Americanism

The subject of corruption in American society is often confined to discussions of bribery, embezzlement, or the direct exchange of money for political favors. While such transactional decay exists and is indeed corrosive, it represents only the surface of a much deeper and more structural issue. The more profound corruption concerns the management of public perception itself, a condition wherein the mechanisms of democratic consent are not broken by force but are instead subtly reconfigured by technique. This form of corruption does not announce itself with a broken lock or a missing ledger entry. It operates silently, shaping the very categories of thought available to the public. To understand this condition, one must examine three interrelated processes: the manufacture of consent, the weaponization of identity, and the meticulous substitution of the appearance of choice for its substance. These processes were not discovered by accident; they were systematized and made respectable in the early twentieth century through the deliberate application of psychoanalytic insight to the management of crowds.

The central figure in this transformation of public discourse was Edward Bernays. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays possessed unique access to the Viennese exploration of the unconscious mind. Where Freud sought to relieve the individual of neurosis by exposing the hidden drives of the id, Bernays saw an opportunity to relieve the ruling class of the unpredictability of democracy by exploiting those same drives. He understood that human beings are not primarily rational actors weighing policy proposals in a state of dispassionate logic. They are moved by deep, often unacknowledged impulses: the desire for status, the fear of exclusion, the yearning for security, and the tribal instinct for belonging. Bernays took this clinical, theoretical framework of psychoanalysis and applied it not to the therapy couch but to the press release and the publicity stunt. He recognized that if one could attach a product or a political idea to an unconscious desire, the public would embrace it not because they were persuaded by argument, but because they were satisfying an internal, emotional necessity.

Crucially, Bernays understood the stigma attached to the word “propaganda,” which had been tarnished by its association with German wartime efforts. To make the systematic manipulation of public opinion acceptable in a democratic and commercial society, he required a new vocabulary. He borrowed the language of the professional class and the ethos of civic service, rebranding the practice as “public relations.” This linguistic shift was itself an act of engineering consent. By calling it “counsel on public relations,” he distanced the activity from the crude deception of the propagandist and recast it as a neutral, even noble, function of mediating between the public interest and private enterprise. This new profession did not require outright lying, for Bernays believed that lies were inefficient and politically dangerous if exposed. Instead, his method relied on the engineering of consent. The goal was not to tell the public what to think in a direct, declarative fashion. The goal was to manage the environment of information and symbols such that the public would arrive at the desired conclusion on its own, believing that conclusion to be the product of its own free will.

This brings the analysis to the second pillar of modern corruption: the weaponization of identity. What the contemporary observer calls “political identity” or “cultural affiliation” is, to a significant degree, a Bernaysian product refined over decades. Political identity, as it functions in the mass media age, is not merely an organic expression of one’s geographic roots or family tradition. It is a constructed bundle of signifiers, often deliberately designed to be in opposition to another set of signifiers. Bernays’s early work involved linking consumer products to a sense of self. A famous example from his career involved the effort to expand the market for cigarettes to women in the 1920s. He did not produce a white paper on the health benefits of smoking; he consulted a psychoanalyst who informed him that cigarettes were phallic symbols representing male power. Bernays then staged a public spectacle where debutantes lit cigarettes during the Easter Sunday parade, signaling to the press that they were “torches of freedom.” The act was not about nicotine. The act was about identity. Smoking a cigarette was rebranded as a public declaration of female autonomy and defiance.

This exact mechanism did not remain in the commercial sphere. In 2009, what was presented to the American public as a spontaneous grassroots uprising of ordinary citizens furious about government overreach emerged as the Tea Party movement. It arrived fully formed, with professional organizers, coordinated national messaging, and a media strategy tailored to maximize cable news coverage. Substantially funded by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-funded organization, the movement was a Bernaysian operation applied to electoral politics in real time. The manufactured identity was the taxpaying patriot, a figure of righteous, ordinary American anger. That identity was adopted with fierce loyalty by millions of people who were, in material terms, among the primary victims of the deregulatory agenda the movement was engineered to advance. The technique was identical to the Easter Sunday parade: attach a political program to an identity, and the public will defend the program as though it were a defense of the self.

