America Has Entered a New Age of Propaganda

On July 16, Donald Trump went on prime-time television to repeat to Americans that an election he had lost nearly six years earlier had been stolen. Four months before the midterms, Trump turned a presidential address into another recital of the conspiracy theories that have sustained him since 2020. In an ominous and unhinged speech, he claimed that China’s attempts to acquire voter data were evidence of a plot to corrupt the vote, then returned to his familiar claims about widespread fraud. ABC and NBC declined to carry the speech on their main broadcast channels. CBS aired it, then broke away after about 15 minutes to debunk Trump’s assertions. Trump answered that the networks were engaged in a “plot” and said those that did not air the speech should lose their licenses. Six days later, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr said ABC’s snub would be considered in an unusually early review of licenses for eight Disney-owned stations. ABC and Disney have since sued the FCC, alleging retaliation.Captive Minds: A Study of ManipulationBelknap Press, 288 pp., $29.95America has entered a new era of truth manipulation and censorship in which journalists are faced with a self-sealing trap. Carry the speech and help spread the election lie, or refuse and be cast as part of the conspiracy supposedly suppressing it. Either response could be recruited into the government’s propaganda campaign. The prospect of a society in which truth and falsehood are indistinguishable—one in which the difference doesn’t even seem to matter—troubles philosophers Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon in their book Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation. Sharon is a political theorist who specializes in democratic legitimacy and the conditions under which citizens can genuinely govern themselves. Margalit is a preeminent philosopher best known for The Decent Society (1996), The Ethics of Memory (2002), On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (2010), and On Betrayal (2017). He has spent his career asking what degrades human dignity—humiliation, forgetting, rotten compromise, betrayal—and now, with Sharon, turns to the capture and domination of judgment itself.Margalit and Sharon explain their personal stakes in the preface. Living in Jerusalem, they began writing Captive Minds while watching demagogues exploit the threat of terrorism to justify occupation and the horrors of occupation to excuse further brutality. “As more blood flows between the River and the Sea, the two peoples living on this punished land become easier prey to manipulators who exploit fear, hatred, and confusion,” they write. That blood is “the fuel of manipulation,” which then precipitates further violence. And the resurgence of authoritarianism in Europe and the United States threatens a similar vicious cycle on a global scale. Donald Trump, in their view, is more a symptom than a cause. Their subject is the set of conditions that makes such a figure possible.The book is neither a conventional work of media criticism nor a narrowly academic philosophical treatise. It reads instead as an urgent work of late democratic anxiety. What if the greatest political danger of our time is no longer that governments force their subjects to obey, but that they induce citizens to surrender their judgment willingly? How did that become possible?American propaganda has a long lineage, from the partisan press of the early republic to wartime mobilization and modern public relations. During World War I, the federal Committee on Public Information promoted the war through official news, posters, films, and more than 75,000 “Four Minute Men,” who delivered vetted speeches in movie theaters and other venues. After the war, veterans of such campaigns brought those techniques into commercial persuasion. One of the field’s principal theorists was Edward Bernays, who treated public opinion as something trained experts could engineer.Bernays regarded the manufacture of public opinion as both legitimate and necessary. In his 1928 book Propaganda, he argued that democratic society was too complex for citizens to navigate unaided, and therefore required the “conscious and intelligent manipulation” of the habits and opinions of the masses by an “invisible government.” The following year, working for the American Tobacco Company, he arranged for fashionable young women to smoke cigarettes during New York’s Easter parade, while alerting the press that women’s rights marchers would light “torches of freedom.” A campaign to sell Lucky Strikes appeared as a spontaneous protest against a sexist taboo. Bernays’s method was to identify an existing desire, attach it to a product or policy, and make the desired behavior appear to originate with the public rather than the sponsor.The darker connotations of propaganda are clear in its history in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, where mass persuasion worked alongside censorship, surveillance, terror, and political violence. Nazi propaganda exploited prejudice, fear, humiliation, resentment, and the desire for restored greatness, supplying a story in which Germany’s defeats were caused by internal enemies and traitors. Soviet agitprop likewise defended the state, sanctified its leaders, manufactured heroic myths, and attributed failures to saboteurs and class enemies. In both systems, propaganda did more than circulate falsehoods. It organized a way of seeing the world. “If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore,” Hannah Arendt