The Western shockwaves of WW I's unsettling aftermath contributed heavily to the now-negative connotation of the word propaganda, which theretofore had been a commonly neutral word applied to matters of state, religion, and advertisements.
President Wilson's Committee on Public Information — which "propagated" pro-war messages, which in turn the public accepted as necessary and benign — created its own backlash when the body politic, fatigued by war, also came to believe it had been deceived by the promise of victory's splendor. Not so with the Second World War, however the European enemy wielded the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which further degenerated the word.
In the contemporary era, American propaganda flourishes like never before, through media outlets once never dreamed of. Correspondingly, the effect of political propaganda has been profound, ruthless, and unconscionable.
Of the two major parties it can be said, with a good deal of objectivity, that the Democratic establishment — forget for a moment how that word has been propagandized, by ill-bred populists, into doddering sinfulness — remains largely in the world of reality and reality-based messaging.
However since at least President Reagan, Messrs. Laffer and Norquist, the Republican poundings of surreal, fantastical and wholly grotesque propaganda — e.g., the combined but impossible, supposed virtues of lower taxes, higher defense spending, balanced budgets — have been ear-splittingly uninterrupted.
Later, as we know too well, President Bush Jr. took President Polk's bloody propagandizing beyond foreign shores. By unscrupulously conflating Iraq and 9/11, the administration convinced most Americans that the former loomed as what is now known, with no little tedium, as an existential threat, mushroom clouds and all. The resulting sectarian hell of that war-torn land persists. Nonetheless, under Bush's reign there were slivers of the positive — say, promoting Medicare D and an African war against AIDS.
Yet subsequent to eight years of wholesale Obamian sanity we encountered the age of Trump's Trumpism. Nowhere in its reign is there even a whisper of the positive, a bit of benevolence, or a touch of Democrats' reality-based messaging. Rather, Trumpism is universally, propagandistically diabolic; all dark, all the time, by all its yapping Beelzebubs.
Consider one of them, Rudy Giuliani, who in the cynical context of describing himself as "a poor, simple, little defense lawyer who’s defending his client" — more like abetting a felony, or two, or ... — went on to say, "The reality is, the more the Democrats press for an investigation of what I did in the Ukraine, I invite it."
That's more than spin; for the masses it's rather sickly propaganda of the false bravado sort: Democrats are foolish and desperate against a proper, faultless president — whom more than two-thirds of the public cannot stomach. And Giuliani "invites" no such thing. He would be the foolish one if he did, for an honest investigation into this mouthpiece's Ukraine activities would only lead to an indictment.
Or consider Newt Gingrich, another Trump mouthpiece. He's not at all sheepish in embracing his bad propagandistic self, telling the Washington Post that Trump's deceptive offense directed at Ukraine and Joe Biden is a purely political calculation that "would crush Biden if people came to believe it was true" [italics mine]. The Trump crowd doesn't even bother to hide its falseness any longer.
Then there's that unrivaled propagandist of our time, Rush Limbaugh, who for about a week has been peddling to his listeners a virtual "Second Amendment-remedy" of the unAmerican intelligence community which harbors "speech police," and "the coup actually is ongoing; it hasn’t stopped." Perpetual subversion of true-American forces of the good is Limbaugh's message, and it's a dangerous one.
Remember Matt Whitaker, Trump's erstwhile acting attorney general who literally had to act like one? He explained to Fox News' gullibles that the Ukraine story "is a clear example of someone that’s part of the deep state in the intelligence community taking advantage of this whistleblower procedure and then trying to create this firestorm."
Whitaker failed to inform Fox News consumers that the inspector general who's been thwarted by Trump, "his" DNI and "his" DOJ, is Trump-appointed. A key element of effective propaganda is a devilish admixture of truth and lies.
The Brookings Institution's William Galston has observed, "We haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime." He was born a year after the Second World War, so his lifetime hasn't encompassed the propagandistic debauchery of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, or the Soviets' early Cold War propagations of mountainous untruths. "What we’re discovering," he added, "is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law."
Hence the unacknowledged joker in the deck: All along, our shining city on a hill has been subject to others' unexceptionalism. Throughout our history we've taken immense pride in the rule of law over the vagaries of men, yet tradition, continuity, and the law's foundations were more fragile than believed.
For now we see that September of 2019 is nothing unique in our national experiment; it's merely the latest month in at least 40 years of men's vagaries, relentlessly expressed in aggressive, antagonistic, pseudoconservative propaganda.
The villainy of Donald Trump is but the apex of our weakness — though beyond every villainous apex is the real potential of returning to leveled stability. This assumes that America, through its 2020 votes, rejects engaging a politically turbulent 2021 — which propagandists on the left are so grievously encouraging.
America must first catch its breath, reorient, recenter and regain whatever virtues it once had. Then it can proceed to what one hopes is honorable political warfare.