Donald Trump tweeted a quote that has been attributed to Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini and defended the tweet in an interview: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you take an in-depth look at any of the right-wing fascist dictators who rose to power in their countries or states over the past century — from the most widely known instances of Adolph Hitler in Germany to Benito Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain or George Wallace in Alabama — I think you will find one thing in common about their political methods. They used communications propaganda to exploit the existential anxieties of the mass public.

How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

In every case it’s nearly an impossibility to even imagine developing a counter communications campaign to stop these mass, nationalistic movements.

Even in his day when the world was a much less complicated place, when communications was still mostly done by word of mouth and printed newspapers, Mark Twain had some wisdom about human behavior that still applies today, in spades.

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” he reportedly said, although some literary critics say there’s no evidence he actually said these exact words.

It doesn’t really matter, since it’s still a truism, especially these days when social media is taking over where the dead tree press left off, and the lies are just as likely to be spread on the radio and television, even in the supposedly “objective” interest in reporting “both sides” of every story.

Lying for political advantage is easy. Countering the lie is nearly impossible. People believe what they hear first. Changing their minds is difficult once the information is in their heads. Remember Walter Lippmann’s “pictures in our heads?”

Public Opinion, 1922.

Any student of political communications over the past century in America should know this.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove knew it.

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth (or the lie) to sink in,” Bush liked to say, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Also remember what Joseph Goebbels is famous for saying.

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it,” he said. “And eventually you will even come to believe it yourself.”

Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German philologist and Nazi politician who was the district leader of Berlin and chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, as well as Third Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Hitler’s closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

George Orwell, the author of 1984, also knew it.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it,” Orwell said.

He had other knowledge of human behavior from his astute observations.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” he also said.

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force,” he warned, which should make the American people wake up to what is about to happen in the campaign for president in 2024.

In our lifetime, there have been worthy attempts to use this technique for good.

While Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used their methods of propaganda to create a wedge between Republicans, Democrats and independents in the 1980s, claiming it was impossible to have a clean environment and a strong economy, Clinton and Gore set out to prove this wrong. In nearly every speech Clinton and Gore made back then, they focused on a tight message emphasizing the need for jobs but also a clean environment and a strong education system.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore came into office in 1993 committed to demonstrating that a strong economy and a clean environment go “hand-in-hand.”

In an archive of the early White House website from those days in the early days of the internet, there is an interesting discussion of this.

“Over the past eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration has proven it: we now have the strongest economy and the cleanest environment in a generation. This administration has invested in a common sense and cost-effective approach of new technologies, tougher enforcement of environmental laws, strengthening public health standards, and protecting our irreplaceable national treasures. President Clinton’s environmental strategy has given our nation the cleanest air and water in a generation and the strongest economy in our nation’s history — proving that you can both protect the environment and grow the economy.”

Perhaps some of you might remember the so-called “peace dividend” of those years. At the turn of the century, even a majority of the American public said the country was on the right track. The conservatives on the Supreme Court disagreed, handing Bush the presidency by putting a stop to the counting of “hanging chads” in Florida.

One of the biggest problems of the 2024 campaign is going to be convincing a majority of the American people that the economy is on the right track. The New York Times and President Joe Biden took a crack at this just this week.

The Economy Looks Sunny, a Potential Gain for Biden

“Recession fears have eased,” the Times reports. “Growth and job gains are beating expectations. Inflation is cooling. Consumers are happier. The president is waiting to benefit.”

“This is a good economy,” Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, declared at a news conference this week.

In light of evidence that the economy’s performance continues to defy expectations, President Biden went on the offensive

“America’s economy is the strongest in the world,” he said in a statement on Friday morning. “Today, we saw more proof.”

The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index jumped. The Labor Department said employers added 353,000 jobs in January, the highest monthly number in a year. It also revised its estimate of December job growth upward by more than 100,000 jobs — to 333,000 — suggesting that the job market was accelerating even with unemployment near half-century lows.

While Biden has struggled to sell voters on the positive signs in the economy under his watch, as the Times put it, the data shows rapid job gains, low unemployment and the fastest rebound in economic growth from the pandemic recession of any wealthy country. Wages are now rising faster than inflation. The economy grew 3.1 percent from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, including robust growth at the end of the year. The inflation rate is falling toward historically normal levels. U.S. stock markets are recording record highs.

The Federal Reserve, which sharply raised interest rates to tame price growth, signaled this week that it was likely to start cutting rates soon.

What Can ‘the People’ Do?

Now what is a role Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and independents can play in this counter propaganda campaign in their own lives and on their own social media accounts?

As I’ve been saying for years, when most people won’t listen, people are going to have to share the accurate version of events on social media, even if that means starting an argument with your recalcitrant friends and family members.

Human beings live and learn by narrative stories. These days that might mean memes and videos.

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, fiction or nonfiction. As a journalist and writer, that’s all I can do is write and tell stories, publish them on the web and share on social media.

Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these, according to this simple presentation on Wikipedia. The word narrative derives from the Latin verb narrare (to tell), which is derived from the adjective gnarus (knowing or skilled). The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative — narration — is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description and exposition.

The social and cultural activity of sharing narratives is called storytelling. These days that must include sharing memes on Facebook, sad as that happens to be for those of us who came up in the final days of the 20th century and the end of the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper. Especially those of us who are still trying to make a living by writing news stories rather than posting selfies or reality show clips on TikTok.

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