This Is Not Propaganda: The majority coalition and how it is held together.
‘The people’. How often have we, in Britain, seen and heard this mantra both in the media and online? Alternatively, they are referred to as ‘the electorate’, ‘the voters’ or ‘the silent majority’. They are described as ‘normal’, ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘enemies of the people’ — ’Remoaners’, ‘metropolitan liberals’, ‘the radical left’ or, as Pomerantsev puts it, ‘people like you’. They play the role of fifth columnist traitors, cosmopolitan outsiders who supposedly pursue their ideological, unnatural dreams and have abandoned ‘the people’. The narrative of ‘used to represent us and no longer do’ is key — for the theme of ‘betrayal’. Betrayal in turn connects to nostalgia — a longing for ‘the good days’, ‘before they left us’.
This, in itself, is not a novel notion. Totalitarian regimes loved nothing better than to present themselves ‘for the people’ against ‘the enemies of the people’. However, back then this narrative was built around an imposed ideology and a set of myths. It had to be backed up by physical force and surveillance. The propagandist Squealer in ‘Animal Farm’ always appeared with threatening dogs to drive his point home. No dogs are needed now, nor is there any need for an ideology. The myths have been watered down to a few vague slogans. ‘The people’ now are what Pomerantsev calls ‘the majority’ — with an identity, an emotive sense of tribal belonging and a clear understanding of what they are against — but little idea of what they are for.
One of the first political technologists to construct a ‘majority’ coalition, back in the 90s, was Gleb Pavlovsky, the special adviser to both Yeltsin and Putin. In the book, he himself explains the method: first extensive polling was used to find the kind of leader that would appeal to Russians emotionally. They wanted ‘an intelligent spy, a Russian James Bond’. Once a leader with such a ‘back story’ was found, a ‘Putin majority’ was constructed based on the polling data. This majority consists of very different ideological groups united by what Pavlovsky calls ‘a fairy tale that will be common to all of them’ — in 1999 this was ‘bringing Russia off its knees’. Like an actual fairy tale, this must contain a set of well-identified enemies. People kept their own beliefs but projected them into the fairy tale and so onto Putin, felt that Putin was speaking to them. They were ‘bound around an amorphous but powerful emotion which everyone can interpret in their own way’. Eventually, they became synonymous with ‘the Russian people’ in their minds.
(I put ‘majority’ in quotes because it need not be a majority. The ‘Putin majority’ is indeed a true majority, but in the UK the Tories and the Brexit party between them got less than 50% of the vote in the last general election. The key is to act like you are the majority, like you are the people.)
In the UK, the ‘fairy tale’ is, of course, built around Brexit. Thomas Borwick, of Vote Leave, admits to using similar tactics — however he had something Pavlovsky lacked: social media, both as means of communication and as a way of gathering data about people’s interests. He was able to target people online based on the social media groups they belonged to, classify them into broader groups based on the things they cared about and send them tailored messages that connected to their individual cause, joined them to the overall ‘fairy tale’. Animal rights activists up in arms about bullfighting and hardline conservatives outraged by immigration both voted Leave in order to ‘take back control’ from the same, well-identified enemy — the European Union. ‘I believe a well-identified enemy is probably a 20 per cent kicker to your vote’ Borwick himself boasts to Pomerantsev.
With time, the messaging is becoming more and more refined, better tailored to the needs of maintaining the ‘majority’ coalition, better targeted at individual members and new recruits. This is where organisations such as Cambridge Analytica came in, claiming to be able to classify people into ‘personality types’ based on their facebook ‘likes’ using data analysis and psychological personality profiling — theoretically that would allow messaging to be even better targeted. It is not clear how much real value their algorithms added to the existing methods of understanding and altering voter behaviour. But what they did is just the icing on top of everything else.
The information age was supposed to give greater freedom. In my own opinion, this did not happen for the following reason: just like economic liberalisation often increases inequality (this would have been observed by Pomerantsev’s parents when they headed back to Russia after the fall of the USSR), the free flow of information creates data inequality. People, organisations, governments with resources can mine data to create tools of influence not available to those who are not ‘data rich’. The knowledge of enough people’s interests, their socio-economic class, possibly their psychological profile allows the messaging to the various parts of the ‘coalition’ to be refined and perfected in ways that have hitherto been impossible. People are theoretically freer — but are now possible to influence with misinformation in individually tailored ways, and this is far more effective than the old-style ‘official narrative’. Borwick claimed to have refined the messaging to 70 or 80 classes of targeted messages, one for each ‘class’ of people he defined.
