As Vice President JD Vance dressed down European officials over two days last month for criminalizing far-right speech, his outrage built to the unkindest cut of all. “This is Orwellian,” he trumpeted, “and everyone in Europe and the U.S. must reject this lunacy.”
A day later, Orwell reappeared — this time wielded against President Trump after his truth-mangling suggestion that Ukraine was somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion. Even a fellow Republican, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, couldn’t resist: “Putin started this war,” he posted on X, adding, “I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”
And as Trump unleashed a torrent of norm-puncturing executive orders — declaring newly forbidden words here, renaming a body of water there, making assertions that seemingly mean their polar opposite — so many references to “1984” have flooded the political conversation that it feels as if nearly half the electorate joined the same book group. After the White House took facts on a loop-de-loop, claiming that officials who revealed details of strike plans in Yemen on a Signal chat had not disclosed classified information, hundreds of people posted the same Orwell quote on social media: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” T-shirts with the same line are available on Etsy for as low as $16. So is one with a fake Orwell quip: “I literally wrote a book to warn you all about this.”
Orwell is the long-dead British writer whom no one will let rest in peace. He remains forever current, thanks to his novels “Animal Farm” and, especially, “1984,” easy-reading teenage favorites — one an animal fable that skewered Stalinist totalitarianism, the other a satire of an all-seeing, all-controlling ruling party epitomized by Big Brother. He was an inveterate democratic socialist, but his writing established him as a champion of fearlessly independent political thought and an enemy of political expression dominated by “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” as he wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.”
Warnings of language as a weapon of manipulation, obfuscation and oppression run through Orwell’s work. It is a reason you could be excused for hearing real-life echoes of scenes from “1984” emanating from Washington. Trump’s airbrushing of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a “beautiful day” and the pardoning of violent rioters who, he said, had “love in their hearts” recalls one of Orwell’s quotes: “The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.” The bureaucrat who gleefully bragged that “we’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day” could have been deployed at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the search-and-delete mission for references to race, but in fact worked at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984.”
And that abrupt switch of Russia from enemy to ally? That also happened in “1984.” In the midst of Hate Week festivities dedicated to vilifying Eurasia, the enemy of Oceania, the novel’s fictional empire, a general announcement was made without explanation: “Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.”
In “1984,” hate binds members of the Party, reinforced with Two Minute Hate sessions aimed at the televised mythical figure “Emanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People.” In the lexicon of Trump, his many enemies — law enforcement, judges, immigrants, the press — are “scum” and “vermin” and, yes, “enemies of the people.”
Not long ago, it was the political right that was regularly trotting out the tall, gangly socialist. “We are living in Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America.” That was Donald Trump Jr. posting on Twitter on Jan. 8, 2021, the day his father was kicked off the platform following the Jan. 6 attack. Elon Musk, the multibillionaire who bought Twitter and helped fund Trump’s comeback, last year attacked diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying, “Always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book.” That’s the same Elon Musk who now oversees the initiative he calls the Department of Government Efficiency.
Orwell even has a big fan at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the think tank that produced the Project 2025 playbook that many critics are finding, well, Orwellian. “I reread ‘1984’ every few years because it is such a prophetic book,” says Roger Severino, Heritage’s domestic policy vice president, who was an official in the first Trump administration and wrote the health-policy chapter of Project 2025. For him, the warnings of “1984” rang most loudly in the left’s approach to transgender issues and Covid mandates, and the “canceling” of people who did not comply. Conspiracies still rage over restriction on dissenting scientific voices on Covid’s origin in China and over shutting down schools and much of society in response.
Severino called the 2016 Obama Justice Department guidance that schools should treat transgender students according to their “gender identity” an Orwellian rewriting of the scientific fact of two sexes, now codified in Trump’s “restoring biological truth” executive order. Biden-era directives telling government employees to address co-workers with their preferred pronouns meant forcing “people to repeat a lie with their own lips,” he said. It reminded him of the end of “1984,” when the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, beaten into submission, adopts the lies of the Party. Smith “began to write down the thoughts that came into his head,” Orwell wrote. “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.”
