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Wednesday
A couple of weeks ago I posted about how people like Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, and other neo-fascists are attempting to appropriate George Orwell’s 1984 for their purposes. In furtherance of this goal they are now, according to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, attacking the left for attempting to cancel Orwell. More on that in a moment.
In my post I quoted FrameLab’s Gil Duran on the absurd way they are using Orwell:
The skewed conservative interpretation of Orwell holds that freedom means the freedom to spread lies about topics like the 2020 election, COVID, vaccines or anything else. It depicts any effort to challenge falsehoods as an attack on this supposed freedom, and as a form of “thought control” in line with 1984’s totalitarian Big Brother. It vilifies fact-checkers, journalists and social media content moderation policies as enemies of freedom. According to its twisted upside-down logic, liars are defenders of liberty and truth is a form of oppression.
Since Duran’s article appeared, we have seen Trump acknowledging that he would be dictator “on day one” if he is elected and his aides promising to go after the press. In the words of Kash Patel, a chief of staff in the Defense Department and member of the National Security Council under Trump, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” (this over the “stolen” 2020 election).
Meanwhile Ohio senator J.D. Vance wants the Department of Justice to investigate Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan for his opinion column warning readers that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” Vance said that Kagan’s article falls under the DOJ’s jurisdiction to intervene in cases of invitation to insurrection, manifestation of criminal conspiracy, and an attempt to bring about civil war.
Basically, the MAGA right is saying that free speech has no limits for me and my friends but you are criminally liable when you use it. Or more succinctly, “liberty for me but not for thee.”
Author Sandra Newman’s article in the Post notes that the MAGA right is using a new biography of Orwell’s first wife as proof that liberals are trying to cancel Orwell, making them the authoritarians, not MAGA. They point to how biographer Anna Funder has described Orwell as “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent.” Nor is Funder the only one who has noticed Orwell’s dark side, which includes “his shabby treatment of his wife, his alleged attempt to rape a childhood friend, his homophobic remarks and his colonial service.”
MAGA critics have accused Newman herself of canceling Orwell through her feminist novel Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984. And it’s true that she acknowledges the book to have blind spots that can be linked to Orwell’s life:
The evil Party in the book imposes a cartoonish version of feminism on its members, forbidding perfume and makeup, and forcing women to wear gender-neutral overalls and short hair. When Julia and Winston find a hideaway where they can safely express themselves, for him it means voicing his political opinions; for her it means putting on pretty dresses and making cups of tea for him.
More startling, Winston imagines murdering women on several occasions. Before he ever speaks to Julia, he has fantasized about raping and killing her. Julia says of the women’s hostel where she lives, “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” and chides Winston for not following through on his idea of killing his wife.
But—and this is a very big “but”—one doesn’t cancel a book because it’s got some bad in it. She herself wants us to continue reading 1984 because its virtues outweigh its flaws:
However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in 1984 was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.
In other words, those on the right are engaging in doublethink when they accuse the non-authoritarian left of an Orwellian cancellation of Orwell. “What’s Orwellian,” Newman says, “is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.”
Literary scholar Wayne Booth, in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction,” is smart in his handling of flawed masterpieces. Contending that we should regard books as friends, he says that just as our friends aren’t perfect, so are many beloved works. And as with friends, we factor the imperfections into the way we deal with them.
To be sure, if it turns out that the friendship is truly noxious, we should end it—there are books that are out-and-out bad for us—but in the case of 1984, the warning against dictatorship is so powerfully presented that we can separate it out from the novel’s limitations.
People do the same with other works all the time, with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew coming immediately to mind. We don’t wholesale reject Shakespeare, or even the plays themselves, because of their problematic images of Jews and women. Instead, we enter into nuanced discussions, seeking to separate out the good from the not-so-good.
I sometimes wonder, while watching how Trumpist authoritarians use 1984 to accuse their enemies of authoritarianism, whether there’s a silver lining here. The French 17th century moralist François de La Rochefoucauld once wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” the point being that when vice clothes itself in the vestments of virtue, virtue still has the upperhand. If Trumpists claim that freedom is a good thing, even though they then interpret that to mean freedom to oppress other people, freedom itself is celebrated. And once it is, then it’s harder to argue against freedom to love who you want, freedom to make your own decisions about your body, freedom to speak out against injustice—or even freedom just to assert that 2+2=4.
The MAGA right hasn’t yet gotten to the 1984 stage of arguing that “freedom is slavery” and that only mindless obedience to a dictator is true freedom. And while they may get there, so far most Americans still embrace the “self-evident truth” that they have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Most Americans still push back against abortion bans and contraception bans and book bans and LGBTQ+ bans.
In other words, most of us are not yet contending that 2+2=5.