This is probably going to be hit and run because I'm off to a Khanukah party soon. (Yes, I spell it "Khanukah." Deal with it!) But I have already done what fighting I wanted to do elsewhere, and a smart comment by a poster with whom I was (mildly) arguing made me realize what the "GG-BWD Affair" is about. So I'll briefly set forth my thesis in a way I hope is not provocative, Kum-Ba-Ya.
This is about propaganda. Most of you probably think of "propaganda" as a negative word, but I'm using it a purely descriptive without making value judgments about it. Here, to prove that, I'll say this: "I think that the Democratic Party needs better propaganda." I truly do.
I'm not immune to the appeals of good propaganda. As I've said elsewhere, I would sometimes over the course of the last campaign season visit BWD's diaries precisely because they were propaganda -- and I needed a fix of Happy Thoughts. Propaganda is like a recreational drug, and I lurked in BWD's diaries some days, using them in moderation to make myself feel good.
That's what they were there for. That's the point.
There is an actual science behind propaganda, rooted in my own home field of social psychology. If you understand this, then you will probably understand why GG described BWD's as "creepy." From a certain perspective they are, and from another perspective they aren't. We can have that discussion if we understand what propaganda is supposed to do:
Propaganda is political communication designed to bypass our process of reasoning.
George W. Bush famously spoke about "catapulting the propaganda," and most of us understood that phrase (as it was probably intended) as "bypassing the media." But why bypass the media? It's not like he, unlike us -- and unlike Obama in many of his speeches -- had problems getting access to the public through the media. But this wasn't merely a matter of gaining direct access to the public without media blocking it, it was also an attempt to bypass the rational analytic function that a healthy media provides. Because BushCo catapulted the propaganda, the media asked fewer questions, because the story from BushCo's perspective was already reaching the public and the public largely wasn't worried about analysis -- part of which Bush famously disdained as "nuance."
The most common way that we think of propaganda is in the tradition of Joseph Goebbels -- whom I invoke not because he was an evil Nazi but because he was an innovator and master craftsman as a propagandist. This involves tactics such as "the Big Lie": repeating something often enough that it becomes thought of as true. Well, take a step back: why does this work? It is because it uses the form of argument -- implacable repetition -- as a way to, yes!, "bypass our process of reasoning." We use the fact that something is being repeated all the time, often using the same language, as a heuristic, because usually in our lives when something is repeated to us that way, it turns out to be true. ("Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria." "The cube root of 256 is 8." "Smoking causes lung cancer." See, that last one is a reminder that propaganda can be good.)
Getting people to focus on anything but the rational basis for your proposition is helpful when rationality is not on your side. That doesn't mean -- because I'm sure that some of you just read it that way -- "when your proposition is irrational." Please understand the difference. "Not on your side" means "not the best way to convey information to your audience." If you're talking to schoolchildren, you don't want to debate the niceties of sexual behavior with them. "Anyone who tries to touch you there is being BAD." That may be the limit of what children can understand -- so one resorts to propaganda.
Voters, also, often need things simplified -- because they are not interested applying their reasoning faculties to the dreary and depression issues at hand. The Republicans are very good at this and Democrats much less so. I'm sure that I don't have to review this. Oversimplification is another effective tool of propaganda. So is Manichean (black-and-white) thinking. There are many more, but my time is limited.
Now, that's mostly written and verbal propaganda, that uses confusion and distraction to get past rational analysis. There's another kind, and the most famous proponent and practitioner of it is, like it or not, Leni Riefenstahl. This is visual propaganda, which bypasses rational analysis of one's position by deft use of visual imagery to evoke the desired emotions. Again, there is a science behind this as well as an art and craft. It works.
(Music is also useful as a propaganda tool; check out campaign commercials sometimes. Music -- usually, not always -- speaks more effectively to the emotions than to the rational mind. Largely, the medium is the message. (Think of Borat getting people to cheerily sing "Throw the Jew Down the Well.")
Riefenstahl showed how images could be used to evoke pride and nationalism, largely through an appeal to strength and power, without inviting debate into the rational basis of those images. You could argue with a Riefenstahl film, but for people who were enjoying its surface grandeur and beauty -- if their rational (and moral) faculties were in neutral -- that seemed out of place. It served the interest of eliciting pride and associating it with the preferred target. It made rationality beside the point.
I'm sure I don't need to give you a whole lot of examples of how this works. Many of them are fairly benign -- Olympics coverage, for example. We see that runner at the Beijing Olympics running around the rim of the stadium and we experience positive emotions that we associate with China. We can stop the process and say "but but but ... Falun Gong and prison labor and currency manipulation and Tibet and Taiwan and Internet censorship and repression," but we don't -- and that's why it's propaganda and that's why it works.