The horrific discovery made since the fall of the last totalitarian regimes in Europe is that once the ‘majority’ coalition has been constructed, once it has been endowed with a notion of ‘the people’ against ‘the enemies of the people’, once messaging has been tailored and refined, it is possible to tell brazen and self-contradictory lies without consequence. All can be smoothed over by an overarching narrative of ‘the people’ against ‘the enemy and its minions’. Such narratives are not new in themselves, however, to emphasise yet again, in the past they were accompanied by the silencing of opponents. Now, it is possible to mislead without noticeable controls on free speech or imposition of an ideology. Pomerantsev, throughout the book, speculates why this is.
Apathy
He points to disillusionment, to loss of belief in progress as one possible reason. in Russia after the 90s, in the West after the 2008 financial crisis, people stopped believing that their lives will improve in the long term. The gnawing, ever-present uncertainty, the fear people have about their future has replaced the age of relative stability in which people might have lived more modestly but had stable jobs, stable communities and some pride. The nostalgia typically associated with the ‘fairy tale’ appeals to precisely this. (An alternative theory is that of the ‘cultural backlash’: white, previously dominant working class men who have lost out economically, feel threatened and marginalised by the progressive values of modern society and are prepared to follow anyone who would restore to them their lost status and return the socially conservative society they crave. However, it is not clear how that applies to Russia or the Phillipines.)
What I have observed is that this led them to relegate the bread-and-butter issues — the ones that actually affect their lives, such as jobs or housing — down the order of priorities, make them secondary to the siren-song of the simplistic ‘fairy-tale’ narrative. In the UK last year, we saw people again and again putting the need to ‘get Brexit done’ over issues that affect their lives, such as the (poor) state of the local public services or their own poverty. Part of the reason was that these problems were blamed on the immigrants and the EU, but, also, they lost the belief that those things could ever improve, that their lives can be changed through the ballot box. They feel they have nothing to lose whichever way they vote — and go for the option — Brexit — that they feel they can still affect.
The simple propagandist trick is always to make the issues outside the ‘fairy-tale’ seem complex and unsolvable, in contrast to the simple and straightforward narrative inside it. It makes for a nice tactic: opponents can be forever pressured for more and more detail, more and more explanation and justification whilst any challenge to the supposed simplicity of issues such as Brexit is dismissed as the work of the evil saboteurs. Enough voters can be relied on to prioritise the supposedly simple issues over the seemingly unsolvable complex ones.
Conspiracy theories
The idea that you, the little voter, cannot change anything beyond ‘fighting the main fight’ as defined for you by the ‘grand fairy tale’ is solidified through a host of conspiracy theories. These are the glue that solidifies the ‘majority’ coalition, stops it from breaking apart due to its internal contradictions.
This ingredient is extensively discussed in Pomerantsev’s earlier book. It used to be that the USSR would spend a lot of resources on carefully crafting conspiracy theories to smear the West — for instance to claim the US has invented the HIV/AIDS virus. Now, crude, conflicting and contradictory conspiracy theories are made up and thrown out on the spot as ‘explanations of what is possible’. Their aim is no longer to convince — but to confuse and alarm, to play on the emotions, to serve as red herrings to be used against anyone with an opposing view.
To illustrate this principle with just one example: Pomerantsev talks of the Russian activist Lyudmila Savchuk who infiltrated the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg. In 2015, a prominent critic of Putin, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered just outside the Kremlin. The IRA went into overdrive, spreading far-reaching ‘explanations’ of who might have been responsible. ‘The trolls were told to spread confusion about who was behind the murder: was it the Ukrainians? The Chechens? The Americans?’ The IRA works in tandem with the Russian state television, who likewise throw out conspiracies live on air (one of its main mouthpieces, Dmitry Kiselyov’s favourite phrase being ‘coincidence? I don’t think so’).
And then, the lies travel. It is well known that fake news spreads on the internet several times more quickly than real facts. Pomerantsev talks of the ‘adolescent joy’ of being guided by your emotion and not reason, of ‘the pleasure of spouting sh*t’ and this could explain how so many people are willing to propagate misinformation that fits in with their world view. Reposting simplistic memes, slogans and narratives, both to gain street cred with the like-minded and to goad the rest, is fun for too many people and they become conduits for propaganda, conveying it to far more people than any facts countering it might hope to reach. To put it bluntly, people get a kick out of spreading misinformation. They also do it to taunt opponents. ‘Owning the libs’ is a major motivation for many Trump supporters: you spread misinformation to get a reaction, even if you might know that information to be false.
