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Tuesday
I’m struck by how much my attitude to George Orwell’s 1984 has changed over the years. When I first encountered the novel as a bookish teenager, I reveled in it as a stimulating thought experiment. When I served on a college discussion panel in 1984 during the virulently anti-communist Ronald Reagan administration, it struck me as somewhat over-the-top paranoia about the dangers of totalitarianism. Now I see it as an essential resource for combating Trumpian totalitarianism.
The first time I fully realized the novel’s applicability was when newly elected Trump began telling easily disprovable lies, such as that his inauguration was larger than Barack Obama’s The point of such lying, Orwell points out, is not to persuade people. After all, there’s compelling photographic evidence on crowd sizes. The point is to get you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” This, the author tells us, is the Party’s “final, most essential command.”
Trump got virtually the entire Republican party to reject the clear and compelling evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and he has riddentheir slavish loyalty to a second term in office in 2024. Now it appears that he has come up with another test: will Republican senators support for cabinet positions (I use the framing here of Editorial Board’s John Stoehr) a nominee for the law that is anti-law, a nominee for national intelligence that is anti-intelligence, a nominee for national defense that is anti-defense and a nominee for science that is anti-science.
Or as Stoehr puts it quoting Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The plain awfulness of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Stoehr argues, is the point. The Senate really will become no more that clay in his hands if if surrenders to (1) an alleged statutory rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general; (2) a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence; (3) a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense; and (4) an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist as secretary of health and human resources.
There’s another explanation, one not mentioned in 1984, for why Trump has made such awful picks. In addition to them being a test of Senate loyalty, Stoerh writes that totalitarians
fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.
Stoerh concludes by quoting Hannah Arendt:
“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. Totalitarianism “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).
We’re all waiting to see how low the Senate will go.
