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Book Review: Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction

Nicholas O’Shaughnessy has a wonderful epigrammatic and lyrical style of weaving and writing a plot while educating and engaging the reader in the ever more advanced and complex issues that exist within macromarketing. His focus for much of his career has been on communication, discourse, political marketing, and propaganda, and in his latest work, he returns to his favorite area of study, politics and propaganda. In 1990, he broke new ground with his insightful narrative and early guide to the modern phenomenon of political marketing with his book The Phenomenon of Political Marketing (O’Shaughnessy 1990). This text conceptualized much of the early thinking and the development of key methodological building blocks for the establishment of what has become a substantive international research field, political marketing. The book was grounded in key observations and reflections on the campaigns and promotion of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 1980s. It framed much of what we see and study today as agenda setting, spin, and the dumbing down of political debate and discourse into a number of repeated slogans, images, and sound bites. The work’s primary thesis was that marketing is not merely a metaphor but a relevant and useful perspective and way of interpreting American politics and American government— not least because the costs of campaign advertising mortgaged American legislatures to special interest pressure groups (a criticism that seems even more significant today). Of course, although originally intended to be a critique of American political communication, inevitably, during the past two decades, this form of campaigning and fund-raising has grown throughout the Western world and has meant that many more politicians are in hock to lobbies and special interests than they were a decade ago. This early text, along with Newman and Sheth’s (1993) The Marketing of the President: Political Marketing as Campaign Strategy, underpinned much of the past decade’s developments in theory development in this significant area. O’Shaughnessy’s work stalled somewhat in the early 1990s. His 1990 work was not widely read or understood as it was not deemed mainstream and was probably a decade ahead of its time in outlining a radical reinterpretation of communication. After a pause to reevaluate his thinking, his political work has continued, with a distinct focus on such issues and themes within contemporary political communication as the ethics of negative advertising and the rise of what he calls symbolic government. He has also developed a more general interest in what he sees as the renaissance of propaganda, and this is explored in depth in the book under review, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction. This text contributes substantially to the evolution of a significantly underresearched field of enquiry and also rejuvenates the word “propaganda” in academic debate, discourse, and study. It differs from current work on this subject in that it is conceptual and not a historic narrative. It broadens the scope of the term “propaganda,” bringing it up to date in the context of the twenty-first century and proposing a conceptual framework to understand recent contemporary events—of particular note, the Iraq War and the concept of and search for both tangible and intangible weapons of mass destruction, or as O’Shaughnessy teasingly refers to them, the “Weapons of Mass Seduction.” However, one is left reflecting whether over time, the image of Iraq will be more associated with the hanging of Saddam Hussein than with the coalition invasion (liberation) and the development of democracy. The manufacture and regular massaging of public opinion today is a compulsory activity. Whether we like it or not, any public organization, major corporation, or political entity can either seek to manipulate the basic and brutal judgments of public opinion or become their victim. That is O’Shaughnessy’s book’s primal proposition. Clearly, the importance of persuasion and even political marketing is no new thing. Plato, after all, attacked the sophists (teachers of rhetoric) for making no distinction between truth and falsehood, and Cicero’s brother wrote a political campaign manual on how his brother could get elected to the Roman senate. However, it is only today that we can really speak of a persuasion culture or argue that victory or defeat, whether in government or in business, accrues to those who are the most publicly articulate and organized. In his book, O’Shaughnessy explores the arguments with regard to this phenomenon and maintains that the principal argument lies deeper than this, not with the use, but with the abuse, of persuasion. In his thesis, O’Shaughnessy explores the following propositions about persuasion today: