Is there a Voice of America anymore?

Fans of propaganda tell us that broadcasting to the Iron Curtin helped end the Cold War; they think we should try it again.

Two men I respect wrote an interesting Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week. In How America Can Win the Information War, Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey make a persuasive case for the resumption of American participation in the global “information wars.”

They are concerned that countries like China and Russia are expending a great deal of effort and money on spreading their respective messages. I am not going to opine on whether or not I agree with their concerns, nor if I think such a concern is worth spending time and treasure on “countering” those messages in a perpetual spiral of competing propaganda.

Here is how the authors see the US position in the world:

To prevail, the U.S. must employ every tool of national power. Regrettably, one of the most forceful and inexpensive weapons has withered over the last 20 years: advocacy—the marshaling of truth and fact to persuade foreign audiences. Recall the important part played by the U.S. Information Agency in winning the Cold War. Its Voice of America broadcasts persuaded Soviet citizens that life on our side of the Iron Curtain was better than theirs.

VOA didn’t rely on news alone; it employed editorial writers and even contracted for made-in-Hollywood films. If sole reliance on news sufficed, today’s war criminal and serial violator of human rights, Mr. Putin, wouldn’t stand high in Russian polls. Instead, the U.S. must bring back advocacy meant to persuade. That’s where wits come in.

Defeating propaganda with truthful advocacy is more difficult than in USIA’s heyday. Our adversaries outspend us by orders of magnitude and, using bots and social media, dump disinformation into millions of computers, eyes, ears and brains every day. They have massively stepped up their game. So must we.

In theory, I agree with Messrs. Lieberman and Humphrey regarding the value of informing the world about America’s virtues and - perhaps - unique value proposition. But I am afraid their mental models of how the world - and America - works are outdated and inaccurate. An inaccurate understanding of how things work makes it well-nigh impossible to craft the sort of influential persuasion campaign they have in mind.

My first concern is about the practical difficulties of empowering the federal bureaucracy to “speak for America’s interests abroad.” There may once have been a time - in 1945, say - when there was a general consensus amongst Americans as to what the nation “believed” as a whole. I am not so sure that such a thing exists anymore. Even if such a message consensus could be taken for granted, for starters, the federal bureaucracy in 1945 was a whole lot leaner and people served - imagine this! - at the will of their employer. Today, the wall of bureaucratic protections which cocoons and coddles unionized civil servants has changed the nature of the people with whom we would entrust this new propaganda war.

Back to the primary concern about the lack of a demonstrable unifying message “about America” upon which we would base this new Voice of America. Despite what some of the professional political class or professional commentariat believe, the cultural and political divides in current American life are not manufactured divisions. They are organic and real; most attempts to bridge the various issues which divide us have only made them wider and nastier than before.

Let’s take a simple example. Does “America” believe that adults who took out loans to pay for a college education should have their loans paid off by the majority of taxpayers who did not attend college? Or does “America” believe that everyone should bear the personal responsibility for financial choices they entered into willingly? Which of those “America Believes” storylines would make it into one of the “after school specials” the authors suggest would help us “win” the global information wars?

Let’s take a more searing and passionately divisive example. Does “America” believe our nation is a unique beacon of freedom and universal opportunity, where anyone can make their dreams come true through hard work and perseverance? Or does “America” believe our nation is plagued by a wide range of systemic injustices which hold some people back, no matter how hard they try, so that we are not a land of equal opportunity? Depending on what the staff at the “propaganda bureau” believes, the types of movies or social media posts they generate will paint a very different picture to foreign audiences.

Even if we could get past the deep and bitter partisan divide and “just” focus on “our message” abroad, I don’t know if that is possible right now. As folks in DC have told me over the years, in relation to a number of Administrations, “not everyone here believes in the supremacy of the free market, either morally or practically.” That seems like a pretty basic thing to agree on, given that the USA is proof positive of the strength of individual initiative, entrepreneurship and free economic choice. And yet, it is not.

On foreign affairs, there is no unified consensus on how best to act in the world. There are rational Americans of good faith who believe strongly that entities like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court are the best way for the American government to try to influence foreign affairs. There are also rational Americans of good faith who point to the absurdity of North Korea and Cuba sitting on the “Human Rights Commissions” at the UN, the UN’s track record of condemning repeatedly one democracy for defending itself while ignoring the appalling abuses committed by dozens of dictatorships, or the absurdity of allowing a regime like Venezuela to bring “war crimes” cases against American soldiers or diplomats.