I have once briefly visited one of the British ‘fake news’ hubs, a pro-Brexit, pro-Trump site called going-postal.com. All I can say about it is this: a raging crowd that seems to be in a constant state of frenzy, forever engaged in a non-stop Two Minutes of Hate against Remainers, the Left, the minorities and anyone else who stood in the way. It must give its denizens a hell of a rush — I felt a rush from just being there and reading the stream of comments and memes and I can only imagine how it is for people in full agreement with the content. In those sorts of places the ‘shock troops’ of the internet are galvanised, equipped with memes and slogans to go forth and spread their word far and wide as well as to troll on the forums of those they might disagree with.
We notice how far those lies have reached when we find our normally apolitical relatives suddenly starting to repeat those same slogans and talking points, to express particular views out of the blue. Lyudmila says she saw hers repeating the very talking points her colleagues at the IRA were disseminating. People who intuitively mistrust the papers and the television, treat them with suspicion, are far more willing to listen to tenuous theories that their Facebook friend has reposted, without knowledge where they originated. The best gateway to people’s hearts and minds are their friends whom they know and trust.
And besides, once again, the main aim is not to convince, but to plant seeds of doubt. With the information space saturated with misinformation, people stop trusting anyone — credible or not, they start to believe every voice to be lying and self-serving. They are pushed more and more towards what is clear and well-defined — the grand ‘fairy tale narrative’.
The ‘traditional’, elaborately crafted, conspiracy theories have very much not gone away. They are still there — incredibly complex and seeking to drown you in detail, present you with lengthy screeds and lists that would need hours to understand. As far as the Russian state is concerned, over the ‘key’ issues such as the Skripal poisonings, the Syria gas attacks or the shooting down of Flight MH17, they are everywhere. Any forum discussion worth its salt on the topic would contain long posts with the appropriate ‘proofs’, or links to blogs containing such.
As for the US, they have had their separate, dark money funded ‘alt-fact’ mill going for decades (Jane Mayer’s quite shocking book ‘Dark Money’ being the best place to read about that, and much more besides). Global warming denial, the birther movement, tall tales about Muslims wanting to establish a ‘worldwide caliphate’ were (and are) elaborate conspiracies of the ‘old’ kind, with lavish money spent on making them look believable. This is an ongoing project. Recently, my mother told me that an expert, Andrey Illarionov, a respectable man whose podcasts about economics and geopolitics she often listens to, started going on about Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracies. Having such respected and smart people do this has a dual role. Some people might believe him. Others might decide that if even he is doing this, no one else, no matter how much of an expert they might be, cannot be trusted either.
Even though some of those conspiracy theories date back many years, things are now different. ‘Conspiracies used to buttress an ideology, now they replace it’ says Pomerantsev. On the internet, you can be reasonably sure that if someone believes in, say, ‘the global warming hoax’, they probably support Brexit, dabble with anti-Soros conspiracies and believe that Bill Gates is responsible for COVID-19. Whilst some (arguably, most) are merely confused and misled, the core of the ‘majority’ coalition, the zealots at its heart have combined the main conspiracy theories into a whole belief system founded on paranoia.
The identity
Those people at the heart of the ‘majority’ develop an identity, forged by thinking themselves a part of an endemic conflict of ‘us vs them’. They act as the ‘in-group’ — opposed to the ‘out-group’ consisting of the ‘enemies’. Pomerantsev meets Rashad Ali, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir (a fundamentalist Islamic movement that used to count the controversial right-wing radio presenter Maajid Nawaz among its members) who has left the movement and now works on deradicalisation. He sees similarities between the tactics of Islamic fundamentalism and mainstream politicians. ‘One chooses a theme — religion, immigration, an economic principle — then builds it up so that it becomes a marker of who you are, not just a policy to be debated but a line on the other side of which everyone is deemed untouchable’. He calls it ‘identity masquerading as ideology’.
‘You have to seal your audience behind a verbal wall’ — Pomerantsev says, adding later that the enemies of the audience have to be kept as abstract as possible. I, myself, often came up against such verbal walls when interacting with people online — a whole language with its own terminology, full of vague, general, often loaded statements that were only meaningful to fellow acolytes and for that reason very hard to argue against. The amount of time and patience needed to unravel just one concept in this language is incredible — not least because the adherents have a tendency to avoid their terminology being questioned, the usual tactic being to switch subject at the first opportunity.
