Joseph Rago, an editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal, died this week at age 34. He was a master of the opinion-writing arts and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2011 for his editorials predicting the ills of the Affordable Care Act. The following piece ran in the Journal on Feb. 2, 2017.
Postelection trauma hasn’t subsided. In fact, its sufferers have been performing ever more distraught and operatic displays of emotion. Witness the cottage industry now dedicated to the intersectionality between Donald Trump and George Orwell.
As “1984” climbs the best-seller lists, rising to No. 1 on Amazon, critic after critic is meditating on the literary rediscovery. What did the 1949 novel predict, anticipate or otherwise explain about the gathering horrors of the Trump era? Are the sales a comment on Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”?
The genre is heavy on adjectives and adverbs, like “harrowing” and “chillingly.” Other dystopian novels are invoked — Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) — but Orwell is the presiding visionary: newspeak, the memory hole, the fragile veneers of democracy and objective truth, the underappreciated dangers of a dictator consolidating power.
Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles staged a dramatic video reading of “eerily relevant” passages from “1984,” some of which are “now essentially happening,” he intones, accompanied by spooky string music.
Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, confessed that he once believed “1984” didn’t qualify as prescient, because its world is “too brutal, too atavistic, too limited in its imagination of the relation between authoritarian state and helpless citizens.” Not anymore! He recanted after watching “how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be.”
Yet if Americans who buy “1984” actually read and think about it, maybe the irony will be that U.S. political fevers start to break. Any literate person can recognize that the analogies between Mr. Trump and Big Brother are, not to put too fine a point on it, preposterous.
The terror of “1984” is that the state has achieved total control of society, oppression so absolute as to obliterate the independent mind. “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be,” the torturer O’Brien tells Winston Smith in Room 101. “The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ ”
Were Big Brother watching today, he might begin by liquidating the tens of thousands of people committing the thoughtcrime of acquiring “1984.” Instead, many of those purchases are delivered by government-employed mailmen. He might silence the mass street protests, or dispatch the secret police to Adam Gopnik’s apartment. Yet somehow the clocks aren’t even striking thirteen.
Mr. Trump’s immigration order is harsh. The refugee policy in “1984” is somewhat harsher. Winston writes in his diary about seeing a war film about “a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. First you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink . . . then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it.” Fantasizing yourself into this hellscape is probably melodramatic and self-indulgent.
Some Orwell revivalists — not all — allow that “1984” isn’t literally afoot, or that it is a matter of degree. There’s usually innuendo, like Mr. Charles’s grace note that U.S. citizens “still, for the moment at least, enjoy the right to object.”
But what makes these pieces caricatures of anti-Trump solipsism is that “1984” may be the single most useless guide to the political hour. Orwell took the most abusive tendencies of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and postwar Britain and amplified them to infinity. In a 1949 statement, he wrote that he wanted to draw out “totalitarian ideas . . . to their logical conclusion.” That stark clarity is why the book is compelling — and suitable for high-school reading lists — though at the expense of steamrolling the complexity and elusiveness of the real world.
But any idea is absurd when taken to its logical conclusion, because ideas are contingent and contextual. Orwell didn’t invent the slippery slope, but he did create 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.
A political aide who spins, or corrupts language for her political benefit, as all political aides have done for all of human history? Why, it’s the Ministry of Truth in action. A false claim about inauguration crowd size — of zero practical import and now superseded by fresh outrages — is transformed into the Party’s assertion of reality control. “1984” is a template for making anything seem sinister, even if six degrees of separation are different from 60, or 600.
“If you want a picture of the future,” O’Brien says, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” At worst, the Trump correlative is an overlong infomercial for steaks and herbal supplements.
Reading Mr. Trump on the “1984” spectrum is not a formula for understanding. His administration more than most will feature ambiguity, imprecision, exaggeration and intellectual contradiction. Avoiding analytic failure will require more subtlety and distinction-making, not less. After the mismanaged immigration rollout, a more intriguing question is whether Mr. Trump has the competence to become even a run-of-the-mill strongman.
Meanwhile, the intellectuals who think they’re living in Airstrip One might ponder how effective nonstop hyperpanic is as a form of resistance, or how it comes off to normal nonpolitical people. The chimera of autocracy isn’t likely to persuade those whose daily lives bear no resemblance to “1984,” and they might well conclude about Mr. Trump’s opponents: “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
That’s a passage from “1984.”