Political Consumption: Post-Truths, Marketing, and Popular Culture
In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary chose post-truth as the Word of the Year.
“Post-truth: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
While 2016 heralded modern dialogue on post-truth politics and rhetoric, the birth of post-truth political culture dates to 1917, when former President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. into its first World War.
In 1916, Wilson’s campaign of “neutrality” in the burgeoning war in Europe prompted his re-election as president. Mere months later, on April 2nd, 1917, Wilson recanted his campaign and stood before Congress asking them to declare war on Germany. To rally Americans behind the war effort, the Wilson administration launched a massive propaganda seeking to manufacture popular support towards America’s war efforts. The campaign, led by the Committee on Public Information (CPI), used newspapers, the radio, and posters to strike fervour for America’s involvement in the war. This included the recruitment of “Four-Minute Men” who were trained to give speeches around the nation speaking in favour of U.S. involvement in World War I. Central to these speeches was the use of emotions, symbols, and political buzzwords which resonated with listeners. For instance, rhetoric like “liberty” and “democracy” that was used to describe the U.S. contrasted words like “autocracy” and “treachery” that was used to portray Germany. Most interestingly, historian David Kennedy notes the speeches given by the Four-Minute Men would become reminiscent of the “Two Minutes of Hate” in George Orwell's novel 1984.
Consequently, the success of the CPI’s propaganda campaign inspired the U.S. government to leverage politically motivated mass marketing campaigns for decades to come. Following the events of September 11, 2001, the U.S. sought to promote the idea of large-scale global war to the American public. Despite the fact the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks was situated in Afghanistan, former president George W. Bush used the terror attack as an opportunity to market Iraq as a threat to the American people and the values of freedom and liberty America stands for. The presumption of Iraq as threatening was based on a purported link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. Thus, it was this assumption that framed the Iraq War as part of the broader “War on Terrorism”. The success of Bush’s campaign for the war lay not in providing the American people with a fact-based argument, but rather by generating fear within the American public through the use of a single buzzword: “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. With these repeated speech acts, Bush’s government presented the American public with an existential threat. Seeking to gain popular approval in the face of criticism, the White House formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and convened a group of experts to market war in Iraq. An example of a marketing tactic included an aggressive public relations campaign that predominantly relied on “Weapons of Mass Destruction” to generate emotive responses. While appearing on CNN, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice mentioned “Weapons of Mass Destruction” 13 times. In a similar fashion, Bush mentioned “Weapons of Mass Destruction” eight times within the first half hour of his Ohio speech.
Unlike the “Four-Minute Men” who were recruited and trained to market war to the public at large, modern advancements allow marketing to proliferate outside of government intervention. The most notable way marketing occurs is through popular culture, particularly from Hollywood. For example, the American-based television series 24, which premiered just two months after the events of 9/11, featured a different weapon of mass destruction in each season. In addition, pop culture’s successful marketing of the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” resulted in the term being awarded ‘word of the year’ in 2002 by the American Dialect’s Society—just one year prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
These two examples of the employment of post-truth rhetoric and mass marketing demonstrate how these tactics were used to consolidate public opinion and legitimise war. Post-truth rhetoric in political practices was not conceptualised in the Trump presidential era, but rather is a historical tool of political power. Simply put, actors will continuously rely on post-truth politics during politically turbulent times. The challenge, then, becomes the critical evaluation of mass political marketing. Upon examination, many of the emotive terms and phrases evoked by Western nations are proven to be empty signifiers. Who is the “axis of evil?” What are “weapons of mass destruction,” and when are they qualified? Who is the “War on Terror” even against? More importantly, who has the power and authority to answer these questions? To answer these questions, it is vital to examine the intersection of political marketing and popular culture. Television and film, and more recently social media platforms such as Twitter, have scaled the original marketing conducted by Wilson and the “Four-Minute Men”. Therefore, it is essential that we ask ourselves what we are consenting to when we buy into these Hollywood narratives of terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Image courtesy of Fabrice Florin via Wikimedia Commons, ©2017, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team
