The United States of Propaganda

Why Trump's United States Lacks Social Rights

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Excerpt:

The United States of Propaganda

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!Vintage illustration featuring a swirling red ribbon with the text "IT'S FUN TO LIVE IN AMERICA" winding past blue graphic scenes of a convertible car, a family around a radio, and a woman on a landline telephone.

*Vintage illustration featuring a swirling red ribbon with the text "IT'S FUN TO LIVE IN AMERICA" winding past blue graphic scenes of a convertible car, a family around a radio, and a woman on a landline telephone.*

The cover of a pamphlet titled "It's Fun To Live In America" shows vignettes of suburban family life in the United States in 1947. Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images

Excerpt

The United States of Propaganda

Few Americans have the vocabulary to describe what’s making them miserable.

September 11, 2026, 2:40 PM

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By **Susan Neiman**, an American philosopher.

My university education was excellent. Yet nothing was more enlightening than the nearly seven years I spent living in West Berlin in the 1980s. To improve my German, I tried all sorts of things: from sitting through half-understood theater performances to spending evenings with anyone willing to put up with my stumbling conversation.

None of them compared hearing the news. Berlin was still divided by a wall that always looked incongruously small when you bumped up to it. With a U.S. passport, I could take the train behind the Iron Curtain for the price of dinner. Back in my West Berlin apartment, I practiced German by listening to the news from both East and West, toggling between them with the turn of a dial.

My university education was excellent. Yet nothing was more enlightening than the nearly seven years I spent living in West Berlin in the 1980s. To improve my German, I tried all sorts of things: from sitting through half-understood theater performances to spending evenings with anyone willing to put up with my stumbling conversation.

This article is adapted from ***Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era*** by Susan Neiman (W.W. Norton & Co., 240 pp., $27.99, September 2026).

None of them compared hearing the news. Berlin was still divided by a wall that always looked incongruously small when you bumped up to it. With a U.S. passport, I could take the train behind the Iron Curtain for the price of dinner. Back in my West Berlin apartment, I practiced German by listening to the news from both East and West, toggling between them with the turn of a dial.

The experience sharpened my ear and tuned my attention to propaganda. It was seldom obvious or crude. Armies occupied both cities, so political authority was stalemated. What mattered was the constant struggle over what Germans call *Deutungshoheit:* who gets the last word on interpreting the world. With savvy listeners on each side of the border, the radio stations tried to avoid simple stereotypes. Only if you listened to both could you see what was left out.

East Berlin radio offered credible information about U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s covert war on Central America. West Berlin reported on resistance to Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government, though without mentioning that most of it was provided by CIA-supported Islamic fundamentalists (who later became the Taliban). The ordinary people on your side of the Cold War were humanized with background stories and contexts; those on the other side were listed as numbers, if they were listed at all. If you listened to both, you’d be well informed. I wouldn’t have experienced the Western news as propaganda had it been the only source I heard; only repeated comparisons made that clear.

Can anything good be said about East Germany? On hearing the name, most people today think of the Stasi and other repressive political structures. By contrast, in much of the world, it’s still possible to make positive references to the United States without immediately being asked to justify the European genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black people, or the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I’m hardly inclined to defend the Stasi or East German censorship. But given how much information and context have long been absent from U.S. media—even before it made concessions to the second Trump administration—I’m also disinclined to describe it as free. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in *Manufacturing Consent*, it’s “much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent.”

This is especially true when the media portray themselves as champions of free speech. Jason Stanley’s *How Propaganda Works* stresses the same point: “Part of the propaganda of states that consider themselves liberal democracies is that they do not allow propaganda.” As a Russian colleague told me, the main difference between educated Russians and educated Americans is that Russians know they’re listening to propaganda.

!A speaker stands at a podium in front of a glass barrier framing the Brandenburg Gate in the background. A large crowd and dignitaries seated on stage surround the podium beneath a flying German flag.

*A speaker stands at a podium in front of a glass barrier framing the Brandenburg Gate in the background. A large crowd and dignitaries seated on stage surround the podium beneath a flying German flag.*

Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan commemorates the 750th anniversary of Berlin on June 12, 1987.Mike Sargent/AFP via Getty Images

*Manufacturing Consent* described anti-communism as the national religion of the United States, as well as its control mechanism. This is even truer today t