A citizen does not merely hold a set of policy preferences; they inhabit a lifestyle brand that is packaged and sold by political parties and media outlets. One is not simply in favor of lower taxation or increased regulation. One is a member of a tribe that drinks a certain type of coffee, drives a certain class of vehicle, and views a specific news channel not for information but for affirmation of tribal membership. The identity is weaponized because it forecloses the possibility of persuasion. When a political stance becomes fused with one’s core sense of self, any challenge to that stance is not perceived as a policy disagreement but as an existential attack on the individual’s integrity and community standing. Bernays’s genius lay in recognizing that people will defend a manufactured identity with far more ferocity than they will defend a rational argument. The political class, in turn, learned that it was far easier to govern a population distracted by culture war and identity performance than a population united in material grievance. By engineering consent around these identities, the political apparatus ensures that the energy of the electorate is channeled into symbolic battles while the substantive levers of economic and institutional power remain undisturbed by meaningful oversight.

This dynamic culminates in the third and most elegant form of corruption: the substitution of the appearance of choice for its substance. This is the logical endpoint of engineering consent, and the two-party system in the United States stands as the cleanest, most durable example of its application. A casual observer might argue that the existence of two major political parties represents a robust democracy. After all, the citizen may choose between Option A and Option B. However, to view the system through the lens of Bernays is to see that the structure of the choice is as important as the choice itself. The two-party system does not function primarily to represent the diverse, nuanced, and often contradictory will of three hundred million people. It functions to narrow the scope of the political imagination. It creates a binary universe in which the available options feel like the only options possible within the boundaries of reality.

This is the appearance of choice substituting for its substance. The substance of democratic choice would require a broad spectrum of political possibilities reflecting the actual diversity of economic and social thought in a vast nation. It would involve viable alternatives on matters of industrial organization, property rights, foreign policy, and monetary theory that fall outside the narrow, corporately approved window defined by the two major parties. Instead, the public is presented with a recurring drama of conflict between two teams whose primary function is to manage the status quo while maintaining the illusion of opposition. The engineering of consent here does not require the propagandist to lie about the candidates. It requires only that the public relations apparatus, from cable news to the education system, consistently frames the world as a contest between these two fixed poles. Any third alternative is depicted not as a different choice but as a “wasted vote” or a “spoiler.” The imagination is not forced to stop; it is simply guided toward the conclusion that beyond the horizon of the two parties, there is nothing but the void of chaos or irrelevance.

Bernays understood that if you can control the range of options presented to the public, you control the outcome regardless of which specific option is selected. In the electoral context, whether the citizen pulls the lever for Party A or Party B, the underlying structure of lobbying, campaign finance, and corporate capture of regulatory agencies remains almost entirely unchanged. The act of voting provides a cathartic release, a sensation of having exercised power and expressed a preference. Yet this sensation of power is largely illusory precisely because the options on the ballot have been pre-filtered and sanitized by the very institutions that require public consent to function. The citizen is offered the liberty to choose the steward of the empire but not the liberty to question the necessity of the empire itself. That is the ultimate triumph of public relations: to make a population believe it is governing itself when it is merely being managed.

The corruption of American society, therefore, is not best understood as a lapse in morality but as a triumph of technique. It is the legacy of a specific, rationalized, and academically derived approach to crowd psychology that was rebranded as public service. By manufacturing consent, the ruling institutions bypass the critical faculties of the individual. By weaponizing identity, they ensure that the population remains fractured and incapable of collective action on issues of common material concern. And by carefully curating the appearance of choice within a rigid binary system, they preserve the formal rituals of democracy while draining them of the substance required to challenge concentrated power. The citizen is left not silenced, but busy. Not imprisoned, but distracted. And in that distraction, the machinery of consent continues to hum along, efficient and invisible, preserving a system of order that is frequently mistaken for a system of freedom.

The application of these techniques to foreign policy reveals the full scope of what Bernays made possible. The decades-long economic embargo imposed by the United States government against Cuba stands as one of the most instructive examples. The embargo did not emerge from a spontaneous public outcry demanding the isolation of a small Caribbean island. It emerged from a carefully orchestrated campaign of psychological management that framed a complex geopolitical and economic dispute as a simple, binary struggle between freedom and tyranny. The public was not asked to evaluate the history of United States corporate domination of Cuban agriculture, the conditions that produced the revolution, or the humanitarian consequences of an economic blockade. The public was asked to fear communism and to applaud any measure taken against it. The consent for the embargo was engineered long before the policy was fully enacted, and the techniques employed were those Bernays had refined over decades of practice. The engineering did not rely on fabricated news. It relied on the management of the information environment such that only one conclusion appeared reasonable. Organizations with names suggesting scholarly detachment produced reports consistently emphasizing the communist character of the new Cuban regime. Journalists were invited on curated tours where the itinerary, the experts provided, and the background materials all converged on a single interpretive framework. The journalist who returned and questioned the wisdom of an embargo would be writing against the weight of an entire experience that had been manufactured for them.

