There are three primary ways that political movements do propaganda:
Explicitly partisan propaganda. Our leader is great, here’s a biopic of how great he is, here’s all the great things he does. Our enemy is shit.
Ideological propaganda. Pass off ideological beliefs as moral or even scientific truth or common sense—e.g. NGOs and civil society groups, leftist disciplines in academia. The people doing these regard themselves as “above” and purer than political leaders (even the ones on their side) in a fundamental sense.
Bias in apolitical information. Note how Wikipedia does not call itself “Leftistpedia”. It says its mission is to “give everyone free access to the sum of all human knowledge”—and it actually achieves things to this end. It is able to easily package political propaganda with this information because it creates value in the first place.
In politics as in entrepreneurship as in courtship—you need to actually provide value to get what you want. You cannot just say “I want you to hear my political views, gimme your time” much like an entrepreneur can’t tell his customers “I want to make a profit, gimme money” or a man can’t tell a woman “I want sex, gimme body”.
No, you have to first think about what value you can actually create, make yourself aesthetically pleasing in terms of looks and personality, BVILD something people actually want, then in return get their attention to your politics. Indeed, you must see the politics as an inseparable part of truth, no different from whatever other information or value you’re providing.
The best way to conceptualize it is to see it as a very dense information supply chain that is unmatched in breadth and depth and able to produce all kinds of commodities from the lowest consumer product (everyday topics) to the highest complexity capital goods (STEM) which is carefully monitored, maintained and continually upgraded by an army of unpaid volunteers and professional revolutionaries all co-operating stigmergically united by shared political commitments and for whom it is a Weberian vocation.
The “secular value” comes because of the above mentioned competitive advantage in producing content of all kinds.
The reason for why they have a competitive advantage in politics is because politics is not seen as something separate or external to their general activity but is seamelessly integrated with it. I think this has something to do with their own talents and also the demands of their totalizing political ideology which demands a strong cognitive unity in various sphere of work and of theory and action.
This is very strong in marxism but also exists for various other tendencies and factions of what I term the “democratic left” (socialism, left-liberalism etc).
The political community thus finds its unity not in organization, kin, blood or institutional organs but in the doctrine itself which is itself highly structured. This explains why the right wing opposition has nature of “scattered insurgency” compared to the left.
In the theoretical domain the right relies on eclectic adding up of unrelated parts related to mishmash of griveances while for the enemy the parts are determined from the whole.
Some tips on examples of things you can work on which would be useful (1 to 4 are things I am working on or planning to).
xatra: the matplotlib of maps (historical maps, but also data maps etc): github.com/srajma/xatrapramana: a comprehensive and systematic library of ancient Indian literary and other sources, with: proper search and pattern indexing, provenance info as per different secondary sources etc.The Left-liberal Rāj: this book.Encyclopedia Indica: comprehensive wiki on Indian politics and history, to solve the “right forgets so easily” (section 7.2.2) and the “right puts the burden of learning about everything on the individual” (section 7.1.2) problems.Scalable counter-institutions: An underrated impact of the rise of AI is that it cuts down the “Midwit Human Capital” advantage of the Left-liberal Rāj, significantly equalizing the field. How, exactly, can we best take advantage of this?Fiction with a right-wing message: A big problem with RW propaganda is it only fights at the superficial level—valorizing leaders or one-off events—rather than trying to make fundamental cultural changes (promoting capitalism, Hindu sovereignty etc). At the very least, your biopics should emphasize the character’s RW ideas, rather than promoting him by relying on promoting how much jai-kisān Modi is or how Shivaji was fair toward Muslims.
We need a Pro-sweatshop film/TV series.
Imagine: the sweatshop-owner is initially demonized as an evil greedy guy, but as the film progresses the protagonist (a farmer who started working for him because his farm income wasn’t enough for his son’s education) realizes he’s the only one helping him while everyone else is virtue-signalling and using him.
At no point should you show the sweatshop-owner as having a “soft side” or doing any altruist favours. But just by pursuing profit he generates employment for the protagonist and others.
Congressis shut down the factory with some regulatory reason, causing hardship. The sweatshop-owner and his workers work out a way to continue working illegally.
At some point someone instigates them to unionize; the result is the union having a monopoly on labor and others being excluded from employment; the protagonist takes pity on them, leaves the union and raises the excluded workers into a Private Military Corporation to crack down on strikes like the Pinkertons.
Another episode where environmentalists are the problem, and Durges’s Pinkertons gun down all the tree-huggers. Filled with allusions to Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna burning down the Khāṇḍava forest.
All this is in the backdrop of a village that’s slowly turning into an industrial hub, Laura Ingalls style, or maybe Old Western, against the challenges posed by Congressis, activist groups, and media/filmmakers trying to make him look like the problem.
Or: maybe not entire shows dedicated to this as a topic, but side-plots and passing comments in some film about another topic, that depict things like “socialists egging workers to strike causing industries to shut down” etc.