For The Atlantic’s June cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” staff writer Anne Applebaum reports on how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places around the world are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom everywhere. Applebaum’s story is adapted from her forthcoming book, Autocracy Inc. (publishing July 23), and draws from her exceptional reporting for The Atlantic.
Even in authoritarian states where surveillance is almost total, Applebaum reports, “the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.” This has resulted in autocratic regimes slowly turning their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. Applebaum writes: “If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.”
To accomplish this, Applebaum reports, autocracies are now making systematic efforts to influence both popular and elite audiences, including via the use of state-controlled media—most notably China’s Xinhua news agency and Russia’s RT, but also Venezuela’s Telesur network and Iran’s Press TV, along with numerous others—to create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies. These, in turn, are repeated and amplified in other countries, translated into multiple languages, and reshaped for local markets around the world.
When these stories make their way to the U.S., Applebaum reports, “a part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers.” The State Department has in the past decade created a division to preemptively combat (or “prebunk”) foreign disinformation operations. But no such agency exists to combat the spread of Russian and Chinese propaganda within the United States.
“One could call this a secret authoritarian ‘plot’ to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface,” Applebaum writes. “Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.”
“Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War” was published today in The Atlantic. Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.
