Donald Trump’s Orwellian nightmare
It’s a newly-minted April fourth as I write this, the date Eric Arthur Blair — writing as George Orwell — chose to begin his seminal novel about what was, for him, the misty future of 1984. Though that year lies buried forty years in our past, Orwell’s dystopian vision remains a present and chilling cautionary tale.
Orwell’s magnum opus, never once out of print since its publication in 1949, enjoyed record sales shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, briefly becoming Amazon’s number one bestseller. We understood only too well what Trump’s election could mean, and it was immediately reflected in our sudden taste in literature. Since then, the adjective “Orwellian,” first coined in the 1950s, has remained in continuous use.
Orwell saw clearly what today’s MAGA Republicans strive to bring to pass, a police state where America’s law enforcement are indemnified against wrongdoing and ultimately answerable only to Big Brother aspirant Trump. Theres is a frightening and plausible Orwellian world, where abortion, contraceptives and recreational sex are crimes, where books are banned, where truth is no longer a conceptual absolute but whatever the fascist state declares it to be, where political dissent is not tolerated and unorthodox thought is labelled something like “crimethink” and punishable by imprisonment or even death.
These horrors are euphemistically cloaked by Republicans in their opposites. Members of today’s MAGA cult paradoxically speak as if they are the sole guardians of “freedom,” paralleling the Orwellian notion “freedom is slavery.” Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is oddly mirrored in Trump’s Truth Social. Trump’s MAGA acolytes are systematically initiated into the contradictions of doublethink, declaring themselves patriots of the very democracy they wish to destroy.
We are fortunate that Trump’s MAGA world is incompetent and moribund in ways that Orwell’s Ingsoc was not. But it remains disturbing that so many Americans have been seduced by Trump’s lies. We feel safe from it the way a visitor to an aquarium feels safe from a hammerhead shark circling in a tank, but simultaneously uneasy in the knowledge of its sleek and deadly potential.
Meanwhile the Republican Party remains an entity devoted to the Orwellian proposition that “the object of power is power.” We must remain steadfast in our vigilance against them. Our job won’t end in November, but must continue for as long as their ambitions remain consistent with the intent Orwell warned us against. We cannot afford to fail — ever. They need to succeed only once. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.