ORWELL’S “1984” AND TRUMP’S AMERICA

[David Morris]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/orwells-1984-and-trumps-america
ORWELL’S “1984” AND TRUMP’S AMERICA
By Adam Gopnik <http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik>

The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the
sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered
not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage,
vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.

And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about
this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests
on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not
simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to
his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of
changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.
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