The weaponization of identity in the Cuba campaign drew upon the master identity of Americanism in its Cold War configuration. Communism was not presented as an alternative economic system with which the United States had geopolitical disagreements. It was presented as an existential threat to the American way of life, as a godless, totalitarian force seeking to destroy freedom, family, and faith. By attaching the label of communist to the Cuban revolution, the public relations apparatus ensured that the embargo would appear not as an act of economic warfare against a struggling nation but as a necessary act of self-defense. The citizen who questioned the embargo was not engaging in a legitimate policy debate. They were betraying their identity as an American. Meanwhile, the appearance of a moral choice was constructed with the same precision: support the embargo and stand with freedom, or oppose it and stand with tyranny. There was no space in the managed public conversation for a position that acknowledged the legitimate grievances of the Cuban revolution while opposing a blockade that would immiserate the Cuban population for generations. The substance of the arrangement was an unexamined bipartisan consensus serving a narrow set of corporate and political actors whose holdings on the island had been expropriated. The appearance was a clear moral imperative that millions experienced as their own considered opinion. The citizen who still supports the embargo today is not expressing an informed foreign policy preference. They are expressing the residual effects of a public relations campaign launched generations ago that has never been meaningfully countered. They are living in the aftermath of Bernays.

Americanism is a term that carries the weight of a sacred invocation in the national lexicon, yet its function in the maintenance of the political order is far more specific and technical than its sentimental resonance suggests. When examined through the framework of engineered consent and the weaponization of identity, Americanism reveals itself not as a fixed, natural set of traits emerging organically from the soil of the continent, but as a deliberately constructed and continuously managed ideological product. It is the master identity category designed to subsume all other potential loyalties, conflicts, and material interests under a single, emotionally resonant banner. To define Americanism thoroughly in relation to the systematic corruption of perception is to understand it as the preeminent public relations campaign of the state itself.

Americanism functions as a manufactured consensus about the national character that operates prior to and independent of any specific political debate. It is a bundle of abstract virtues, liberty, individualism, opportunity, and moral exceptionalism, that are presented to the citizenry not as propositions to be debated but as foundational truths to be affirmed. The efficacy of Americanism lies precisely in its vagueness. It is a container so large and so loosely defined that virtually any action, whether it is the passage of a progressive labor law or the deregulation of a monopoly, can be justified under its auspices. This is not a flaw in the definition; it is the defining feature of the engineering process. Because the term is never subjected to a precise, juridical definition that would limit its application, it can be deployed by both poles of the two-party system to sanctify their respective agendas. The consent to be governed is manufactured in part through the ritual repetition of this term. The citizen is not asked to consent to a specific piece of legislation that might harm their material standing; they are asked to consent to “Americanism.” To refuse the term is to be marked not as a dissenting policy analyst but as a foreign body, an enemy of the tribe.

In this sense, Americanism is the civic descendant of the “torches of freedom” applied to the national sphere. It is the weaponization of national identity at the level of the state itself. The process of weaponization involves attaching the deepest, most irrational layers of the individual psyche to a specific political and economic status quo: the fear of being cast out of the group, the longing for ancestral continuity, the pride in collective achievement. The public relations apparatus of Americanism, embedded in the school curriculum, the naturalization ceremony, the sports stadium anthem, and the political address, does not merely describe a country. It prescribes a state of mind. It defines the acceptable boundaries of loyalty. To be an American, under this manufactured definition, is not simply to hold a passport or reside within certain borders. It is to internalize a particular narrative about the inevitability and righteousness of the nation’s institutional arrangements. This internalization is the primary mechanism for neutralizing substantive dissent. A citizen who has fully identified with the identity of Americanism will experience cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence of systemic injustice, not because the evidence is weak, but because the evidence threatens the integrity of the self that has been constructed around the national myth.

