What is certainly new is that a tribe of PR spinners, political operatives and psychologists are finding increasingly sophisticated ways to manipulate us, these naive people. I was illuminated by Oborne’s book pointing me to the fascination Boris Johnson’s one-time chief adviser felt for the manipulations of Willi Münzenberg, the shadowy chief propagandist of the pre-war Communist Party of Germany and architect of the Comintern, the Soviet-controlled international organisation that promoted communism worldwide from 1919 to 1943.
Dominic Cummings, before he became the prime minister’s would-be Rasputin, wrote that Münzenberg dazzled the intelligentsia, was “frighteningly effective” and “the most brilliant propagandist”. His techniques were the basis of most modern PR, said Cummings. And chief among them was that even educated people “tend to get their political views from feelings, mood, Zeitgeist and fashion… It is a mistake to think that the better educated are ‘more rational’ in their political analysis; often they are less rational.”
He went on, somewhat sinisterly: “Much of the techniques of Soviet propaganda… rely on one principle – how to overwhelm reason and humans’ capacity for objective analysis.”
According to Cummings, in other words, as far as the successful propagandist is concerned, it is more important for people to feel like “one of us” than to have regard for actual facts.
Now add to this basic Cummings approach the other key psychological elements in the modern political operative’s toolbox – the invention of imaginary enemies; the concoction of scientific uncertainty where none exists; the doubling-down when challenged – and you have a powerful means of stirring people up and sending them in the direction you want them to go. It becomes irrelevant that lies are being told.
Oborne puts it this way: “At the heart of the new politics is the nightmare assumption that emotion is more important than thought.”
I fear that he needs to face up to it: this state of affairs is certainly a nightmare, but it is not just an assumption. Emotion is indeed so much more powerful a political force than mere facts, and the reign of Johnson is therefore not going to be stopped by calling him a liar. He needs to be combatted not by truer facts, but by better, more decent, emotions.
‘The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism’ by Peter Oborne is published by Simon & Schuster UK
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