Throughout the Cold War, the Voice of America broadcast the lifestyle afforded by the beautiful bounty of the free market in stark contrast to bread lines and crappy goods available in the Soviet sphere. For an East German getting a glimpse of life in West Berlin, the message was clear: Communism sucked for the vast majority of people.

As the policy wonks like to say, conditions on the ground have changed.

Right now, like it or not, the Communists in China have - thus far - delivered material bounty in the absence of political or religious freedom. That current shiny bounty may well prove to be illusory, a frantic materialist explosion built on a tower of debt and State planning - cracks are starting to appear as entire empty cities built overnight are being quietly demolished

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- but hundreds of millions of people experience brand new housing, brand new cars and the national pride which comes from State media blaring - accurately - that China controls 75+% of global manufacturing across a dazzling array of industries.

Other nations with autocratic systems also shine and glisten with brand new infrastructure and a splendid quality of life. As a friend from Abu Dhabi told me just recently, “We took a vacation to the States. It was awful. San Francisco was so disgusting, we left a few days early.”

Because of all this empirical evidence that living the good life does not require universal suffrage or even any basic rights to speech or self-defense or thought, combined with decades of foolish indoctrination in America’s universities by knee-jerk Leftists who’ve never had to make private sector P&L decisions with imperfect information, some insane percentage of college students and recent grads think “socialism” is a great idea.

While I find that disheartening, I would rather focus on education than criticism. Whenever someone tells me about “the damage capitalism does,” it usually turns out that the damage they have witnessed was not caused by “capitalism” at all but rather by unscrupulous people cutting corners and cheating. Or sometimes the “damage” was done by sheer economic reality; if a competitor can pay labor 10% of what I pay, then depending on the profit margins of our service or product, my laborers may be damaged because the company goes out of business, but again, that is not “capitalism” doing the damage.

The fierce fighting over meaning, facts and truth is not new. The Athenians ordered Socrates to commit suicide because he wouldn’t stop being a gadfly public intellectual, telling the elites just how wrong and stupid they were. For every American - it seems to me - who cheers for the truth-tellers, there seems to be at least one who applauds the government colluding with Big Tech to silence dissenting voices.

(Don’t tell the modern day “misinformation warriors” - a/k/a censors - about the Athenian trial of Socrates. I’m not saying that today’s wildly intolerant speech censors would demand that people skeptical of, say, the utility of masks to prevent viral transmission be forced to drink hemlock, but why give them the idea?)

On top of those internal social dynamics, a massive difference between the Voice of America’s time of influence and today is the existence of the Internet. Back in the 1950s, we were broadcasting “over” the Iron Curtain. There were also three network television stations, meaning some very high percentage of Americans were all watching the same shows, providing cultural cohesion. And those television stations stopped broadcasting at “the end of the broadcast day!” Try to explain that concept to a teenager today.

Now, everyone on the planet has access to the internet on a phone, often with highly sophisticated VPNs and encrypted communications. Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 lament of there being “57 channels and nothing on,” appears quaint three decades later. Never mind all the various social media and related platforms - on which platforms should this Voice of America 2.0 be active?

On top of all these difficulties not only in message formulation but effective delivery, because of the ubiquity of the Internet, the world is awash in information. Terabytes of content spew forth from billions of sources 24/7 about America and everywhere else. So the cost of “overcoming” the sea of constant noise to convey “the truth and facts about America” is likely to be many magnitudes higher in budgetary percentage terms than the original Cold War efforts were.

With all due respect to Messrs. Lieberman and Humphrey, actions speak louder than words. The always-available facts regarding American exceptionalism, our dynamic markets and our constant attempts to improve conditions for all our citizens, can speak for themselves. The free market does a fine job of conveying information; if anything, the Government should spend its dollars making sure no one stops the flow of information. That demonstration of true freedom and our enduring respect for the infinite value of the First Amendment will prove more convincing to foreign audiences than any possible set of produced propaganda, er, “truthful advocacy,” created by a bureaucratic committee.

1. ‘What a waste’: Video of 15 skyscrapers being simultaneously demolished in China stuns all online | Trending News,The Indian Express