As Étienne de la Boétie pointed out, the state is absolutely dependent on ideological support, without which it could not even command an army to force obedience from the public. Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State points out that the state acquires this support by means of its court intellectuals, who frame power as “public service,” while framing skepticism as childish, antisocial, or “conspiratorial”—especially the simple habit of asking cui bono (“who benefits?”). In a previous article, I highlighted the need for libertarians to criticize how academia and journalism can serve as the primary vehicles of state propaganda.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is useful to libertarians because it targets legitimating machinery at the level of language. In van Dijk’s formulation, CDA studies how dominance and power abuse are enacted and normalized through text and talk—by hiding agency, smuggling moral premises, and presenting contested choices as technical necessities. In libertarian terms, CDA is a discipline of de-mystification: it helps you translate respectable abstractions back into concrete human action—who decides, who compels, who pays, and who benefits. Once you can see those moves, the mystique weakens—and you can read “objective” prose as an artifact of institutional power rather than a transparent window onto the world. The checklist below turns that insight into a practical method.
A Libertarian CDA Checklist: Seven Moves that Unmask Propaganda
Below are CDA “moves” you can apply to journal articles, think-tank reports, newspaper stories, policy memos, and NGO white papers. Each one answers a libertarian question: Where is the coercion hidden? Who is acting? Who pays? Who benefits? Who is being trained to feel ashamed?
Find the Missing Agent
Propaganda loves grammar that deletes responsible actors: passives (“mistakes were made”), nominalizations (“the implementation of policy”), and abstract forces (“market failures,” “systemic pressures”) that float free of decision-makers. A libertarian reading habit is to restore the subject. For example:
- “Taxes were raised” → Who voted for it? Who signed it? Who enforced it?
- “Errors occurred” → Which agency? Which manager? What incentives?
- “Communities were displaced” → Who used eminent domain? Who profited?
Van Dijk discusses how texts can conceal or understate the agency of powerful actors. If no one is doing it, no one can be blamed—and no one can be resisted.
Underline every verb in a paragraph and write the implied subject in the margin. If the implied subject is “the government,” ask: which part? Which people? Which chain of command? The more a text resists being rewritten with concrete agents, the more likely it’s performing ideological concealment.
Spot Presuppositions
Academic and journalistic writing often embeds contested claims as background assumptions. For example:
- “When we invest in infrastructure…” (assumes taxation is “we,” and coercive taxation and spending is “investment”);
- “How should policymakers address inequality?” (assumes the policy frame is legitimate and primary; assumes inequality must be addressed via policy)
- “The government must protect consumers from…” (assumes adults are wards, and regulators are guardians)
Hilary Janks frames CDA around “whose interests are served” by how a text positions readers and reality. Presuppositions often do that positioning: they assign you a role—responsible citizen, stakeholder, beneficiary—and then treat that role as the ground of argument.
Ask: What had to be assumed for this sentence to feel normal? Often the hidden axiom is that the state is the default problem-solver, and private action is derivative or suspicious. If the text asks, “How do we reduce X?” try “Should anyone have the authority to force Y?” or, “What institutions created X?” This doesn’t “win” the argument by itself; it reopens it.
Track Moral Loading and Euphemism
Look for euphemisms that transform violence into virtue: war becomes “intervention,” “stabilization,” “humanitarian response”; censorship becomes “content moderation,” “information integrity”; surveillance becomes “public safety,” “risk management”; taxation becomes “revenue,” “mobilizing resources,” “raising funds,” etc.
This is CDA’s basic insight: words are not neutral labels; they’re political instruments. The state has a special need for euphemism because its core operations—taxation, conscription, policing, imprisonment, killing—are morally radioactive when described plainly.
Try translating euphemisms into plain language without adding polemics.
- “Mandatory contributions” → payment enforced by penalty
- “Compliance measures” → threats for non-obedience
- “Civil forfeiture” → taking property without conviction
If the “neutral” version suddenly sounds like something you’d object to in private life, you’ve learned something about the moral laundering function of the original phrasing.
