Bush the Conservative p. 3

What is lacking is a means of separating that part of an ideological statement that is aimed at mobilizing support. In other words, some tool needs to be used that takes into consideration that political keywords are used strategically. Karen Johnson-Cartee and Gary Copeland (2004) explore the strategic use of rhetoric in politics by dividing “persuasion” from “propaganda”. Persuasion, according to Johnson-Cartee and Copeland, aims to get individuals to change their behavior in some manner because doing so is in their own best interest. Propaganda, however, aims to mold behavior by linking that behavior to desired groups of people.
Propaganda, then, is not a type of brainwashing where new ideas are implanted that conflict with previous beliefs. Rather, it is a type of resonance messaging that uses culturally shared beliefs to support specific actions. As such, it is deliberately self-reinforcing and aggrandizing (Schwartz, 1972).
It is, then, at least theoretically possible to distill complex ideological concepts into rather simple propaganda keywords. This would indicate the existence of ideologically-laden propaganda keywords. Such words (or phrases) would make a statement based on a system of beliefs that is aimed at group-identification and leads to an emotional attachment to the original statement. The existence of such a device would certainly be one answer to the original puzzle of how ideologically driven elites gain support from non-ideological masses.

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