Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the memoir of an ambitious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed popularity owed to the relevance of a nearly 70-year-old vision of shabby, totalitarian future England to twenty-first century America, and how much to the fact that, as far as influence on popular culture’s image of political dystopia, no other work of literature comes close? For all the myriad ways one can criticize his two administrations, Trump’s America bears little superficial resemblance to Oceania’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Party. But it can hardly be a coincidence that this period of history has also seen the concept “post-truth” become a fixture in the zeitgeist. There are many reasons not to want to live in the world Orwell imagines in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the thorough bureaucratization, the lack of pleasure, the unceasing surveillance and propaganda. But none of this is quite so intolerable as what makes it all possible: the rulers’ claim to absolute control over the truth, a form of psychological manipulation hardly limited to regimes we regard as evil. As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s overseas service during the war, and there received a troubling education in the use of information as a political weapon. The experience inspired the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith spends his days re-writing history, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severely reduced English designed to narrow its speakers’ range of th...
First seen: 2025-06-17 01:11
Last seen: 2025-06-17 01:11