So it has come to this. All seem to agree we might be slouching toward “1984,” but not on who is most Orwellian. Orwell was indeed prophetic. Including, it seems, about his own legacy. He once wrote about another English writer whose politics have been wrestled over, Charles Dickens. In a 1939 essay, he lauded Dickens as a writer guided by morality and “always on the side of the underdog.” As if writing about the icon he would become, Orwell noted: “Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives.”
This has long been Orwell’s posthumous fate. “He fills a hole for anyone who wants to establish any kind of intellectual pedigree,” says John Rodden, a retired professor who has written extensively on Orwell. It is unlikely Orwell, as a writer of precision, would have approved of being slotted into every hole equally and simultaneously. But perhaps Orwell’s well-turned words have found their moment.
What Would Orwell Think?
Orwell died in 1950 at age 46, three weeks before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech declaring that he had a list of Communist sympathizers in the State Department, setting off the witch hunts of the 1950s. Rodden points out that it was the first of many tumultuous events that scrambled political alliances and set off debates about who could claim Orwell’s moral authority. He was anti-Communist, but would he have actually condoned McCarthy? Not being around to declare himself on the Cold War, Richard Nixon, the invasion of Iraq, the internet or the Trump years, Orwell was never pigeonholed in the modern era and instead morphed into his very own, very handy adjective. Really, what can’t be deemed Orwellian?
In his book about Orwell’s novel, “The Ministry of Truth,” the British author Dorian Lynskey writes that “1984” became “shorthand for not just a grim future but also an uncertain present” — which basically covers all eventualities. At one point, the right-wing John Birch Society made 1984 the last four digits of its headquarters’ phone number, while the Black Panthers taught Orwell at their school in Oakland, Lynskey noted.
Orwell’s applicability across political divisions can be traced partly to the fact that he was an undogmatic thinker, willing to shift his views based on personal experience. The son of a British civil servant in India who himself served as a young man with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell soured on colonialism and imperialism. A reporting assignment among the British working class helped turn him toward socialism. Even so, for decades after his death, the political right made claims on Orwell based on another ideological transition, this one sparked by his experience in Spain.
He went to Spain in 1936 to join the leftist campaign defending the Popular Front government against the fascist-backed forces led by Francisco Franco. It was a brutal dress rehearsal of sorts for World War II. For Orwell, the drama was twofold: He was shot in the neck and almost died; then Soviet-backed government forces violently turned on Orwell’s militia, with a vicious campaign of propaganda and imprisonment, accusing them of secretly supporting Franco. Orwell fled Spain and the Communists.
That set him apart from his fellow leftists in England. He struggled to find a publisher for his book about Spain, “Homage to Catalonia,” given its dark portrayal of the anti-Franco forces, then in vogue with the British left. He also broke with his pacifist allies on the British left after the 1939 nonaggression pact between the Nazis and the Soviet Union convinced him that England needed to enter the war against fascism. When he wrote “Animal Farm” during World War II, with Moscow aligned with the West against Germany, Orwell again had trouble finding a willing publisher for his dark take on the Russian Revolution.
A statue of Orwell outside the BBC’s headquarters in London is inscribed with his quote “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And he did. He skewered capitalism — he called millionaires “rich swine” — but also took aim at his fellow socialists. His book based on reporting on the working class in England’s coal country contained an analysis of how socialists were out of touch with ordinary workers — a striking echo of a debate in today’s Democratic Party. To many socialists, he wrote, the movement “means a set of reforms which ‘we,’ the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them,’ the Lower Orders.”
Then he added, gratuitously, “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” This chiding of his political compatriots reflected what Lynskey called Orwell’s “liberal heart and conservative temperament,” which has given people on both the left and the right confidence over the decades that he might have evolved in their direction.
Though he never visited the United States, his independent, adaptable views have helped fuel the American version of the parlor game WWOT? — What Would Orwell Think?
