Rethinking Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ in Trump’s America
For Aldous Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for George Orwell, optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope.
Jason OX4 / CC BY-SA 2.0
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The remains of such language finds its Orwellian apogee in the Trump’s endless proliferating of lies such as claiming that China is responsible for climate change or that former President Obama was not born in the United States. In moments that speak to an alarming flight from moral and social responsibility, Trump has adopted terms strongly affiliated with the legacy of anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology. For instance, historian Susan Dunn refers to his use of the phrase “America First” as a “sulfurous expression” connected historically to “the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to Appease Adolf Hitler.” It is also associated with its most powerful advocate, Charles Lindbergh, a notorious anti-Semite who once declared that America’s greatest internal threat came from Jews who posed a danger to the United States because of their “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”
It gets worse. Once he was elected to the presidency, Trump took ownership of the notion of “fake news,” twisting it around from a critique of his perpetual lying to applying it as a pejorative label aimed at journalists who criticized his policies. Even Trump’s inaugural address was filled with lies about rising crime rates and the claim of unchecked carnage in America, though crime rates are at historical lows. His blatant disregard for the truth took another low soon afterwards with his nonsensical and false claim that the mainstream media lied about the size of his inaugural crowd. Trump’s lies and his urge to tell them are more than what Adam Gopnik calls “Big Brother crude” and the expression of a “pure raging authoritarian id,” they also speak to an effort to undermine freedom of speech and truthfulness as core democratic values. Trump’s lies represent more than a Twitter fetish aimed at invalidating the work of reason and rational assertions. His endless fabrications also point to a strategy for asserting power, while encouraging if not ennobling his followers to think the unthinkable ethically and politically.
Echoes of neo-Fascism are not only visible in Trump’s rhetoric but also in his policies. For example, his white supremacist ideology and racist contempt for Muslims was on full display in his issuance of an executive order banning all Syrians and people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. In doing so, Trump has not only made visible, and without apology, his embrace of the frenzied lawlessness of authoritarianism, he has also put into place an additional series of repressive policies for the creation of what might be called a democracy in exile.
Not only will this executive order further threaten the security of the United States given its demagogic design and rhetoric of exclusion by serving as a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists, it also legitimates a form of state-sponsored racial and religious cleansing. Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich, hardly a radical, was right in stating that the design and implementation of the order was “rushed, chaotic, cruel, and oblivious” to the demands and actualities of national security, but that it had “ushered in a dark moment in U.S. history.” Dark, indeed, because the impetus behind the ruling signals not only a society that has stopped questioning itself, but also points to its immersion into a mode of totalitarianism in which a form of social engineering is once again being constructed around an assault on religious and racial identities. What we are witnessing under Trump and his chief ideologues is a purification ritual motivated by xenophobia and the attempt to create a white public sphere free of those who do not share the ideology of white Christian extremists.
Trump’s immigration order is meant to carve out a space for the dictates of white supremacists, a space in which those considered flawed—racially and religiously defective- will be subject to terminal exclusion and exile. This war on the Other is part of a larger obsession which combines a purification ritual with the heightened, if not hysterical, demands of the national security state. Under Trump’s regime of hatred, the cruelty and misery of massive exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism merges with a spectacle of exclusion and a politics of disposability that echoes those totalitarian regimes of the 1930s that gave birth to the unimaginable horrors and intolerable acts of mass violence. Racial cleansing based on generalized notions of identity echo the sordid principles of earlier policies of extermination that we saw in the past. This is not to suggest that Trump’s immigration policies have risen to that standard of violence as much as to suggest that it contains elements of a past totalitarianism that “heralds as a possible model for the future.” What I am arguing is that this form of radical exclusion based on the denigration of Islam as a closed and timeless culture marks a terrifying entry into a political experience that suggests that older elements of totalitarianism are crystallizing into new forms.
The malleability of truth has made it easier for governments including the Trump administration to wage an ongoing and ruthless assault on the immigrants, social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor minorities and any vestige of the social contract. The principles of casino capitalism, a permanent war culture, the militarization of everyday life, and market-based practices emphasizing the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity will be accelerated under the Trump administration. There can be little doubt about the ideological direction of the Trump administration given the appointment of billionaires, generals, white supremacists, representatives of the corporate elite, and incompetent nominees to the highest levels of government. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have and will be increasingly commercialized—or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. Orwell opened a door for all to see a “nightmarish future” in which everyday life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance, and control—a society in which the slogan “ignorance becomes strength” morphs into a guiding principle of the highest levels of government, mainstream media, education, and the popular culture.
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