The War Nationalist’s Delusion

TFW you realize propaganda has been a constant for your entire adult life.

Shortly after publishing “The Nationalist’s Delusion,” Adam Serwer tweeted out an additional bit of commentary that he didn’t spend much time on in the article:

There’s a section in my piece on something that I think is underappreciated as a factor in Trump’s election: nearly two decades of post-9/11 war nationalism.

In my own Trump-induced vertigo, adrift in the news cycle, I’ve tried to anchor my sanity in American history and my bookshelf has become stacked with works from World War I — another era defined by war nationalism. It wasn’t this particular parallel that drew me in as much as all the others: globalization, technology reshaping the economy, economic inequality, droves of immigration, migration to cities.

More than any similarity, though, I was drawn to the sheer electricity of the era’s marketplace of ideas. Immense change cultivated an equally immense flowering of philosophy, politics and art from writers buzzing in the pages of newly launched magazines. Randolph Bourne and The Seven Arts idealists, Walter Lippmann and The New Republic liberals, Max Eastman and The Masses socialists. While war raged in Europe, neutral America’s future remained open-ended and anything seemed possible. (Jeremy McCarter’s Young Radicals paints an excellent portrait of that optimistic possibility). Coming of age in the Obama years and peak Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, theirs was a familiar hope.

But tragically, America entered World War I and that creative, constructive multiplicity of ideas was outlawed. With the censorship of Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 — draconian restrictions on free speech — and the propaganda of the Committee on Public Information — a new and influential wing of the Wilson administration — the singular idea of war nationalism became government policy. Where I had seen in public debate the evidence of democracy, the government saw “voices of anger and confusion” that had left public opinion “muddled by the pull and haul of opposed interests.”

“These were conditions that could not be permitted to endure,” wrote George Creel, the architect of the Committee on Public Information. With his staff of 150,000, Creel’s propaganda flooded American streets, newspapers, movie theaters, and radio waves. In parallel, dissenters of the war were jailed, magazines barred from circulation, and pacifists assaulted. Millions of men who had voted in 1916 to elect Wilson explicitly because he kept America out of war enlisted just a year later to fight the Germans in Europe.

With a thorough warping of the marketplace of ideas, public opinion had been swiftly, mechanically flipped — which is what was so jarring to me about Serwer’s point on war nationalism.

I read this chapter of our history with horror. As a devout believer in journalism’s fundamental role in democracy, I can’t conceive of America without freedom of speech. So as I kept reading, it came as a relief to learn that our modern conception of a dominant first amendment emerged after the war, almost allergically, out of the era’s own horror at what it had witnessed.

But here’s Adam Serwer, telling me not to be so relieved. Two decades of post-9/11 war nationalism. I was 13 years old when the twin towers fell. Have I really spent the majority of my life, and my entire adulthood, in the same sort of deluded public opinion that I’ve been reading about?

In November 2005, Rolling Stone published “The Man Who Sold the War,” a National Magazine Award-winning report on John Rendon, “one of the most powerful people in Washington … a leader in the strategic field known as ‘perception management,’ manipulating information — and, by extension, the news media — to achieve the desired result.”

I only recently found the piece after a suspicion that if we were living amid war nationalism, surely we would have our own George Creel. Regrettably, the search did not take long:

• “The Rendon Group … has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help ‘create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.’”
• “In a ‘secret amendment’ to Pentagon policy, the report warns, ‘psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies.’”
• “By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas — knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly.”
• “In modern warfare, [Rendon] believes, the outcome depends largely on the public’s perception of the war — whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. ‘We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality,’ he says. ‘Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war.’”

That the Iraq War was a mistake based on lies, faulty intelligence or overconfident ideology is now common knowledge, but how its orchestration by the Bush administration, Rendon and others distorted the marketplace of ideas through the ruthless commitment of war nationalism remains, as Serwer suggests, underappreciated by most.

“When you boil down precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it’s fairly simple,” wrote Al Gore in The Assault on Reason. “He waged the politics of blind faith. He used a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent, and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration.”

But the tactics of war nationalism bled beyond the war.

Earlier this week, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times, published a revealing essay in The Intercept about the Times agreeing to suppress stories at the insistence of government. The stories — one about a mishandled CIA operation regarding Iran’s nuclear program and the other detailing the NSA’s then-unknown domestic surveillance program — would have been embarrassing for the government and alarming to the public. In both instances, high-ranking administration officials summoned Times editors to intervene, successfully spiking the stories by citing national security risks.

“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune,” explains Bill Keller, then the Times editor-in-chief. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

While I can’t judge Keller for taking that stance or even necessarily disagree with him, it’s hard to imagine a quote that better exhibits the success of war nationalist propaganda.

As I write this, I feel almost pathetically naïve. As someone who worked in both journalism and (perhaps more relevantly) native advertising, I felt I had a highly developed sense of media literacy — a well-practiced ability to recognize the difference between fact and fiction, PR and journalism, spin and reality. Somehow, I had written off the idea that naked propaganda and censorship could be a feature of American life. I imagined it a relic of the past or a tool exclusively for autocrats running developing countries.

Recognizing the fallacy in that didn’t take too much effort, but did require accepting that Keller was right. The world is a dangerous place. Platforms, bad faith, kakistocracy, dwindling government transparency, and fading trust in media have made the world more ripe for propaganda than ever before.

Next on the reading list will be Zeynep Tufekci.