Furthermore, Americanism is the linguistic and psychological infrastructure upon which the appearance of choice is built. The two-party system would be untenable without the unifying, prepolitical faith provided by Americanism. The parties may present themselves as locked in mortal combat over the direction of the country, but that conflict is only possible and only profitable for the managerial class because it takes place within a shared, sacrosanct container of Americanist identity. The appearance of a choice between a candidate of the left and a candidate of the right is the substance of the electoral ritual. The substance of the arrangement, however, is that both candidates must prove their fealty to Americanism in order to be eligible for selection. They must pledge allegiance not only to the flag but to the specific, unspoken economic and geopolitical doctrines that the term Americanism has been engineered to protect. The choice between two nominees is therefore a choice between two different styles of performing Americanism, not a choice between Americanism and an alternative system of organizing society. The imagination is narrowed such that the only conceivable way to be a legitimate political actor is to operate within the framework of this identity.

The thorough definition of Americanism, consequently, must distinguish between the lived, pluralistic experiences of the people residing in the United States and the ideological construct of Americanism as a tool of social control. The former is a vast, contradictory, and dynamic reality. The latter is a curated, simplified, and psychologically coercive brand. This brand was not left to chance. It was, and continues to be, systematically cultivated by the very public relations techniques that Bernays normalized. It is a product of the Committee on Public Information during the First World War, which perfected the art of linking dissent with disloyalty. It is a product of the Cold War consensus, which welded the term “American” to the term “free enterprise” so tightly that to question the latter was to betray the former. And it is a product of the contemporary media environment, which ensures that any voice challenging the fundamental tenets of Americanist ideology is either ignored, marginalized as unserious, or framed as an agent of a foreign adversary.

Americanism, therefore, is the ultimate example of the substitution of the appearance of choice for its substance. It offers the citizen the grand, sweeping identity of belonging to a nation conceived in liberty. This is a deeply satisfying psychological reward. In exchange for accepting this identity and performing its required rituals, the citizen is granted the appearance of political power. Yet the substance of that power, the ability to alter the distribution of resources, to restructure the institutions of governance, or to redefine the nation’s relationship with the rest of the world, is largely withheld. The identity is a substitute for agency. The feeling of patriotic fervor stands in for the difficult, often boring work of democratic oversight and institutional reform. By thoroughly defining Americanism in this manner, one moves beyond the patriotic orations and arrives at a clinical understanding of its role within the broader architecture of engineered consent. It is the master narrative that makes all the other, narrower manipulations of public relations possible, ensuring that the public remains loyal to the stage itself even as they are distracted by the drama performed upon it.

The term “Americanism” for Black people in America is entirely distinct from the public relations construct of national identity discussed in the preceding sections. It does not refer to the abstract virtues of liberty, the sanctity of individual rights, or the creedal promises recited in civic rituals. When a Black person rejects the American identity, they are performing an act of political and psychological clarity that exposes the machinery of engineered consent for precisely what it is. In this context, “Americanism” is defined not as an aspiration but as a concrete, lived system of subjugation. It is the name for the structural and ideological apparatus that produces and maintains a specific class of victims while simultaneously demanding that those victims pledge allegiance to the apparatus that destroys them.

Malcolm X articulated this with a precision that no subsequent political commentary has surpassed:

“I’M NOT A POLITICIAN, NOT EVEN A STUDENT OF POLITICS; IN FACT, I’M NOT A REPUBLICAN, NOR A DEMOCRAT, NOR AN AMERICAN, AND GOT SENSE ENOUGH TO KNOW IT. I’M ONE OF THE 22 MILLION BLACK VICTIMS OF THE DEMOCRATS, ONE OF THE 22 MILLION BLACK VICTIMS OF THE REPUBLICANS, AND ONE OF THE 22 MILLION BLACK VICTIMS OF AMERICANISM.” — Malcolm X

This formulation does several things simultaneously that deserve close attention. First, it refuses the framework entirely before dismantling it. Malcolm X does not say he prefers one party over the other, or that the system needs reform. He exits the frame. Second, the tripartite structure of the indictment is precise: the Democrats, the Republicans, and Americanism are named as three distinct categories of victimization, not three competing alternatives. They are three mechanisms of the same system. Third, the phrase “got sense enough to know it” is not casual rhetoric. It is a diagnostic claim. It identifies the failure to recognize one’s victimhood as a failure of consciousness, as the successful internalization of the engineering process that Bernays perfected.

