Critique in the Trump Era
For almost two years, I've been playing a kind of intellectual solitaire I've dubbed the Orwell game. I check out any hot take, think piece, or news article I think will allude to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Often, click-bait style, the reference is in the title, but even when it isn't, I've developed a sixth sense for Big Brother mentions. When I find them, I consider, What point is being made? Should the article have chosen a different dystopia for its springboard? Has the writer read Orwell since high school?
Alluding to Orwell is a popular rhetorical tool in every Anglo-American political camp: right, left, and sideways. Perhaps as a result, the connotation of "Orwellian" has become vaguer over the years, such that concepts Orwell attempted to define precisely are sometimes used as mere expressions of disapproval, hurled by any given faction at its enemies. What does "Newspeak" actually signify when you can find someone willing to slap the label on nearly anything, from protests on college campuses, to the EU's press releases, to politicians who refuse to blame terrorism on Islam qua religion? Does this sloppy, elastic Orwell discourse result from the usual foolishness and political bad faith that Orwell claimed, in his seminal essay "Politics and the English Language," lead to confused rhetoric? Or is it somehow worse now? "Post-truth"?
I divide Orwell articles into three types: those that use "Orwellian" as a generic pejorative; those that use Nineteen Eighty-Four or another Orwell text as a jumping-off point for an extended analogy with the present moment; and meta-Orwell articles that criticize prior articles for their (mis)use of Orwell.
The most illustrative group of recent Orwell articles surrounds the Trump administration's "alternative facts" debacle. On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated president of the United States. On January 21, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed that the crowd attending the inauguration was "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period." This claim was a demonstrable lie, refuted by photographic evidence. On January 22, on NBC's Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway why Spicer lied. Conway first deflected—what about those scurrilous lying journalists?—and then called Todd "overly dramatic," before defending Spicer's lie on the grounds that he was simply providing "alternative facts." A deluge of Trump-Orwell pieces followed:
- On January 22, The Washington Post published a piece by Margaret Sullivan, who called Conway's comments "full Orwell" but cautioned her fellow journalists not to let the administration's train wreck spectacle distract them from reporting substantive issues. The "full Orwell" is the only mention of Orwell or his work in the article; it functions as a generic negative phrase.
- On January 25, The L.A. Times published, "Not an 'alternative fact': George Orwell's '1984' tops Amazon's bestseller list." Here, book critic Michael Schaub notes various comparisons of "alternative facts" to Newspeak, which he describes, inaccurately, as "the euphemistic language that often inverted meaning in '1984.'"
- Also on January 25, The Washington Post published an op-ed by its book editor, Ron Charles, called, "Why Orwell's '1984' Matters So Much Now." Like the A. Times piece, this op-ed implies that the January 2017 spike in sales of dystopian novels, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a direct response to Conway's "alternative facts." It also draws parallels between the dystopian state Oceania's propagation of obvious contradictions and various Trump claims.
- Still on January 25, The Guardian published a trio of mini-essays about post-truth politics titled, "Welcome to dystopia—George Orwell experts on Donald Trump." These experts trace "post-truth politics" back to the W. Bush era; talk about Orwell's attitude toward America (ambivalent, go figure); and note that, unlike politicians in the era of "post-truth politics," "Big Brother [. . .] brought a certain amount of guile to pretending what he said was true." This last quip brings up an interesting point: namely, that the dystopian state in Nineteen Eighty-Four cares about unitary truth—albeit in a destructive fashion—whereas "post-truth" discourse does does not.
- On January 26, The New York Times published a hot take from long-time book reviewer Michiko Kakutani titled, "Why '1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read." This article is unusual among Trump-Orwell pieces in that it begins by calling out the NSA, thereby reminding us of Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of U.S. domestic surveillance. Perhaps Kakutani was flashing back to the 2013 Obama-Orwell articles published among centrist news outlets, the New York Times among them, when "Orwellian" was used to denounce a surveillance state trying to hide itself, rather than traffic in overt, obvious, sometimes weirdly unmotivated lies.
- On January 27, The New Yorker published Adam Gopnik's "Orwell's '1984' and Trump's America." Gopnik frames his article as an extended mea culpa to Orwell and his partisans. He used to think that Nineteen Eighty-Four was too simplistic, too on the nose, but the "pure Big Brother crude" phenomenon of Trump's lying and his "pure raging authoritarian id" have converted him. The central claim of the piece, not articulated in most other Trump-Orwell articles, is that Trump's lies and the dystopian state's are more "a way of asserting power" than of actually deceiving people.
