One of the most bizarre aspects of President Trump’s first few weeks in office is that a book written by an Englishman back in 1949 has suddenly become a bestselling novel in the America of 2017.
The book is George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 and, without any hint of irony, liberals are hailing the book’s warning about the extremes of big government as a primer on what to expect from Trump and his administration.
A cursory glance at mainstream news outlets or at the trending topics on social media shows that President Trump’s executive actions so far have convinced his detractors that the government of the USA has overnight turned into the kind of brutal dictatorship portrayed in 1984.
Sales of the novel have skyrocketed and it has just been announced that an acclaimed British stage adaptation of the novel will transfer to Broadway in June.
This abrupt switch from the government being seen as a wise and benign institution (so long as it was under control of the Democrats) to becoming a wicked and authoritarian one (as in Orwell’s novel) miraculously happened only once Trump was sworn in.
A recent review of the book on Amazon sums up the emotions and fears that have seemingly engulfed a large part of the country since the inauguration: “I first read this book as a teenager, and there was a great deal of discussion about the book. Did we really think that life would be as totalitarian and regimented in 1984 as the book predicted? For most of us, no. We realized most would be alive in that year, and we had no fear. Now, in 2017, the fear is here. 1984, the book is in the top ten book sellers this week. Why? Fasicism (sic) is upon us.”
The notion that America has suddenly been transformed into a dystopian world of Big Brother and Big Government also roiled the Huffington Post. They informed nervous readers not only how much like 1984 Trump’s administration already was but also that Orwell’s essay Politics And The English Language was even more relevant to Trump’s America: “1984 is a classic novel that asks an important question: How far could an authoritarian state go? But Politics and the English Language tells us where we are right now. And that, unfortunately, is just as frightening, if not more.”
Quite how anything could be more frightening than the totalitarian nightmare described in 1984 is not something that Huff Post cares to tell us, but apparently Trump’s America is now worse than anything experienced under Stalin’s Soviet Union which was Orwell’s inspiration for his depiction of life under Big Brother.
One of Trump’s ”doublespeak” crimes was apparently saying that he wanted to return law and order to the inner cities — what he was actually doing by saying that was (according to the Huff Post) hiding “the evidence that people of color are treated worse by police than white people.” Other liberal media mouthpieces carry similar somewhat twisted warnings of the parallels between the book and life under Trump.
And Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University, referenced the book as required reading, kindly giving us 20 top tips on resisting a “repressive state” including the somewhat overly hysterical rhetoric of point 19: “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.”
Of course the great irony is that none of the people currently quoting Orwell over Trump’s Executive Orders were that bothered when President Obama did the same thing during his administration
In fact the liberal media and his supporters cheered Obama on to ignore Congress and to use his pen more often to pass the progressive agenda that they favored. Hollywood liberal Gwyneth Paltrow spoke for many on the progressive side when she famously gushed at an Obama fundraiser in 2014 that, “It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass.”
Those who are just discovering 1984 seem naively unaware that Orwell’s fictional spirit-crushing future was a warning against Communism and the unbridled power of an over-reaching government. Trump, for all his myriad faults, seems more concerned with deregulation and taking power away from central government control than building it up.
It was Obama, not Trump, who weaponized the IRS to take down his political opponents and who used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more government whistleblowers than all the previous administrations put together. But none of that unduly bothers today’s new liberal Orwell readers.
Another aspect of 1984 that has seemingly gone unnoticed amongst its sudden glut of contemporary fans is the cult of personality described in the book. Big Brother is everywhere, smiling down from huge billboards and leading his people on the path to salvation.
Strangely, the Big Brother comparison didn’t seem to bother those on the Democrat side back in 2009 when school children were filmed creepily chanting “Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barak Hussein Obama” or when the erstwhile President Obama informed us in 2006 that his selection as the Democrat presidential nominee was “the moment the oceans stopped rising and the world began to heal”.
The idea that Big Brother knows all and knows what’s best for us also didn’t worry progressives when Michelle Obama promised Americans that,“Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” See, Barack knew best and only he can could have stopped you from being uninvolved and uninformed.
Sarcasm aside, America today is nothing like Orwell’s 1984 — but the point is that dictatorships of the kind that 1984 shows us don’t happen overnight. They develop with the government being given more and more power over our lives until it controls every aspect of our existence – from how much soda pop we’re permitted to drink, to what we’re allowed to say and think.
And if you don’t complain about government abuse when your team is in power, you can’t be taken seriously when the next team takes over and uses similar abuses against your side. As George Washington reputedly said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.”
Washington had no idea of the horrors that centralized governments would later unleash upon the world but both he and Orwell (who saw those horrors in his lifetime) realized the dual nature of government.
1984 is a stark warning against totalitarianism and what happens when we cede absolute power to authority. Using Orwell’s masterpiece merely to inaccurately score political points between Red and Blue and to stir up fear and anger both does a great writer a grave disservice and dilutes an extremely important message.