As all are aware, today is the third anniversary of the assault on our nation’s Capitol by followers of former President Donald Trump, provoked by former President Donald Trump.
Earlier this week, MSNBC’s Morning Joe cited a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll which indicated that in 2021, 60% of adult Americans thought Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the riot; now, only 53% do. Of that total, in 2021 27% of Republicans, 57% of Independents, and 92% of Democrats thought Mr. Trump had culpability; now, only 14% of Republicans, 56% of Independents, and – the diminution most surprising to me – only (relatively speaking) 86% of Democrats think he was responsible.
The Morning Joe panel professed to be reassured by the fact that a majority of Americans believe Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.
I was appalled. We no longer live in an era in which we had to absorb our news through print media, with little if any benefit of pictures, an age in which written accounts would necessarily shift over time and any mental images they evoked in readers, no matter how initially vivid, would necessarily fade over time. Now, we have the video of Mr. Trump speaking on January 6, 2021 – a record the accuracy of which no one disputes – urging his adherents, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then, his followers stormed the Capitol.
Over the last three years, given the information now in the public domain that wasn’t available in 2021 — the facts uncovered by the U.S. House of Representatives’ “January 6th Committee,” the number of convicted January 6th rioters who have said their actions were incited by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, the guilty pleas by Trump lawyers to election interference-related charges, the almost-billion dollar defamation settlement paid by Fox News to Dominion Systems, the $148 million defamation award against Trump co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani to two Georgia election workers, the wide number of statements made by Trump White House staffers implicating Mr. Trump in various ways, to name just a few — the number of Americans believing that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol riot should logically be significantly higher than it was in 2021, not lower. Yet today apparently only a bare majority of our people believe Mr. Trump bears responsibility.
I suppose I should be heartened that we have the video of Mr. Trump’s speech and the ensuing actions of the rioters; it is alarming to contemplate how low a percentage of Americans would still consider Mr. Trump culpable for inciting the assault if the visual evidence didn’t exist.
When confronted with the effect that Mr. Trump’s repeated lies have had upon our people, I often consult his de facto handbook [which, even if (as he claims) he hasn’t read, he has absorbed]: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. What follows are Hitler’s own words about propaganda, published almost exactly a century ago; I leave it to you to decide how relevant they are to what we confront today:
“… [P]ropaganda is no more than a weapon, though a frightful one in the hands of an expert.
… It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
… The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts … whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real … its function … consists in attracting the attention of the crowd … its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. … [W]e must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest [propaganda’s] intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.
… The receptivity of the great masses is limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan [Emphasis added].
… [Those who believe everything they read are] the great mass of the people and … the simplest-minded part of the nation. … To it belong all those who have neither been born or trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white. … [T]he influence of the press will be enormous. [The great mass of people] are not able or willing themselves to examine what is set before them, and as a result their whole attitude toward all the problems of the day can be reduced almost exclusively to the outside influence of others. This can be advantageous when their enlightenment is provided by a serious and truth-loving party, but it is catastrophic when scoundrels and liars provide it. [Emphasis Added; included here for the irony.]
… The nationalization of the broad masses can … be … achieved only by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation toward the goal to be achieved.
… The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of diplomats. The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or negative attitude lies. It is receptive only to an expression of force in one of these two directions and never to a half-measure hovering between the two. Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in the fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward [Emphasis Added].
Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. Its name is not objectivity (read weakness) but will and power.
… The broad masses are only a piece of Nature and their sentiment does not understand the mutual handshake of people who claim that they want opposite things. What they desire is victory of the stronger and the destruction of the weak or his unconditional subjection. [Emphasis Added]”
This is what we are up against. Propaganda is, as Hitler observed, a frightful weapon in the hands of an expert. Mr. Trump’s support is, as Hitler would have predicted, extraordinarily stable. Thomas Paine once declared, “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” That said, in addition to concentrating on turning out the currently uncertain, disappointed, and disaffected who will, if in the ballot box, vote for Mr. Biden, the President’s team also needs to message effectively to reclaim as many as possible of the distracted 7% of Americans who in 2021 recognized that Mr. Trump was accountable for arguably the darkest day in our nation’s history, but reportedly do no longer.
Since January 6th cannot be undone, let its reminder be a tool to help us save our democracy.
McCoy's Noise 