Repeated political ideals turn into meaningless operational sounds in industrial society.

Evidence

As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 284

Categorization

• QUESTION: Marcuse calls this ‘the progressive elements of mass culture’ — worth chasing what he means by progressive here, a puzzling concession.
• XREF: connects to: Industrial progress destroys the conception of the person as a bearer of reason; Fading hope breeds reverent repetition of emptied political slogans. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 143; Politics disguised as culture becomes insoluble jargon. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media. #corroborates (0.88) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 360
• Politics disguised as culture becomes insoluble jargon. #corroborates (0.85)
• Vague ideological slogans can mask rather than resolve real political contradictions #corroborates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2766