Have you ever noticed that the Left tends to be far better at motivating crowds—especially young, emotional ones—than their counterparts on the Right? I mean, really, wasn’t Bernie more entertaining than Hillary, Ted, Rand and just about every other horse in the 2016 race with the exception of Candidate Trump?
Truth be told, the celebrants of the cultural Left—political progressives, entertainment elites and most news media—are nearly always better at propaganda, because they generally deal in untenable ideals (aka fantasies) rather than reality, and hold little regard for truth other than to turn it into balloon animals they will then proclaim alive. Such truth-twisting is grounded in the moral quicksand of relativism, and it shows up in bogs everywhere from the halls of academia to the Supreme Court, with its “living document” view of the Constitution, to Saturday Night Live, whose stock in trade is caricature trying to come off as commentary.
From politics to education, the Left has long fielded slicker salesmen than the starchy slugs on the Right. Thus, despite suffering occasional defeat at the hands of a Reagan or some lesser figure riding his chimeric coattails, they have largely succeeded in gradually nudging—sometimes yanking—American culture in their direction.
Until Donald Trump.
Trump did not reverse this leftward march so much as he confused the marchers, like a like a kid tearing apart an ant trail with his sneaker. And although it remains to be seen whether the 45th President of the United States will lead the country left, right or in a drunken weave, the mere fact that he ruined the old trail was enough to put him into the White House.
I have long maintained that in politics, a party’s proficiency at propaganda is invariably inverse to their actual ability to govern. In other words, the reason leftists are often clever at political spin is because they have to be, since their policies don’t work. Conservatives, on the other hand, have historically proven less adept at marketing their wares, accustomed as they were to letting the career skills they brought to offce do the talking for them. President Trump may muss this little construct as well, or he may vindicate it yet again, as did his immediate predecessor.
The savvy reader will note that lying and propaganda are not necessarily one and the same. Propaganda may sometimes be truth too loud, as Candidate Trump often demonstrated (and before him a host of revivalists harking back as far as Charles Finney.) More frequently, however, propaganda is the devil in Groucho glasses, and as time goes by truly dedicated propagandists are likely to leave the truth behind altogether in favor of furthering their deceit.
Communist Russia provided the perfect example. The Soviet KGB employed three primary propaganda techniques, even spelling them out in their manual for field agents. First was what we might call “cultivation,” where the target of their ire was mentioned briefly but unfavorably for some weeks or months in various news articles, setting the stage for a big smear later on. They often used this trick on people they eventually intended to arrest and either send to prison or into exile. I have friends in both categories.
The KGB also instructed their agents to take a “180 approach” to the truth, i.e., to state exactly the opposite of their true intentions, and to state this position frequently and without wavering over time. The goal was not necessarily to make everyone believe the lie, but rather to make the truth seem less certain.
That technique was related to a third one, wherein patently absurd lies and accusations were hurled in order to make subtle ones believable. It’s the “trojan horse” method, and it is now popular with the American press. For example, if you want people to believe that a certain person is racist, you accuse him of two or three utterly ridiculous offenses, while dropping in the white lie about his past “ties” to segregationsists, the truth being that he once received the unwanted endorsement of some 20-member redneck fraternity.
The KGB failed, of course, as witnessed by the ash heap formerly known as the USSR, but that failure actually spotlights the one good quality about lying: It inevitably succumbs to its own poisons, because it is the work of history’s greatest failure, Satan.
Realizing that fact served me well throughout my three Christian dozen missions to Soviet Bloc nations, both before and after the fall of Marxist communism. Staring at a giant propaganda billboard one day in Estonia and cursing it under my breath, I suddenly realized it was nothing more than a garish pretense, like the raised voice of a substitute teacher who proves he’s not in charge by yelling that he is. After that day, I made it a point to stop at every portrait of Brezhnev or statue of Lenin—they were everywhere—and cursing it. “This is not your country,” I would whisper while feigning a tourist’s curiosity. “This nation is God’s property and you’re coming down.” Needless to say, those portraits and statues were swiftly cast down in late 1991, and for years afterward I stopped, lifted my hands in praise to God, and danced on their empty pedestals.
Whether in politics, courtroom or classroom, lying eventually caves in on itself for the simple reason that it is the construction of false realities, an alternative to the real world over which only God can preside. As my Russian friends used to joke, “Our government thinks it is God. If that’s true, then all our problems are solved!” In other words, being God is a really hard job that will take you down if you’re not suited to it.
Yes, deceit does injure people, but in the long run, truth tellers have every reason to rejoice, because lies are houses built on sand. They provide no foundation for the future, and any institution—political administrations, newspapers, universities, corporations—that relies on them will fall. Those left standing will thrive, because Truth will have set them free.
“The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession'” Psalm 2:7b,8, ESV.
Christ’s opponents are two millennia too late. He asked.