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Tuesday
For those puzzled about how rightwing authoritarians can use the word “freedom” so loosely, it’s worth taking another look at what George Orwell says about freedom in 1984. After all, Big Brother announces, in large letters on a public building, that “Slavery Is Freedom.” Before exploring what’s going on with this, there’s a useful recent essay by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie that’s worth looking at.
Bouie recalls the “four freedoms” of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which were “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.”
In his 1941 State of the Union address, Roosevelt called these freedoms “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.” Bouie notes that those freedoms were “the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.”
How can Republicans claim to be in favor of freedom, Bouie asks, if they ban abortions, promote child labor, attack course curriculums (especially when it comes to race and LGBTQ issues), and seek to turn America into a shooting gallery? Their four freedoms are very different from Roosevelt’s:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Which brings us to 1984.
“Freedom is slavery” is, of course, only one of the three official tenets, the other two being “War is Peace” and “Ignorance is Strength.” At first, it appears as though Big Brother is just gaslighting or trolling the public. It’s as if he wants to “own the libs,” saying outrageous things so he can get a kick out of their horrified reaction.
If so, he gets such a response from his arch-enemy Goldstein, as least according to the propaganda film he puts out. In one of his party rallies engineered to fan the flames of hatred (called “the Hate”), he has Goldstein sounding like Roosevelt or the Constitution:
He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed.
But owning the libs isn’t a sufficient explanation for the “slavery is freedom” declaration. For one thing, it doesn’t make much sense, as the freethinking and soon-to-be vaporized Symes explains to Winston:
How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
As we will learn, the fact that the slogan is nonsense is the point. It’s not logic that is being tested but loyalty. When Big Brother asserts an absurdity—an even better example is 2+2=5— you show you are a good party member by agreeing. As Orwell explains,
Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.
Trump understood this in a foundational way from the very beginning of his presidency when he asserted that his inauguration drew more people than Obama’s, even though photographs told a different story. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
An alarming number of Republicans are believing Trump, especially when it comes to his assertion that he won the 2020 election. Loyalty is more important than truth and freedom means whatever rightwing extremists declare it to mean. That’s because the final goal is not truth or democracy or policy but power, a point Big Brother towards the end of the novel:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
The good news is that we haven’t descended into a 1984 reality altogether, as the defeat of Trump in 2020 indicates. But it’s also true that authoritarianism is making a move, with certain American conservatives holding up Hungarian strongman Victor Orban as a model to follow and Vladimir Putin as a leader to be celebrated. Orwell accurately foresaw that there would be this pull, even if he overestimated its success. At least, we’re not there yet:
The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
The progressives Orwell has in mind are Stalin’s fellow travelers in the west, which in 1948 were a real thing, and we can be happy that most leftists and liberals are no longer cheering for authoritarian regimes. We can also be happy that, despite Orban and Putin fever amongst the Tucker Carlsons of the world, many Republicans still support Ukraine, NATO, and democratic governance.
Still, we must be vigilant when it comes to defining real freedom.