said in her final interview in 1973. “That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”This subtlety is a theme of Margalit and Sharon’s book. One of their recurring contrasts, drawn from Cicero and Machiavelli, is between the lion and the fox: The lion rules by force; the fox by cunning, seduction, flattery, deception, and psychological leverage. Another text to which they repeatedly return is Shakespeare’s Othello. For the authors, Iago is the archetypal manipulator. He does not command Othello or threaten him. Instead, he asks insinuating questions, claims that Cassio spoke of a secret affair with Desdemona in his sleep, and arranges for her handkerchief to turn up in Cassio’s room. Othello’s love makes him vulnerable, and Iago converts that vulnerability into jealousy and self-destruction. By the time Othello murders Desdemona, he believes he is acting on evidence and exercising his own will, but he is carrying out another man’s design. “Instead of binding you in chains,” Margalit and Sharon write, “the manipulator pulls your strings.”Iago’s art is ancient, but the scale on which it is being practiced is new. What used to be individual cunning has become commercialized by Silicon Valley, a transformation described in Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, and most recently in Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Church and state were once the main manipulators; now the giants of the attention economy join them as full partners.What concerns Margalit and Sharon is that the liberal ideal of the open society, with free expression, a free press, and open exchange, may now function less as a safeguard than as “quicksand,” because under laissez-faire conditions it can enable “mind-numbing nonsense” to overwhelm the public sphere. More speech is not the answer, not when citizens are saturated with media to the point that the distinction between truth and falsehood begins to collapse. A public sphere flooded with conspiracies, grievance-optimized messages, fabrications, and artificial productions may remain formally open while leaving citizens increasingly vulnerable to domination. An open society permits expression, but a free society protects each person’s capacity to form a judgment genuinely their own.The present danger is subtler and harder for liberal democracy to recognize and fight against, because the United States may remain formally democratic while losing the conditions necessary for meaningful self-government. Citizens may still vote, the press may remain legally free, and political speech may be abundant, yet public opinion may no longer be independently formed. Disinformation and conspiracy theories can shatter common factual ground into rival realities, while generative AI makes the fracture endlessly scalable.Because manipulation has become so pervasive and profitable, resisting it requires more than correcting lies one by one. Margalit and Sharon argue that public discourse should be treated as democratic infrastructure, as essential as fair elections and independent courts, and cannot be left to an unregulated market for attention. Society cannot eliminate manipulation any more than it can eliminate friction, they argue; it can only keep manipulation from becoming an organizing principle. That means reducing the emotional and economic dependencies that make people easy to control, fortifying institutions that earn epistemic authority, respecting genuine expertise, and cultivating a public culture that rewards rigor and punishes quackery.Their argument points toward a useful principle for more specific reform: Regulate the business rather than political opinion itself. Specific efforts are already underway. Google restricts how election advertisers can target voters, while Google and Meta have stopped accepting political advertising in the European Union. Those measures should go further. Congress should ban behavioral political microtargeting, phase out surveillance advertising, make engagement-driven ranking opt-in, and tax digital advertising to fund independent local and public media. Regulators should be able to audit platforms and hold companies liable for the harms they cause. Courts should treat internet giants not as speech platforms but as corporations subject to consumer-protection, negligence, and product-liability law. Recent lawsuits against Open AI and Meta’s landmark $18 billion settlement with nearly every U.S. state are just a start. These reforms rest on the premise that a democracy is entitled to govern its information environment and reduce the incentives that make manipulation so ubiquitous and lucrative.Finally, the survival of American democracy depends on citizens rediscovering the power to uncover manipulation and change their minds. Margalit and Sharon find a model in 427 BCE, when the city of Mytilene rebelled against Athens. In a fit of rage, the Athenians voted to kill every Mytilenaen man and enslave its women and children. When they reconsidered the next day, the demagogue Cleon chastised those having second thoughts and pandered to the people’s urge for revenge. His opponent Diodotus instead implored the Athenians to restore their sense of reason and compassion, and thankfully narrowly prevailed. A second trireme raced after the ship carrying the original order, arriving just as the decree was being read and averting the massacre. For Margalit and Sharon, Mytilene’s escape offers hope for democracy, after all. Even when it seems too late—even after the ship has sailed—a free society might, just in time, still be able to send a second.