I had the pleasure of listening to an interview on American Prestige with Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs and co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of The Myth of American Idealism. The book – as well as the interview – discusses Noam Chomsky’s views on U.S. foreign policy and leftist politics.
I discussed the book briefly in my January Reading List post, but the interview goes into greater detail. Readers should note that the interview sits behind the American Prestige paywall. That said, I’m a subscriber. And I’d highly encourage readers to subscribe, or at the very least to listen to the free weekly news update. It comes out every Friday morning.
That bit aside, let’s talk about the interview. I think a particular line of questioning from Daniel Bessner gets at key issues of leftist strategy in the 21st century.
Propaganda Analysis
For readers following along with the interview, this hits at around the 8 or 9 minute mark. Bessner makes the interesting claim that Chomsky’s work on propaganda might have been true a few decades ago, but misses the mark in the 21st century.
Why?
That’s the trick. I suspect Bessner is making the claim that forces in the post-Vietnam era – the breakdown of Cold War liberalism, the rise of neoliberalism, the Internet, et al. – have rendered much of Chomsky’s work on propaganda a moot point. He thinks it’s outdated. In our current world, as Bessner sees it, most people no longer buy into the foreign policy ideological myths Chomsky identified.
Robinson didn’t have a satisfying response to this, but I think he could’ve given one. In particular, one of the issues on propaganda concerns who it targets and what it does.
Those questions stand at the center of philosophical debates over propaganda. And I suspect Bessner was attributing to Chomsky the common thesis – held by people from a range as diverse as Thomas Frank to Jason Stanley – that it targets average, ordinary Americans. It targets, on this view, working people, marginalized people, and so on.
The trouble, first, is that this view is wrong. Those aren’t the people reading the New York Times or other major outlets. It’s the more highly educated, powerful people who read major sources. I went into much greater detail on this in an earlier post.
But, second, it misses the role that propaganda plays in our system of power – a role it continues to play today.
Propaganda and Power
Bessner is right that most people take a more cynical attitude to U.S. foreign policy. Frankly, I suspect they always did. But I agree with Bessner to the extent that it has gotten far more obvious in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era.
However, I find a different story among the real targets of propaganda – at least the kinds at issue here. Wealthier, educated Americans – the ones who wield power – are the true targets of propaganda. And they still support U.S. foreign policy. They support arming Ukraine. They, for the most part, support Israel’s war on Palestinians.
And it was always those people who formed the focus of propaganda’s causal powers in the world.
Propaganda provides for these people a coherent ideology. This ideology melds them together and keeps them engaged in the project of U.S. Empire. It also prevents the formation of heterodox ideas among the educated class – ideas that might also find a home among working class intellectuals.
That is the causal role Bessner calls for at around the 20 minute mark of the interview – the one he finds lacking in Robinson and Chomsky’s book.
Leftist Strategy
Us leftists tend to just say ‘organize’ when people ask us for a strategy. But that move faces challenges, and Bessner draws them out in this interview.
As he tells the story, the neoliberal era has made workplace organizing more difficult. Our current era of capitalism separates workers using tools like remote work, gig work, and other means of socially and culturally distancing workers from each other. It’s difficult to put people together into workers’ orgs in ways that go far beyond the challenges of a few decades ago.
As the DSA Communist Caucus tells the story, we live in an era of working class disorganization.
The positive message I took from Chomsky and Robinson’s book – the one that Robinson didn’t always fully articulate in the interview – was that a beginners’ analysis of propaganda and foreign policy can help provide regular Americans with intellectual tools to take a step beyond cynicism about U.S. foreign policy. It might also help workers see yet another area where, in fact, they know more than so-called ‘higher status’ Americans know.
That’s an important tool in the toolbox. But, of course, it’s just one tool. And it’s not one of the most important tools.
The most important project, in my view, is the overcoming of working class disorganization.
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