Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about how you read your history. You could just as easily point to the amendments expanding voting rights to men without property, then freed slaves, then women, and so on, as an aberration of the founders' original design. I prefer to look at it through the lens of propaganda because it marked the beginning of an era when big changes in culture and society can be reliably made through subtle manipulation in…
What's your constructive result (as opposed to reactive/condemning) of that characterization? To me, propaganda is just a result of mass media, which itself is a result of the longer trend of advancing of communication technology. It's impossible to oppress someone who is not in your "light cone", or to control actions which are below your limit of resolving. In the past things weren't as developed, so it was easier…
In Bernays' Propaganda, he describes a new process to sell pianos based on psychoanalysis rather than traditional big-print advertisements.
Essentially, get leading architects to incorporate "music rooms" into their residential designs. Most architects will follow the greats and add music rooms as well. The average homeowner will then walk into the hardware store someday and notice a piano for sale - another Bernays innovation - and think to themselves that the idea to buy a piano was theirs all along. In fact, this all could have been done before the invention of the radio, maybe even the telegraph.
Propaganda itself is neither good nor evil. We must accept that biases and manipulable aspects are a part of all of us. We have to work with them, or ignore them at our peril.
One of Bernays' biggest early arguments pro-propaganda was that if the business and political elite don't figure it out now, someone else down the line will, and they'll use it to take you down. We as a species will have to consider this with every generation until Homo sapiens goes extinct.