This Is Not Propaganda
In these days of worldwide crisis many look at the skyrocketing approval ratings of populist right-wing leaders such as Trump and Johnson and wonder ‘how could this happen’? How are they able to lurch from one episode of sheer incompetence to another, yet make more and more people feel they are doing a good job? According to Peter Pomerantsev’s latest book, ‘This is not propaganda’, a novel toolkit of populist political technologies is being used. It first emerged in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s and was gradually adapted for the social media age.
Johnson follows in the footsteps of Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines, Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, Putin, Trump, the Leave campaign in the UK (all are discussed in the book). Each relies on a broad, disparate coalition of voter groups united by opposition to a common, well-described set of enemies. The new political technologies hold this coalition together without much coercion or loss of personal freedom. Each leader is either a natural-born entertainer or the focus of a carefully stage-managed political show, very capable of appealing to emotion. There is an absence of any real unifying ideology: the members of the ‘coalition’ might agree on little beyond knowing what they are against. Usually, this would be some combination of perceived external foes: cultural and/or intellectual ‘elites’, Leftists, Liberals and various minorities.
What are these technologies? In this and the following parts I will attempt to explain, using Pomerantsev’s examples and supplementing them with what I have seen with my own eyes. One of them is the use of multiple half-baked conspiracy theories, supported by alt-facts, to overwhelm people with information and switch discourse from what is plausible to what is possible. Another is the constant insistence that every voice, no matter how respectable, is partisan, part of a general and constant assumption of bad faith on the part of everybody. The aim is not to convince but to disorient and confuse, to make people mistrust and disbelieve everything they see and hear, even if happening in front of their eyes. Another technique is the demonisation of opponents as the ‘fifth column’, supposedly working for the enemies, waging an endless ‘information war’. Supporting this is a massive online operation, with astroturfers, influencers and all varieties of trolls defending the main narratives. Data gathered from social media is used to tailor the messaging, which is then delivered through the same social media.
The heart of the coalition becomes bound by something greater than mere ideology — these people are united by an identity. They start to think of themselves as ‘the people’ (hence the use of the word ‘populist’). Many of them retreat into a virtual political reality, divorced from the physical world, sometimes online; a reality in which they imagine themselves to be the underdog bitterly fighting a set of powerful and arrogant enemies with victory just around the corner and yet always tantalisingly out of reach.
It is very hard to challenge members of such a homogeneous block: facts and arguments lose their meaning, contradictions are happily ignored and politicians find that they can lie and change their story from day to day with no consequence. Their supporters treat facts as irrelevant detail: tribal loyalty to ‘their side’ during a ‘conflict’ trumps everything else. When Donald Trump boasted that he could ‘shoot someone and not lose votes’, this is what he referred to.
It is a frightening state of affairs as it interferes with the main mechanism of democracy — the accountability of those in power, the link between poor performance in government and electoral defeat. A critic can be dismissed as a ‘politically motivated’ bad faith actor, possibly a fifth columnist, inconvenient facts explained away by a conspiracy theory made up on the spot. (If they are too vocal, they start to get threats over the internet, or, in places like the Phillipines, sued for libel or arrested on made-up charges, which is what happened to the investigative journalist Maria Ressa.)
‘Individually free but collectively in chains’ — so Pomerantsev quotes a study about the Chinese — applies also, to a greater or lesser degree, to countries governed by populists: oppositions are discredited, protests disrupted and any sort of collective action attacked as soon as it is seen as a credible threat. You have freedom of speech, but if you start being heard, if you gather an audience, organise, life will become unpleasant for you. Even if you are someone as benign as Greta Thunberg, you will be demonised as a scheming enemy or a tool of a shadowy conspiracy. In such circumstances, holding the powerful to account as part of a group not only becomes harder: it starts carrying a high personal cost.
I wanted to write in detail about the exposition of Pomerantsev for two reasons. It explains a lot of what I am seeing at the moment in the West (especially so since the book was published last summer). Equally importantly, it shows the sheer difficulty of the task faced by the opponents of the populism machine. At the same time— and this I address in the afterword — when it comes to the West, it is helped in a large measure by its opponents being anything but united. All too often, they blame each other for electoral defeats instead of recognising the formidable nature and the danger of the new brand of populism as an electoral force.
There has been a lot of talk of late about how to defeat the Johnsons and the Trumps, about whether the answer lies in better party leaders, more Socialism, more Centrism, advocating more or less immigration, more or less spending or something else. But, reading Pomerantsev, one cannot help thinking that this is a technological problem, that the issue here is not policy, or ‘trust’, or ‘competence’ or any of the other established ideas of what makes politicians popular. Those traditional political notions are falling apart under the onslaught of well-devised, well-managed misinformation: not as important now that whole alternative political reality can be created. Elections are now being won and lost based on whether one team of political technicians beats those employed by the other sides. The response, therefore, is not to blame each other, not to point fingers but to join forces, resolve differences and investigate the best ways to function in the new reality.
Part I — The majority coalition and how it is held together. More about ‘the people’ and what binds them together, making them immune to any criticism or dissenting views.
Part II — The virtual political reality. The populist narratives are able to present an alternative reality.
Part III — The decline and fall of Laughtivism. Peaceful protesters used to be feared by late 20th century autocrats who relied on censorship and fear. Populists have succeeded in discrediting the protest, making protesters seem irrelevant and out of touch. We also discuss the new notion of ‘information war’ and how it is used to portray the protests as a ‘fifth column’, working for ‘enemies’.
Part IV — The supposed death of objectivity. One of the central pillars of the new populism is to claim there is no such thing as true objectivity, that just about every view is equally valid. This means, supposedly, that they can lie and distort truth in any way they can because ‘no one is objective’.
Part V — The technology. How the new narratives are backed up and promoted by a sophisticated campaign on social media.
Part VI — Afterword (The fatal lack of unity). My own assessment of how non-populists — the Left and the Centre — failed to unite against the populists and instead keep attacking each other.