Many of these articles are well written, thoughtful, and appropriately worried, but they're not all using Orwell right. Orwell does critique overblown, vague, and obfuscating diction in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," but does it matter that Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak isn't "obfuscating" or "euphemistic," as various think pieces describe it? Newspeak doesn't resemble the convoluted, impenetrable language Orwell criticized elsewhere. Though its vocabulary includes some brute paradoxes, it's for the most part excessively simple; it narrows each word's range of denotation to a single referent and destroys, rather than misuses, words with politically disruptive potential. Newspeak wouldn't allow, for example, discussion of supposed disagreement among scientists about anthropogenic global warming, because Newspeak doesn't have a word for science.
Does it matter that "alternative facts" would be alien to the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four? The concept itself is material for a dystopian nightmare, yet it has no analog in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because Oceania's Ministry of Truth is invested in controlling all information dissemination. The Ministry of Truth doesn't have "alternative facts," a phrase that implies at least two possible worldviews. It has the only facts, which misdescribe reality completely. It centralizes epistemology, producing unitary false knowledge according to an ideological procedure divorced from actual events. That false knowledge is then imposed on the population by force. By contrast, in the contemporary U.S., we have a polarized epistemology, in which segments of the population choose—unforced—to believe only knowledge imparted by certain groups of ideological fabulists.
So why all the Orwell?
Writers began publishing meta-Orwell articles along these lines just days after the first crop of Orwell-"alternative facts" articles. Meta-Orwell articles fall into two camps: conservative backlash pieces, which deny the applicability of the dystopian framework; and disanalogy pieces, arguing that some dystopian framework is probably applicable, but not Orwell's. Here's a sample:
- On February 1, 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, "Big Brother Is Watching, Say Orwell's Unlikely New Fans," by Joseph Rago. This editorial, slamming the "cottage industry now dedicated to the intersectionality between Donald Trump and George Orwell," is fascinating. Rago accuses Orwell of "creat[ing] a set of tropes—now clichés—meant to discredit ideas and political conventions by comparing them to extreme versions that they don't really resemble." Here, he rejects not just Trump-Orwell analysis but dystopian fiction per se. Dystopias critique current political trends by extrapolating a bad future from their continuing growth, and Rago will have none of it—until, in a final twist, he succumbs to Orwell discourse's siren call, comparing liberal "hyperpanic" over Trump to Big Brother-esque reality control. It's as if the term "Orwellian" has such power—that comparing any group to Nineteen Eighty-Four's dystopian state is such an unanswerable accusation—that Rago cannot resist deploying it even as he decries it.
- On February 2, 2017, in The Guardian, Andrew Postman reiterated an argument found in his father Neil Postman's 1985 work of media theory, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. Postman argues that the West should worry not about the brute state power satirized in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but about the mandatory consumption and endless distractions satirized in an earlier dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). This consumption and these distractions leave us so politically tractable that the state doesn't need to use violent force to control us. In this view, our problem is not epistemological but ethical. The public prefers entertainment to substantive discussion of political issues, so journalists trying to sell newspapers obsessively cover a reality-TV star's antics and accidentally hand him the White House. This narrative has traction among cultural commentators—Michelle Wolf made jokes to the same effect at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner—but I'm not sure it justifies the Huxleyean frame. As a friend of mine asked, plaintively: If we're in Huxley, how come we're not having orgies? Where are our drug handouts? She meant that, while we may be addicted to infotainment, infotainment doesn't provide the surface placidity of group sex and soma. The populace may or may not be addled, but it's definitely angry.
- Back on February 1, the same day that the Wall Street Journal published the Rago piece, The Independent ran my favorite meta-Orwell article, by John Broich, a historian of British imperialism at Case Western Reserve. The article, ""2017 isn't '1984'—It's stranger than Orwell imagined," gives voice to my nebulous discomfort at equating Nineteen Eighty-Four's totalitarian reality-control with "alternative facts" and grassroots conspiracy theories in our contemporary public sphere. It ends like this: "In Orwell's Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston [Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist], freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes five."
After these listicles, I have one recommendation. Re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four and consider whether its novelistic details don't seem, after all, more pointed and specific than the catch-all political pejorative, "Orwellian." Maybe "Orwellian" is an exact descriptor for our current political moment; maybe a novel satirizing Stalin's USSR has diagnosed exactly, almost seventy years before the fact, the ailments of the "post-truth" United States. If not, though, we should recognize that rejecting one label for a political problem is not to deny the existence of the problem but to call for further analysis—cautious, detailed analysis. Orwell might approve.
Finola Prendergast received her PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame in 2018. Her dissertation analyzed the intersection of moral philosophy and speculative genre tropes in contemporary literary fiction.