In 1969, the writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy speculated about whether Orwell would have stood with her and others opposing the Vietnam War. “I can hear him angrily arguing that to oppose the Americans in Vietnam, whatever their shortcomings, is to be ‘objectively’ pro-totalitarianism.” Given the tumult of the moment two decades after his death, McCarthy concluded her essay on him with an audacious bit of speculation: “If he had lived, he might have been happiest on a desert island, and it was a blessing for him probably that he died.” This from a peacenik? How Orwellian!
‘Such a thing as “the truth” exists’
The first executive order that President Trump signed — just hours after he was sworn in to his second term in office — was titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” the order read. “Therefore, this order sets forth a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.” Clearly one American person was front of mind, the president himself.
Trump has made little secret that his four criminal indictments, his 34 felony convictions and jury findings that he sexually abused a woman and defamed her, plus his two impeachments, have earned prosecutors a special place in his hate. Rather than ending weaponization, the order looked more like the beginning of his promised retribution. What followed has been almost daily actions aimed at lawyers, officials or others perceived as being aligned against the president. Security clearances and protections were canceled for those deemed enemies. Law firms were restricted from government work. Career prosecutors and law-enforcement personnel were fired.
On March 14, he angrily vowed revenge when he took the lectern at the Justice Department, which by long tradition and policies has maintained independence from the White House. It is now headed by three lawyers who served on Trump’s criminal and impeachment defense teams. At the event, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, called Trump “the greatest president in the history of our country” and pointedly said the department operates “at the directive of Donald Trump.”
If that is what “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” means, it does resemble the up-is-down doctrines of the mythical Oceania in “1984.” “Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts,” he wrote. “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.” One might imagine the president has on his night stand a dog-eared copy of “1984” alongside Project 2025 and “The Art of the Deal.”
Also on that first day of his second term, Trump signed an order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” It began, “The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.”
That robust defense of free speech lasted unchallenged until the afternoon of Inauguration Day, when new executive orders set off the Great Website Scrubbing, deleting words and expressions that might relate to diversity, equity and inclusion or transgender issues. Eventually hundreds of words were disappearing. (“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” Winston Smith’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth gushes.) This was before Trump threatened to cut funding to colleges that allow undefined “illegal protests,” or a Columbia student activist was arrested and threatened with deportation for what the government said was protesting in support of terrorism, or the president barred The Associated Press from the Oval Office for not calling a certain body of water by his chosen name.
Verbal high jinks have spread. At the Pentagon, Hegseth restored Fort Bragg to its original name but insisted it was not meant to honor the Confederate general but rather an obscure World War II infantryman, Pvt. Roland L. Bragg. (A line that comes to mind is not Orwell’s but one often attributed to another fine writer, Abraham Lincoln, who defeated the Confederacy: “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”)
The fight for the Orwellian high ground on free speech has become a pitched battle. “We are living in a world where the right truly believes that the ‘woke left’ is rewriting reality through its advocacy of trans rights and critical race theory,” says Laura Beers, a professor of history at American University and author of “Orwell’s Ghosts.” The left, she says, views the Trump administration as “Orwellian dystopia come to life” because “objective realities have increasingly ceased to be relevant, and truth and the law seem to be whatever Trump declares it to be.”
But Beers notes that “there is a huge difference between feeling social pressure to be ‘woke’ and the arm of the state forcibly suppressing speech it doesn’t agree with or punitively defunding institutions with which it disagrees.”
As much as Orwell valued free speech, she says, he valued “true speech” more. Writing during World War II, he noted in an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War” that central to German totalitarianism was a denial “that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists.”
“The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘it never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”
In “1984,” the ultimate power is the power to define truth. And it remains so. Simple arithmetic has not been altered. But the scientific consensus on climate change has melted away. By decree, there are two sexes and two sexes only. Unfavorable press coverage is “corrupt and illegal.” Jan. 6 rioters have been “ruthlessly prosecuted.”
In Washington, there is a march to expand “executive power” — the power of the president — by edict, by threats, by humiliation and by legal theories yet untested. The man who battled the truth to try to stay in office in 2020 is being talked up by supporters for a Constitution-defying third term. As an enforcer for the Party tells a beaten-down and resigned Winston Smith in “1984”: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”
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