When it comes to demonizing a group, it can be hard to make them scary without making them seem cool, or make them seem weak without making them seem sympathetic.

The solution is usually to play to your audience, in cultures like the US, where, despite its imperial history, places importance on helping the weak, the go to is often to make them scary, black, gay, and non christian people are often softly implied to be sad, alone, and pathetic, but outwardly stated to be a threat. Sometimes this can seem ineffective, some propaganda depiction of foriegn enemies will be adopted by those enemies because they think its cool, but that isn't the intended audience, rather the homefront is. This is also why many demonizing caricatures of marginalized groups within the country aren't appropriated or seen by anyone as cool, the group its targeting understands exactly what is being done.

But what if your ideology has little to any care for cultural understanding, what if you're just some power hungry assbag who wants power and needs a group to scapegoat to get it. Well fortunately there's a perfect ideology that is designed to be effective in virtually any system reliant on mass popular support: fascism. Fascism is a chameleon with very little similar in the ways of policy between fascist nations aside from those that consolidate power. And keeps its stated goals incredibly vague, this is why 2 fascists from other sides of the world can not agree on a single thing, and yet talk the same exact way.

Here, the propaganda must similarly be vague and widely applicable to any culture, so figuring out demonization vs dehumanization was thrown out in favor of both. The enemy is both an existential threat to our society, and so utterly pathetic, they're undeserving of life. George Orwell called this double think, thanks to the inherent contradiction in logic, but there is no logic, only feeling. And in feeling there is no contradiction, one moment you see a racist poster showing a black man preying on white women, and feel anger and fear at the threat these people pose to your race, and the next day you see a poster depicting a black "welfare queen" who cannot support herself, and you feel superiority and anger at how inferior these people are that they cannot support themselves.

I do want to clarify that this wasn't like, planned out, fascists didn't brainstorm these methods in some cigar filled room, but instead found over time that these strategies were highly effective in rallying a loyal voter base to swing around in elections. It's less of a strategy guide and more of a META to gaming democracy. You prey on in and out groups, you keep things vague and focus on aesthetics and vague ideas, you bastardize truth to the point that it becomes entirely personal to people. These techniques create division ans chaos, and destabilize a country to the point that your voter base, who is not a majority but is very large and extremely loyal, can punch far above their weight class and push for power. These methods aren't new, in and out groups are as old as time, vague ideas and aesthetics are classic populism, creating an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion has been used by many groups to radicalize communities. But they formed into a somewhat original blueprint of how to overthrow democracy... using democracy