By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, March 02, 2017
On April 4, almost 90 art-house movie theaters across the
country will show 1984, the British
film starring John Hurt, as a form of protest against President Trump’s stated
desire to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. The theaters say they
“strongly believe in supporting the [NEA] and see any attempt to scuttle that
program as an attack on free speech and creative expression through
entertainment.”
The George Orwell novel on which the film is based,
you’ll recall, is the classic story of a totalitarian government that controls
all forms of mass media. It thus seems an odd choice for those protesting any
government attempt to get out of the mass-media business.
In fact, 1984
has become something of a touchstone for the anti-Trump left. New York Times book reviewer Michiko
Kakutani undoubtedly spoke for many Americans when she recommended shortly
after Trump’s inauguration that readers revisit Orwell’s masterpiece
post-haste:
The dystopia described in George
Orwell’s nearly 70-year-old novel “1984” suddenly feels all too familiar. A
world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always
listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people’s homes. (Hey,
Alexa, what’s up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up
against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world
in which the government insists that reality is not “something objective,
external, existing in its own right” — but rather, “whatever the Party holds to
be truth is truth.”
Kakutani’s shout out to the NSA is curious, given that
its infamous domestic surveillance program began under President George W. Bush
and expanded under President Obama. The “world of endless war,” meanwhile, has
always been with us: The war on terror that began on 9/11 hasn’t ended yet;
Obama launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries during
his two terms. And I doubt the ruling party’s casual disregard for the truth
bothered her when Obama was promising that, “if you like your plan, you can
keep your plan” and claiming that he “didn’t raise taxes once” and ”excluded
lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”
Of course, during the Obama years, it wasn’t too hard to
find Republicans who insisted that Obama was bringing America closer to the
dystopian world of 1984. In the New York Times in 2013, photojournalist
Santiago Lyon lamented “Obama’s Orwellian Image Control.” In 2015, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret
Stephens quipped, “To adapt George Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama,
friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.” Yale
University law professor Stephen Carter declared, “There is an eerie Orwellian
cost to the Obama administration’s refusal to use the term “War on Terror” to
describe its . . . war on terror.”
The point is not that Barack Obama was Big Brother. The
point is that we always see the other side’s actions as foreshadowing Big
Brother, while our side’s policy moves are just rational steps to take in a
dangerous world.
Orwell’s 1984
is a brilliant, unforgettable warning about the dangers of an all-powerful
state, cults of personality, mankind’s capacity for cognitive dissonance, and
the willingness to believe what is obviously false in order to preserve a
fatally flawed worldview. But the book’s memorable phrases and concepts are
also now so chronically overused as a criticism of political leaders that
they’re clichéd and, I suspect, easy to tune out if you don’t already agree
that Leader X is a power-mad, ruthlessly manipulative tyrant-in-waiting.
The America of 2017 is the same as America has always
been: a mix of good and bad, noble and selfish, exercised liberties and runaway
politicians and bureaucrats. Of course we have problems, but overheated
comparisons to dystopian novels obscure more than they illuminate and
conveniently forget that we’ve seen much worse.
Maybe Fox News strikes you as a modern day Ministry of
Truth, airbrushing away any criticism of the regime. But it’s worth remembering
that there was a time when such criticism was criminalized in America by
Woodrow Wilson’s Sedition Act.
If you believe Trump’s private security guards have the
potential to become a force of unaccountable loyalist thugs, I’d like to
introduce you to Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago Police Department of 1968.
Perhaps you feel the new administration’s discussion of
Muslims and terrorism is scaremongering, and like Representative Keith Ellison,
you argue against it by quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself.” Of course, Roosevelt later rounded up Japanese-Americans
and put them into internment camps.
It’s not hard to find people who insist Trump is
authoritarian because of the things he says. But authoritarians are not defined
by the things they say; they’re
defined by the things they do. The
judicial branch already struck down Trump’s executive order on refugees.
Despite Trump’s hyperbolic denunciations of the media, America’s press remains
as free and vibrant as ever. The first weeks of the new presidency have not
been marked by a meek and obedient Congress but by one that can’t unify behind
a single legislative agenda.
When Orwell’s novel was published in 1949, the Third
Reich had only been gone for four years, Joseph Stalin still ruled the Soviet
Union with an iron fist and far-reaching brutality, Mao Zedong was seizing
control of China and preparing to kill millions in the name of suppressing
counter-revolutionaries, and Pol Pot was just getting intrigued by the ideas of
French Communists. That is what the novel was intended to warn against; not a
democratically elected president who pursues policies you don’t like.
Today, the world has plenty of governments who are
uncomfortably close to the tyrannical regime of Oceania. They’re just not in
America. Vladimir Putin’s critics have a strange habit of dying in
not-so-random crimes and accidents. China still has forced-labor camps. The
city that most resembles the London of 1984
is Pyongyang, North Korea. Iran encompasses it all: complete media control,
arrests for thought crimes, and executions for nonviolent offenses such as
insulting the Prophet, apostasy, same-sex relations, and adultery.
It’s popular in many circles to claim Orwell would look
at the United States of today and shudder. But I suspect he would probably be
content to mock President Trump on Twitter, while keeping his attention focused
on the real threats to freedom, far from a free and democratic America where
constitutional checks and balances remain in place.
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