The psychologically free individual who arrives at this clarity is what the Black community has long referred to as “woke.” That term, long before it was stripped from its original context and weaponized by white political commentary to spread fear and misinformation, meant something precise: to be aware, to exist outside the system, to reject the apparatus of manufactured consent entirely. The conscious and psychologically free individual that the term originally described is someone who has disavowed the primary categories of political identity within the Bernaysian framework. They refuse to participate in the game of public relations management that passes for governance. They reject “Republican” and “Democrat” as a recognition that the two-party system is not a binary offering substantive choice but a unified front of management. And they reject the American identity entirely, not as a rejection of geography or of the people who share the land with them, but as a rejection of the manufactured identity of Americanism that has been weaponized against Black people for centuries. Malcolm X exemplifies this precisely: he named the Democrats, the Republicans, and Americanism as a trinity of victimizers, three faces of a single system of control. The victim count remains constant across all three categories because the underlying condition does not change regardless of which party holds office or which patriotic slogan is most in vogue.

To understand Americanism from inside that victimhood is to understand that the lived experience of being a Black person in American society is one where the legal, economic, and social structures were designed to exploit Black labor and destroy Black dignity. It is the condition of being told that one lives in the land of the free while being denied access to the institutions that guarantee freedom. From the perspective of engineered consent, Americanism is the master identity category that was specifically constructed to exclude the Black population while extracting labor and loyalty from it. The public relations apparatus of Americanism, the iconography of the founding fathers who held slaves, the songs about amber waves of grain picked by exploited hands, the legal documents that enshrined property rights in human beings, was never intended to include the descendants of those human beings as full participants. Yet through a perverse extension of Bernaysian logic, this same identity is imposed upon the victims as a test of their obedience. The Black citizen is asked to salute the flag that flew over the slave ship and the lynching tree. The Black soldier is asked to die for freedoms he cannot exercise in the towns where he was raised. This is the substance of Americanism that every psychologically free Black person in America recognizes. Americanism is a system of psychological and material violence masked by a public relations campaign of exceptional virtue.

Neither party offers a substantive path out of the condition of victimhood because the condition of victimhood was not a bug in the Americanist program; it was a central feature of its operating system. The engineering of consent in this context achieves something more than political management. It achieves psychological violence. The victim is told that their suffering is either their own fault or a temporary aberration in an otherwise noble project. They are gaslit by the very identity that was designed to exclude them, asked to find pride in a national narrative that has produced their dispossession. To reject that identity, as Malcolm X did, is to reclaim one’s consciousness from the engineers of consent.

Bernays believed that by appealing to the unconscious drives of the masses, one could manage them indefinitely. He was, by most measures, correct. But he did not fully account for what happens when a segment of the managed population develops a counter-consciousness that sees through the manipulation entirely. The refusal of manufactured identity is not merely a political act; it is an epistemological one. It asserts that the substance of Americanism is not found in the Constitution or the Fourth of July oration but in the condition of the victim. It strips away the marketing language and the patriotic euphemisms to reveal the power relationship underneath. Americanism is not a shared creed; it is a hierarchy. It is not a promise of liberty; it is a justification for the withholding of that promise. It is the name for the specific, historical, and ongoing process by which the United States has organized itself around the premise of white supremacy while maintaining a global reputation as a beacon of democracy. To be a victim of Americanism is to be the raw material upon which that reputation is built. It is to be the corpse in the foundation of the cathedral while the choir sings of salvation.

I chose the Arabic aphorism that opens this essay because it offers the most compressed and accurate diagnosis of this condition: corruption and backwardness appear when you assign power to people who do not deserve it. In a modern democracy, the assignment of such power does not require a coup or a decree. It requires only a sufficiently sophisticated public relations apparatus, one capable of manufacturing consent for the arrangement, weaponizing the identity of the governed so that they defend the arrangement against their own interests, and curating the available choices so narrowly that no alternative to the arrangement is thinkable. Bernays provided the technique. Americanism provided the vehicle. And the result is a society in which the most profound corruption is not the bribery or the embezzlement, but the insistence that the victim call the violence done to them by the name of freedom.

My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.

This Substack is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

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Until next time, Namaste.

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