Why English Professors Look Down On “Communications” Professors

We Are All Propagandists Now https://t.co/aaV4abyVnD via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 22, 2021

Because the analysis in this article ends here:

The new propaganda manufactures dissent. It uses communication as force to keep people engaged and outraged – and it sets us in motion to trample and destroy things.

Two responses: 

1) Well, duh.  If that’s all you have to offer, why did I read the analysis in the first place?  Basic composition:  don't set up a problem for which you don't have a solution, or at least something better than "That's the way it is."

"We are all propagandists now"?  How is that any more than this?

2) Propaganda always manufactures dissent.  The propaganda of the peace activists and the civil rights activists in the ‘60’s was designed to manufacture dissent.  A more cogent analysis would point out how the current right wing dissent is a direct descendant (and perfectly foreseeable effect) of that dissent.

Propaganda doesn’t just manufacture dissent against the status quo.  It is used, as the article points out, to generate a new status quo, such as support for a war.  The “dissent” in that case is against the pre-war status quo, or the tendency to prefer stasis and familiarity over war and crisis and unfamiliarity.  We who come long after the “Great Wars” know the outcome; but at the time?  WWII was a “great victory” because of the ‘50’s recovery boom.  But that war nearly crippled this country, too. We forget how bleak the years of the war, and immediately after, were.  Or how bleak things were in Europe after WWI and then the further horrors of WWII (which was only the postponed completion of the first war).

“Dissent,” in other words, is a very fluid term.