Keeping George Orwell on the Left
The term “Orwellian” has long been a vacuous cliché, and now even allies of Trump are making use of it to deride their opponents. But George Orwell, a self-described democratic socialist, always belonged on the Left.
George Orwell (1903–1950). (Wikimedia Commons)
Donald Trump’s presidency ended the same way it began — with a spike in sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The first Trump-induced surge in Orwell sales occurred in 2017, shortly after the presidential inauguration. References by members of Trump’s administration to “alternative facts” recalled the manipulation of reality practiced by the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda department where inconvenient bits of evidence are sent down the “memory hole” to be incinerated in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s most famous novel, in this context, appeared as a portent for the post-truth media landscape Trump was said to foster.
Four years later, as Trump’s single presidential term drew to a close, sales of Orwell’s classic jumped again. This time, in a bizarre inversion, it was Trump’s own allies invoking the author to describe not their president but his adversaries.
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