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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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World adds a different and crucial register to the landscape of state oppression, one that is especially relevant with the rise of Donald Trump, a Reality TV star and a personification of a fatuous celebrity culture, to the highest office in the land. Huxley believed that social control and the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in power through the political tools of pleasure and distraction. For Huxley, freedom and privacy were willingly given up as part of the seductions of a soft authoritarianism, with its vast machinery of manufactured needs, desires, and identities. This new mode of persuasion seduced people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, disposable goods, and new scientific advances in which any viable sense of agency was undermined. Huxley believed that the conditions for critical thought dissolved into the limited pleasures instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking itself. If Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression, Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions, diversions that mark late modernity and are found in the spectacles of extreme violence, representations of hyper-masculinity, the infantilization produced by consumer culture, and the power of celebrity culture dressed up in the worship of life-styles while conferring enormous authority on the likes of celebrities such as the dreadful Kardashians.
In a strange but revealing way, popular culture and politics intersected soon after Trump first assumed the presidency of the United States. On the side of popular culture, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, surged as the number one best seller on Amazon both in the United States and Canada. This followed two significant political events. First, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth coined the term “alternative facts” to justify why press secretary Sean Spicer lied in advancing disproved claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. The concept of “alternative facts” or more precisely an outright lie, is an updated term of what Orwell called “Doublethink,” in which people blindly accept contradictory ideas or allow truth to be subverted in the name of unquestioned common sense. Second, almost within hours of his presidency, Trump penned a series of executive orders that compelled Adam Gopnik, a writer for the The New Yorker, to rethink the relevance of 1984. He had to go back to Orwell’s book, he writes, “Because the single most striking thing about [Trump’s] matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be.”
In this amalgam of Trump’s blatant contempt for the truth, his willingness to embrace a blend of taunts and threats in his inaugural address, and his eagerness to enact a surge of regressive executive orders, the ghost of fascism reasserts itself with a familiar mix of fear and revenge. Unleashing promises he had made to his angry, die-hard ultra-nationalists and white supremacist supporters, Trump has targeted a range of groups whom he believes have no place in American society. For now, this includes Muslims, Syrian refugees, and all illegal immigrants who have become the collateral damage of a number of harsh discriminatory policies. The underlying ignorance, cruelty and punishing, if not criminogenic, intent behind such policies was amplified when Trump suggested that he intended to pass legislation amounting to a demolition of environmental protections. He also asserted his willingness to resume the practice of state-sponsored torture and deny funding to those cities willing to provide sanctuary to illegal immigrants. And this was just the beginning. The financial elite now find their savior in Trump as they will receive more tax cuts, and happily embrace minimal government regulations, while their addiction to greed spins out of control. Should we be surprised?
As Huxley predicted, the memory of totalitarianism with its demand for simplistic answers, intoxication with spectacles of vulgarity, and a desire for strong leaders has faded in a society beset by a culture of immediacy, sensations, and entertaining illiteracy. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to misjudge the depth and tragedy of the collapse of civic culture and democratic public spheres, especially given the profound influence of celebrity culture, a permanent war culture that trades in fear, and the ever-present seductions of consumerist society that functions as a petri dish breeding the plagues of depoliticization and infantilism. Another shocking and revelatory indication of the repressive fist of neo-fascism in the Trump regime took place when Trump’s chief White House right-wing strategist, Steve Bannon, stated in an interview that “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile…. You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. …The media is the opposition party. They don’t understand the country.” This is more than an off-the-cuff angry comment. It is a blatant refusal to see the essential role of a robust and critical media in a democracy. How else to explain a U.S. president calling journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Such comments suggest not only a war on the press, but the very real threat of suppressing dissent, if not democracy itself. Unsurprisingly, Bannon also referred to himself in the interview as “Darth Vader.” A more appropriate comparison would have been to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in the Third Reich. A public intoxicated by ignorance and indifferent to the task of discerning the truth from fake news largely applauded this expression of totalitarian bravado, especially as it translated into imposing a ban on seven Muslim dominated countries while treating freedom of the press similar to the way failed contestants were treated on the Reality TV show, The Apprentice. That is, as someone who was a loser and should shut up and be fired.
Orwell’s Big Brother of 1984 has been upgraded in the 2017 edition. As the late Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, if the older Big Brother presided over traditional enclosures such as military barracks, prisons, schools, and “countless other big and small panopticons, the updated Big Brother is concerned with not only inclusion and the death of privacy but also the suppression of dissent and the widening of the politics of exclusion. Under the Trump administration, keeping people out is the extended face of Big Brother, who now patrols airports, borders, hospitals, and other public spaces in order to spot “the people who do not fit in the places they are in, banishing them from … ‘where they belong,’ or better still never allowing them to come anywhere near in the first place.”
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