistently promote the noble outcome over time. In stark contrast to the noble deception scenario, members of the national security state have a strong incentive to protect their monopoly control over information because of the power it affords them in controlling policy and the benefits associated with that control, not out of benevolence. Empowering those in the security state to use propaganda for noble ends also empowers them to use it for ignoble ends. Given the pathologies in democratic politics discussed earlier, there is reason to expect that over time, the power to deceive, once normalized, will eventually be abused.
The noble deception scenario ultimately depends on good people consistently doing good things. If benevolent people possess control over the monopoly information of the security state, good things will happen. But what if benevolent people are not in control? As we introduce the possibility of narrow self-interest and malevolence into the equation, it becomes likely that the power necessary to nobly deceive will instead be used for opportunism. As Lord Acton famously warned, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”49 The concern is that those who rise to positions of great political power often abuse that power in a variety of ways. Even if one can identify past cases where political leaders wielded power for noble causes, this does not mean that it will be the case in the future. When power is highly concentrated, the competition for control of that power tends to reward the unscrupulous challenger who is comfortable wielding power over others and doing what is necessary to secure the privilege of doing so.50 This creates a strong incentive to use deceit in the pursuit of narrow self-interest. Once the precedent for deception is established, it is probable that it will be used for both benevolent and malevolent purposes.
The second reason that the noble deception justification is problematic is that it assumes that citizens are unable to process and act on truthful information. While this might be possible, there is no reason that this is necessarily the case. It might also be that citizens simply disagree with the goals of the elites. As John Mearsheimer writes, “whenever leaders cannot sell a policy to their public in a rational-legal manner, there is a good chance that the problem is with the policy, not the audience.”51 The risk is that noble deception will be used as cover for the elite to avoid the check of the citizenry under the guise that they are simply unable to grasp what is good for them. This has the effect of masking the true costs of military activities—both in terms of monetary costs and non-monetary costs, such as expansions in state power—since citizens are prevented from considering the reality of the situation.
Finally, the idea of noble deception is problematic because it neglects the nature of state propaganda and the implications for a free society. Propaganda is the result of secrecy and direct efforts to obfuscate reality. These conditions, whether intended for benevolent or malevolent purposes, create a culture in which the citizenry is viewed as an oppositional power that stands in the way of the political elite achieving their goals. Rather than seeking genuine consent, the political elite conceals and manipulates information so that potential opposition is neutered. Whether this deception is well intentioned or not does not change the fact that it reverses the relationship between citizens and state from one where the former is viewed as the driving force in politics to the reverse. Moreover, the use of propaganda normalizes purposeful deceit by the state in domestic life and incentivizes similar behavior in matters outside of foreign policy, further contributing to the expansion of state power relative to that possessed by citizens.
POST-9/11 PROPAGANDA
The subsequent chapters present cases of U.S. government propaganda in the post-9/11 period. Each case illustrates how members of the U.S. government have taken steps to convince the American public of certain threats and the government’s need to act—both domestically and abroad—to protect citizens from imminent dangers. These propaganda efforts take place in the context of democratic politics discussed in this chapter. Each case illuminates some of the techniques and functions of propaganda discussed in the previous chapter. They appeal to authority and patriotism while creating “us versus them” distinctions. They do so in a simplified manner that downplays, misrepresents, or ignores realities that run counter to the message being communicated. In doing so, the cases discussed seek to coordinate citizens to provide support for and acquiescence to the activities of the government, all while fanning the flames of fear among the public in order to justify government action.