MOONDEERS NOTES on Bernays' PROPAGANDA

The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.

The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.

The sincere and gifted politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.

An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda.

Present-day politics places emphasis on personality. An entire party, a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality.

The public is not made up merely of Democrats and Republicans. The public is made up of interlocking groups—economic, social, religious, educational, cultural, racial, collegiate, local, sports, and hundreds of others.

The media through which a political campaign may be brought home to the public are numerous. Every object which presents pictures or words that the public can see, everything that presents intelligible sounds, can be utilized in one way or another.

The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public.

I often wonder whether the politicians of the future, who are responsible for maintaining the prestige and effectiveness of their party, will not endeavor to train politicians who are at the same time propagandists.

The criticism is often made that propaganda tends to make the President of the United States so important that he becomes not the President but the embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I quite agree that this is so.

The public actions of America's chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stage-managed. The whole basis of successful propaganda is to have an objective and then to endeavor to arrive at it through an exact knowledge of the public and modifying circumstances to manipulate and sway that public.

Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses. Is this government by propaganda?