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Trump and Trumpism were more than mere personality politics. He hijacked the system of minority rule and the alternative media reality created by Republicans since the 1990s while adding innovations of his own to create the Big Lie of #StopTheSteal, which is now the tail that wags the Republican party dog. Control of this machine will determine who wins the Republican nomination in 2024.
Political technology works. It can create total systems of control. It can give malign actors the edge in political competition. It can create fake political subjects and entire virtual political geometries. It can grow support for fringe and minority politics. And it can be used to reverse lever outsider political takeovers by creating artificial rivals to traditional political structures and then drive them mainstream.
Our theory treats nominally democratic institutions as constraints that autocrats struggle to loosen and citizens’ beliefs as the central battlefield on which the struggle for political change is waged. After reviewing the book’s key findings, in this chapter we use our theoretical framework to suggest a series of important questions about autocratic politics in the early twenty-first century. We explore how the world’s autocrats are attempting to shape their citizens’ beliefs by weaponizing distinctly modern technologies, not just propaganda and censorship. We also discuss how the world’s autocrats are attempting to loosen the electoral constraints that bind them. Although this book is about propaganda in autocracies, it has important implications for politics in democracies, especially as a series of “populist-authoritarian” leaders take power across Europe and North America. We argue, in particular, that Xi Jinping’s propaganda strategy helps us understand the process of democratic erosion underway across the world. We conclude by discussing the book’s implications for public policy.
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