On Achieving the Desired Amount of Propaganda Believability

I am slogging right now through Shelby Foote's three volume Civil War masterpiece, about halfway through Volume I: Fort Sumter to Perryville. It is fascinating historical reading. It is weird to say that a series of books weighing in at close to 10 pounds and including nearly 3,000 pages of densely-packed and meticulously-researched work could ever feel like it's leaving stuff out but Foote is such a good writer that he makes me wish he had written more (editorial note: I reserve the right to reverse this opinion at any time during Volume III).  

An interesting thing that cropped up early in the first volume is the absolute Southern confidence in quick victory. They were so assured of the Southern man's dominance that they thought a single Confederate soldier was equal to ten Federals. But here's the thing: they were so good at selling this narrative that not only were the Union soldiers scared of the fighting ferocity of the Southerner, everyday residents of the South believed it too. This made the early successes in the war, especially in the western theater, particularly hard for the South to understand. If one Confederate was equal to ten Union, then why in the world were the Union soldiers riding roughshod over their Confederate opponents? In other words, the propaganda convinced both the enemy and the friends. When the enemy punctured the propaganda it was shattered for both sides.

This is all notable to me now in the wake of our recent election. The propaganda machine of the left (i.e. nearly every major media outlet) was so efficient in ensuring the easy victory of Hillary Clinton--even imagining a congressional shift because of the public distrust in Trump--that they forgot it was actually just propaganda. That elections are nutty. That they didn't actually have a clue what was going to happen.

And just as the reaction in the South to the first defeats of the war was open and confounded disbelief, so the reaction amongst the left to this election has been the same. Combined, in both cases, with lots of anger and recrimination. 

I don't know what the lesson is here, exactly. Reach some golden mean of propaganda saturation and believability? Avoid propaganda altogether? Maybe. But at the very least it ought to inject a bit of humility into people. There is so much that we cannot know; so much that we assume based on half facts and half truths.