Measure Modality: How Certainty is Manufactured
Inevitability is the psychological cousin of obedience. As Rothbard noted, one technique of state legitimation is making rule seem inevitable, so people meet it with resignation. In text, this is the language of modality: “must,” “cannot,” “inevitably,” “there is no alternative.” Watch for phrases like this: “We must act now”; “This policy is necessary”; “There is no choice but to…”; “Experts agree that we cannot…”
Treat modality as a claim that requires support. Whenever you see “must,” ask two questions: 1) Must, by what mechanism? (Economic necessity, physical constraint, legal requirement, moral duty?); 2) Must, imposed by whom on whom? (Who bears the cost; who bears the risk; who gains discretion?). Very often “must” means “we want the state to do X, and we are impatient with objections.”
Follow “Access to Discourse”: Who Gets to Speak as Authority
Van Dijk treats unequal “access to (public) discourse” as central to how dominance is reproduced. In practice, watch how journalism and policy writing stage authority: credentialed officials are “sources,” while dissidents are “claims”; bureaucratic language is treated as neutral, while outsider language is treated as partisan; corporate lobbyists are “industry leaders,” while ordinary people are “activists” or “special interests.”
A text can appear balanced while quietly establishing whose speech counts as reality-description and whose speech counts as emotional noise. List every quoted or paraphrased voice in an article. Note how each is labeled (expert, official, activist, conspiracy theorist) and note whose claims are treated as needing proof. Often the state’s voice is treated as baseline fact.
Map Intertextuality: The Citation-Laundering Loop
Academic writing often launders legitimacy through chains of citations: claim A is “supported” by claim B, which rests on claim C—until you reach something that’s not evidence so much as a shared ideological axiom. Michael Meyer emphasizes that CDA is problem-oriented and requires linguistic expertise to select relevant textual features—precisely because “anything” can look meaningful if you cherry-pick. The lesson here: Don’t just dunk on a phrase—trace the institutional network that keeps the phrase “serious.” Which agencies fund the research? Which journals and conferences set the boundaries of “responsible” opinion? Which professional incentives punish certain questions?
Follow the citations until you reach raw data, a clearly-stated moral assumption, or a definitional move that smuggles in the conclusion. Stop when you find the hinge.
Guard against Cherry-Picking: Use Corpus Habits When You Can
CDA is sometimes criticized (fairly) for selecting convenient examples. A practical fix is to adopt “corpus-assisted” habits: examine larger bodies of text to see recurring patterns, then close-read representative passages. Baker et al. (2008) combine CDA with corpus linguistics to analyze UK press discourse about refugees and asylum seekers, and Baker and McGlashan discuss how corpus techniques can mitigate bias and “cherry-picking.”
You don’t need fancy software to benefit from this posture. Even a simple practice helps: collect 20 headlines about the same issue, look for repeated verbs and repeated metaphors, and note which actors are consistently foregrounded or deleted. Ask whether the pattern persists across outlets. If it does, you may be seeing a professional norm—a “responsible” style of writing that systematically naturalizes state action.
Good versus Bad CDA
In “The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited,” Murray Rothbard defended good conspiracy analysis and cautioned against bad conspiracy analysis. Similarly, it’s fair to caution against bad discourse analysis. The bad critical discourse analyst (or “uncritical” discourse analyst) turns it into a parlor game, where he “discovers” whatever he ideologically wants to find. So apply Rothbard’s own discipline here: Use CDA to generate hypotheses, not to declare verdicts. “This framing seems to hide or euphemize coercion” is a starting point. Test the hypothesis against institutional facts: funding, regulation, career incentives, revolving doors, enforcement powers, legal privileges. Check counter-texts: how do opponents frame the same issue? What do they foreground? What do they omit? Distinguish intent from function: a journalist may not intend to launder coercion; the genre may still function that way.
CDA becomes most powerful when it is married to a libertarian theory of institutions. Otherwise it can drift into interpretive vanity—seeing “power everywhere” but never identifying who holds the guns, who writes the rules, and who cashes the checks.
In his essay, Rothbard gives a crucial epistemic warning: it is not enough to ask “who benefits” and jump straight to the conclusion that whoever benefits must be responsible. You raise the hypothesis, then you look for evidence. The same applies here: noticing propaganda techniques is not proof of a coordinated plot. It is evidence of systematic incentives—and incentives can be plenty damning on their own.
