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it to reveal Black experience and Black identity” (2015, 65). According to his own
denition, as he acknowledges, this is an instance of propaganda; Coltrane employs the
aesthetic ideal of whiteness against itself. As Stanley later writes about this example: “in
some sense, this is misleading” (2015, 114) and therefore propagandistic. This shows
how propaganda can be used for bad as well as for good purposes. To change people’s
minds, irrespective of whether they hold morally approbative or disapprobative ideals
in high esteem, sometimes some form of manipulation will be helpful. In Stanley’s
words, “It is hard to see how direct challenges to the ideals will be eective” (2015, 66)
and he argues, a fortiori, that in our non-ideal circumstances propagandistic rhetorical
strategies are even a prerequisite for achieving the liberal democratic ideals of freedom
and equality for all (2015, 115).
Stanley’s conceptualization of propaganda contrasts with what he sees as the
“classical sense” of propaganda, dened as “manipulation of the rational will to close o
debate” (2015, 48). By denition, this moral understanding of propaganda goes paired
with the idea that propagandistic speech violates the Kantian norms of discourse,
which consist of the assessment of reasons as the ultimate justifying source of knowl-
edge. But paradoxically, as I indicated, this is the model of normativity (or at least the
Habermasian version of it) which Stanley himself employs throughout his defence of
liberal and deliberative democratic communication. Stanley slides into murky waters
here. If there is good and bad propaganda, there is no a priori way to decide which
propagandistic practices we should condemn as morally bad and which should we praise
as morally good. Nevertheless, Stanley does try to distinguish between democratically
unacceptable propaganda (what he calls “demagoguery”) and democratically acceptable,
or even democracy-enhancing, propaganda (what he calls “civic rhetoric”) (2015, 82).
In his typology, propaganda undermines democracy if its purpose is to support what
he calls “awed ideologies” (2015, 5) and “awed ideological belief ” (2015, 179). This,
in turn, suggests that he believes that not all ideologies or ideological beliefs are awed,
and indeed, he holds that, like “propaganda,” the notion of “ideology” is also morally
impartial. He thereby aims to delineate a revisionist concept of ideology which can be
both true and false. Contrary to how the concept of ideology came to be understood
in the Marxian “critical theory” tradition as perforce epistemically decient, Stanley
thus forges a revisionist conception of ideology as a set of beliefs, values, and norms
that can be both true and false. However, this only changes the question of how to
distinguish between good and bad propaganda into how we may decide what makes
certain ideologies and ideological beliefs awed.
Since Stanley characterizes ideological belief (both true and false) by “its resis-
tance to rational revision” (2015, 187), the criterion of correctness for an ideology is not
just the extent to which it resists bypassing deliberative ideals. Rather, Stanley seems to
believe that this criterion lies in the extent to which ideological belief either enhances
or erodes susceptibility to rational argumentation. As he pictures it: while pernicious
demagogic speech employs awed ideologies “to cut o rational deliberation and dis-
cussion” (2015, 47), civic rhetoric “can repair awed ideologies, potentially restoring
the possibility of self-knowledge and democratic deliberation” (2015, 5). The idea is that
whereas demagoguery decreases our susceptibility to the deliberative democratic norms