Our longtime commenter edrie made a smart comment in the original GG-BWD diary that I think helps to highlight the different perspectives between those who like and are creeped out by BWD's work. (And, as I've said, at different times I have both reactions.)
those who do what bwd is doing are sometimes called "biographers". she is listing the accomplishments of a president who is being treated very unfairly by the press and his own party.
perhaps due to the expectations place upon him by others, when he didn't live up to THEIR expectations, they are evicerating him.
years ago, a very wise woman asked me if it was fair to blame someone for not living up to MY expectations of them instead of living up to their own of themselves.
that is some excellent advice that many here could use as a guide.
as for bwd's site - i like the pictures. i like them alot... just as i liked pictures of previous presidents (well, not bush2) and the good things they brought to a troubled nation and world. photos of prez-kisses on baby heads are legion and they make us go "AAAWWWWWWwwwweeee" - and for a moment, tension flies away, we feel good and life is a wee bit better, if only for a second.
photographs evoke emotions. positive or negative - they bring on emotional responses. the press shows very few shots of obama and of the first lady. why? because their pictures of where they go and what they do make people feel good - both on the ground and the viewer of others' reactions to them.
are we so bitter as a party that we cannot abide "feeling good" for even a minute in this hectic world?
She's very right about the good part of reactions to BWD's work, and why it works as propaganda. We look at those photos of Obama (at least I do) and I smile, relax, and don't want to analyze rationally his Afghanistan policy or his pragmatic or pusillanimous approach to Republicans, etc. They remind me of why I like the guy -- still. And that's they're point. They are not neutral, any more than taking a powerful tranquilizer before listening to a Dick Cheney speech is neutral in its impact.
Where I respectively think she's wrong -- and I think that this is such an instructive disagreement that it prompted this diary -- is that simply putting forth photos in this emotionally appealing fashion and with this purpose is not biography! Furthermore, it crowds out biography, much as the Disney musicals on Broadway, by purporting to be "musical theater," crowd out musical theater.
Part of my response to her was this, and I think it gets to the nut of our disagreement:
The use of visual representations is a way to appeal directly to emotions without bothering with much in the way of cognition. (Music does this too -- which is why a soundtrack is so important in PR efforts like political ads.) There is nothing wrong with that per se. It is what it is, it can be comforting, and I too took solace in BWD's diaries at time during the grueling fall campaign. But please don't call it "biography."
Biography is at root a cognitively based, intellectual enterprise that seeks to understand propositions about the subject's life, through anecdotes and analysis. In most of BWD's diaries (of the ones I saw towards the end, at least), the written commentary was mostly sarcastic remarks about how terrible and unpopular the President is, inviting us to reject them as absurd. (Then we got hammered in the election.)
In fact, if I were to summarize my discomfort with (and GG's disdain for) BWD's work, it would be precisely that it invites us to confuse pictorial hagiography with "biography," or (biography in the short term) with political analysis, and that it therefore impedes our understanding of Obama.
GG is creeped out by BWD's illustrated reverence for Obama because it is propaganda -- because it drives out rational analysis of his policies. (Can I get people to agree that it is designed to do so? Read its defenders's comments! OK, I probably can't -- but it's true, and that's not an insult. It serves its purpose extremely well, and that is a service that most of us occasionally need.)
edrie appreciates BWD's illustrated reverence for Obama for the same reasons. She continues in her comment:
okay - back to your attempt to find a comparison for bwd.
let me offer one:
LIFE MAGAZINE - a photojournal experience that ALWAYS made people feel a little bit better - or sadder - or hopeful.
that is what bwd represents to me. if she doesn't for you - that's okay. people see things in differing lights. i don't tell others they have to go look and respond and i don't want people telling me HOW to go look and respond. that is a personal journey and the rest of the site here isn't invited on my journey because it is MINE, and mine alone!
that's why i get annoyed. who thinks they have the right to tell me how to experience life. it is MY life, not theirs.
I can't argue with this. I can disagree, but it's not something about which people can argue. It wears its imperviousness to argumentation on its sleeve. We just have to disagree about the value of such depictions. I can argue that they aren't biography, and are dangerous (or at least disturbing) to the extent that they drive out the possibility of true biography that is amenable to analysis -- but that's a different matter from whether edrie should be able to do her thing. She should. But that choice can have consequences when the subject turns back to policy debate.
I have to get ready for my party now. I've seldom written a diary with less ability to predict how it will be taken. But I hope that it will help us focus the issues. Those people who disdain BWD do so because they want to be able to discuss the Obama Administration critically and analytically so as to change if for what they believe it to be the better -- and BWD's emotionally-evocative approach gets in the way. Those who love BWD's work do so because it speaks to emotional truths that they cherish -- and they don't want to always have to see Obama's policies analyzed and criticized, because they think that at base he is a good man doing a good job and that too much critical analysis undermines him. They rightly understand that some amount of positive propaganda is pretty much necessary and are pissed that others prevent BWD's from having its salubrious effects.
I am, as I often am, in the middle on this one. Positive emotion towards our President and Party is necessary for political success. But rational analysis -- including seeing when the President is losing the public, and would be doing so even had Daily Kos never come into being, because some of his problems are with reality rather than its interpretation by this likes of us -- is necessary as well.
Neither side is really wrong here -- but I hope that this focus on why BWD's work has the positive impact on people that it does and why an analytical critic of Obama like Greenwald finds it creepy -- at least elevates the debate somewhat.
Update: Hi folks. After about eight hours away from home, almost seven of which at my father's house, I came home to see what looks like a vibrant and interesting discussion. Thanks to all who participated. I'll go through them as best I can and answer what seems appropriate; I just appreciate that a good discussion like this could take place even in a hit-and-run diary. Of course, it's disturbing to this that my absence could actually improve the discussion....