The verbal wall is not their only defence against opposing ideas. Another common feature of such ‘in-groups’ I kept seeing is their profound, visceral victimhood. Putin supporters in Russia air their grievances against NATO military bases, Leavers in Britain complain about ‘metropolitan liberals sneering at the working class’, Trump supporters vent about ‘liberals’. In each case, they play the part of the supposed true, salt-of-the-earth ‘real people’ being oppressed, lied to, lectured, hectored, belittled by their arrogant, infinitely devious ‘enemies’ — whose scheming they can always see through.
The mainstream media
The mainstream media has been badly hit by the competition from the internet, with most newspapers struggling to make ends meet. In the UK, it increasingly relies on big money owners, happy to run newspapers at a loss in return for seeking to impose their own political lines. Governments are also taking advantage: in many countries they have long traded access for favourable coverage. Outspoken journalists find their papers and TV channels unable to get the best government leaks and scoops. In some other places, compliant media get preferential treatment for government contracts — Pomerantsev describes this happening in Serbia. Finally, ‘problematic’ media outlets, being companies, can simply be bought.
Despite the internet, the media still has a great impact on what the public believe. According to Jacques Ellul, propaganda cannot attack precise and well-established points, the propagandist ‘must know the sentiments and opinions, the current tendencies and the stereotypes among the public he is trying to reach… One cannot make just any propaganda any place for anybody.’ Brexit occurred after years of tabloid lies about Europe and immigration. Putin relies on his propaganda TV channels and the newspapers that his cronies bought up in the 2000s.
Whilst in Russia the broadcast media openly engages in brainwashing, in the UK it plays a subtler role. The BBC occupies a special place: it does give a platform to the critics of the populists, however they are usually challenged very strongly. This is accompanied by a narrative of ‘common people challenging the elites’, the best example of this being the program ‘Question Time’, in which the panel typically has a bias towards the Remain side of the Brexit divide but right-wing activists — from UKIP or in the most extreme case supporters of Tommy Robinson — are inserted into the audience to challenge them. People that may have too strong a case — such as the Cambridge Analytica investigator Carole Cadwalladr — are avoided by the BBC altogether.
The overt bias of some of the newspapers hardly needs mentioning, with the Daily Telegraph openly acting as Tory propaganda. But on the whole, the British mainstream media has a dual purpose. On one hand, it is there to be attacked as part of the ‘fifth column’ at any hint of criticism of those in power. Reality is that overall the mainstream media is not critical at all and indeed quite supportive (if you do not believe me, read the recent Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail coverage of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic), but that doesn’t stop complaints about ‘hostile media’ whenever anyone is critical. Large parts of it prepare the groundwork and the narratives enabling the ‘majority coalition’ to come and stay together, to highlight the issues — like ‘drugs’ or ‘immigration’ that it wants people to constantly be thinking about. It goes without saying that it also viciously attacks any real opposition to the ‘majority’ coalition, all the time.
The trick, the reversal, is to present the conformists as ‘insurgent’ and the dissidents as the ‘arrogant elite’. Professional trolls in the media — such as Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer — would express controversial, bordering on racist views or spread conspiracy theories then complain of ‘censorship’ when somebody refuses to give them a platform. They cry loudly about being ‘silenced’ from the pages of national newspapers (such as The Times) and from the TV screens, goad and troll people on social media. Quasi-independent media outlets such as UnHerd or Spiked online are everywhere on the internet. Pretending to be (as the name suggests) ‘for unheard voices’, UnHerd is not only established by the arch-Tory journalist Tim Montgomerie but ‘its contributors are a parade of people who already have big media profiles or are think-tank directors with books out’.
Divide and conquer
What Pomerantsev omits to mention is that as well as trying to string together your own ‘majority’ coalition, the aim is to use wedge issues to destroy the other side’s. Not an issue for Putin, being mostly in control of his country’s information space; however in two-party democracies such as the UK and the US (where consensus politics was always the norm), this is now standard. During the last election, the Tories built a very broad coalition — from metropolitan remainers to Labour leavers — around the issue of a quick Brexit and around the fear of Labour that they themselves propagated. However, at the same time, they succeeded in splitting the Labour coalition, mostly on the issues of Brexit and immigration.
In a similar way, the Trump 2016 campaign sent targeted ads to prevent people from voting — for instance accusing Clinton of racism in order to keep black voters at home. Russian fake accounts helped amplify this message online.