Long before he envisioned the charismatic figure of Big Brother, Orwell argued that most people are not casting their votes for executives based on their political positions. These harsh words against one of their own come tinged with a kind of bafflement at the phenomenon of Trump: How do we make sense of his popularity? George Will argued more recently that a Trump victory could spell the end of the Republican Party in America. Late last year, Michael Reagan said that his father Ronald Reagan would be “appalled” by Trump. Republican political pundits have been stepping up their critiques of Trump lately. The first-edition front cover of the novel "1984," by George Orwell. In fact it may be time for Republicans to have another look at Orwell’s most famous novel, which might help them understand more clearly the mystifying appeal of Donald Trump, their leading presidential candidate. But that doesn’t mean that Republicans don’t have much to learn from one of Britain’s great socialist thinkers. It included the nationalization of all major industries and an income policy which would prevent the salaries of executives from rising above 10 times the income of the lowest-paid workers.Įvery Republican ever, one imagines, would disagree. In an earlier, longer essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” Orwell spelled out fully the program he believed would enable England to become a just and prosperous society. To the contrary, Orwell wrote his two most famous novels to expose the workings of then-communist states that were, in his mind, giving a bad name to the socialist programs he supported. He clarified this in response to a letter from an American reader after the publication of "1984," stating emphatically that “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter).” The two anti-communist novels represented a late turn in his work, and were never meant to stand in critique of the socialism that Orwell espoused for his entire life. Of course any reader who has dipped into Orwell’s work beyond "1984" and "Animal Farm" knows what a distorted picture of Orwell’s work this perspective represents. One can almost envision the overall-clad denizens of Oceania marching through the streets with placards celebrating Big Brother’s ability to 'Make Oceania Great Again.'
The novel affected him so much the second time around, he says, that he cried at the fate of the novel’s two protagonists, who are ultimately reduced to human shells in the torture chambers of a repressive government. In the video, Paul claims to have read Orwell’s novel twice, once as a teenager and again in his 40s. Rand Paul, another presidential candidate, has a seven-minute YouTube video in which he argues that we have become “Orwellian without even knowing it,” thoughtlessly ceding our individual rights to the government. In 2013, current presidential contender Ted Cruz used the novel to bash what he called the “Big Government crowd,” citing Orwell’s depiction of “an all-powerful central government that monitored the citizens at all times.” Orwell’s nightmarish science fiction, Cruz warned, was becoming reality on American soil. (both photos AP) This article is more than 6 years old.Īmerican Republicans love to cite George Orwell’s most famous novel, "1984," in support of their critiques of government overreach. A closer look at the collected works of George Orwell helps explain the phenomenon of Donald Trump.
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