292 - Jason Stanley: Breaking Down Trump’s Propaganda

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Robinson Erhardt (0:54)

In How Propaganda Works, you argued that propaganda has pernicious effects beyond merely communicating information.

So for instance, you can undermine democracy, it can reinforce destructive ideologies. But looking at American politics in 2026 and the upcoming elections in particular, where do you see this most clearly and problematically?

Jason Stanley (1:23)

Well, the propaganda environment has shifted. My book, How Propaganda Works, was published in 2015 At the time when I was working on it in 2012, 2013, 2014, propaganda was not a topic in political philosophy or in public life. People kind of mocked me for working on it.

And what I was focusing on at the time was propaganda in liberal democracies. That is propaganda in societies that take themselves to be liberal democracies. In such societies, people have a really hard time recognizing propaganda. In liberal democracies, people think there is no propaganda. And so, that book was about propaganda in liberal democracies. My concern in that book was to explain why everyone, why many people in the Western world, especially white people, regarded the United States as a liberal, as a city on the hill, the home of liberty, when at the time, we were number one in the incarceration of our own citizens. So, how is one of history's greatest prison societies regarded as a city on the hill, the home of liberty and equality? So, that was kind of what I was looking at, was the sort of way racist propaganda functioned to justify a system of mass incarceration that incarcerated its citizens at seven and eight times the rate of any other liberal democracy. So, things have changed. We are now experiencing in the United States and we have been for some time a shift into authoritarianism. With that, the character of propaganda changes. In How Propaganda Works, I was focusing on the way propaganda works as persuasion in a liberal democracy.

The kind of focus that was the focus of Jacques Laleu, of Walter Lippmann.

Propaganda in explicitly authoritarian societies functions much differently. So, there's an important distinction between soft propaganda, which is directed towards persuasion, and hard propaganda, which is basically wielding threats, shows of power.

The philosopher Megan Hiska criticized my book, How Propaganda Works, and my focus on soft propaganda, because she said it leaves out hard propaganda. And that's right, I was writing about a propaganda situation, where people sort of denied that there was propaganda. It was like, well, how can there be propaganda? We have a free press, you know. So it was really in the vein, how propaganda works was in the vein of Chomsky and Herman's classic book, Manufacturing Consent. But now what we're seeing as the United States has tipped over into a considerably more authoritarian society, is much more hard propaganda. Donald Trump has not sought for a second to broaden his popular support. It is not, you know, his mission to broaden his popular support. Instead, he has directed threats against his political opponents, the Democrats and states that wrote Democratic.

He is employing hard propaganda against his own population, which is characteristic of an authoritarian state. So as you can look at the shift from a liberal democracy into authoritarianism on many levels. You can look at it in terms of attacks on election systems. You can look at it in terms of attacks on democratic institutions like the press and universities and the courts. But you can also see it in the kind of propaganda that is employed. We also see this in other domains right now. For a very, very long time, the state of Israel employed soft propaganda towards American Jews. This was a major topic of my book, How Propaganda Works as well. I talk about the Israel Report, written by a black guy on his name right now, I feel badly. But the guy who came up with a death tax for the Republicans to describe state taxes, and Frank, somebody, I'm blacking out his name. But he wrote this Israel Report, which I discuss in How Propaganda Works, for how to talk to American elites. That was soft propaganda persuasion. He recommended talk lines like, the greatest hope of Israel is that the Palestinians one day have a leadership that represents their interests. He said, see, this way, you represent yourself as the people who represent Palestinians' interests. Did I say that correctly?