It’s not just that George Orwell couldn’t have imagined the world in which we live, or how much of what he described would come to fruition, but how easily the powers that be were able to construct the system with little-to-no push back from citizens in a ‘free society.’
Orwell achieved what many artists dream of: To have their work live on long after they’re gone, and to be claimed by society across the board. Orwell’s 1984 has been used as both siren and cudgel by the far right as a warning against Stalinism, and by the political left as the end point of Hitlerian fascism. Ironically, Orwell himself feared both. As Laura Beers writes in her excellent book, Orwell’s Ghosts (Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century,) “…[Orwell was] a vocal critic of totalitarianism both of the left and the right.”
As we’ve argued about just who Orwell was warning us about, the world he imagined is becoming ever more real. Not through the rise of a singular leader, like those of last century or further back on the historical timeline, but through a slow, steady, near-complete confluence of military, financial, and political power.
As Beers notes, the ‘will to power’ is ideologically agnostic. This invisible hand will link arms with whomever and whatever has the ideas, the resources, and the power. Once ensconced, the system (establishment or order) operates in a metastatic fashion: Replicate, spread, replicate, spread.
Big Brother Calling
Since the end of World War 2, the United States government, in the name of national security, political advantage, or both, has deployed state organs to surveil citizens. The Red Scare of the 1950s was tacitly accepted by President Dwight Eisenhower as a means of protecting his right flank, and actively pursued by zealots such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, along with Hoover, created programs like CoIntelPro to track, pursue, and detain anti-war demonstrators at the height of Vietnam. In the wake of Watergate, leaders such as Idaho Senator Frank Church through his extensive committee hearings, attempted to put the security services’ genie back in the bottle.
These types programs received legal standing after September 11th, 2001. In the wake of Al Qaeda’s attacks, Congress approved the Patriot Act and its expansive surveillance operations. It also created the Department of Homeland Security (of which I am a veteran) placing hundreds of thousands of federal law enforcement officers under one roof (see ICE.) Revelations like those of PBS’ Frontline exposed the National Security Agency’s active monitoring of all phone calls on American soil, explicitly prohibited in its charter.
President Barack Obama signed three extensions to the Patriot Act during his two terms, and supported reforming, though not dismantling the programs, only after Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive, illegal, surveillance of American citizens.
Under Donald Trump, Big Brother’s gloves are off altogether and this time with corporate help. Companies such as Palantir are paid billions every year by the federal government to collect, collate, and analyze data on anything and everything. Agencies like DHS are signing contracts with other corporate surveillance partners as fast as they can print them out.
Just last week, 404 Media reported:
“…[ICE does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person’s identify and immigration status according to an internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media. The document also says any face photos taken by the app, called Mobile Fortify, will be stored for 15 years, including those of American citizens.”
Telescreens? Try the iPhone.
We all remember that piercing tone and the eerie, “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.” Now a vestige of the Cold War, those of us of a certain age felt that skip in the heartbeat as we heard it. Not quite a Telescreen, but an indication that the government could, if it wanted, beam its message into our homes.
Today, the screens are in our hands, and we can’t get enough of them. Far from being intrusive, or having to stand still while we receive the day’s message from the powers that be, we willingly and constantly part with our attention as the algorithms of Meta, TikTok, X, and Google steer us down darker paths. According to a 2024 Morning Consult survey, 31% of American adults self-identified as ‘doomscrollers.’ There’s not need to make us stand in the middle of the living room if the powers-that-be already know where to find us, and how to keep us focused on the blue glow.
Orwell’s description was prescient: “You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every moment was scrutinized.”
Are we even safe in darkness?
The Two Minute’s All Day Hate
As you’ll recall, every day Winston and his fellow Oceanians participated in the Two Minutes’ Hate. Ginning themselves up into a frenzy at Emil Goldstein, and all the enemies of the state, Big Brother and the Party narrowed their subjects’ ability to think for themselves and kept them angry at ‘the other.’
Could Orwell have envisaged a system in which we, the citizens, volunteer for the All Day Hate? If doomscrolling is the vehicle, hatred, anger, and distraction are the destinations. On any given day, Twitter, Bluesky, and TikTok are full of people (me, included) ensuring that those that follow us are both aware of the latest outrage, and exercised enough to smash the like, retweet, or heart buttons. They yell at their phones. We get the dopamine rush of watching so many people agree with us and share our collective anger.
Every click, each view, all those knee-jerk reactions are collected, fed back into the algorithms, and utilized to keep us on an app, keep us angry, and keep us scrolling. As we do so, we disassociate from what’s around us, allow ourselves to be duped, and doped into providing far more energy and information that we should to people that see us, like drug dealers, as little more than ‘users.*’
*Hat-Tip Kara Swisher.
Cancel Culture as Thought Police?
The Internet is forever. The last decade has demonstrated that if someone can be cancelled, they probably will be, and that cancelling is an equal opportunity event. In Orwell’s world, Winston had to keep up with what The Party deemed acceptable in speech, thought, and deed. On Monday, a word was valid. On Tuesday, its utterance was a crime against Big Brother.
Unlike today, in 1984, cancellation was sanctioned and enforced by the state. In 2025, we cancel each other for crimes large, small, or sometimes non-existent. To be cancelled is to disagree with elite popular sentiment, or the ever-shifting mores of social media.
There are too many examples to list here, though you can read this for some idea of the companies that crossed into cancel-territory. Whether rooted on the American left or emanating from the Trumpist right, the goal is the same: Determine, at an elite level, what is and isn’t an acceptable ideal, utterance, or action (be it public or private.)
By doing so, those who are unsure of an opinion will keep it to themselves. Those hoping to climb the corporate ladder will clam up. Political climbers will hue to the party line, whether it is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ simply to maintain favor with the powers that be.
It was no less a person than Steve Bannon who said on his podcast, War Room (I know) the following: You can believe we shouldn’t allow Israel to dictate our foreign policy and not be an anti-Semite. You can believe Iran is ruled by ruthless men and not be anti-Muslim. They don’t want you to have that argument.”
Author’s note: Why is Bannon making sense?
Oceania Has Always Been At War…
Eurasia? Eastasia? Both? Neither? The point is to keep Oceania’s population patriotic and, as Julia says, “to keep people frightened.”
As of this writing, the USS Gerald R. Ford and her battle group are moving toward the Caribbean Sea. Other American military assets are on their way or have already arrived. Why? If you believe the Trump Administration, it’s to interdict drug traffickers coming out of Venezuela. Otherwise, it very much looks like Trump deciding to go to war with a large country in South America that would be near-unconquerable by traditional military means.
Since Donald Trump returned to office we’ve bombed Iran. This left his nominal opponents, the NeverTrumpers, in a quandary, as they loathe Trump personally, but are incapable of cutting their neoconservative roots. Both Republican and Democratic leaders are unwilling to reduce funding for Israel’s military operations, no matter how far afield they are from the country’s borders.
This isn’t new for us, of course. We went to war in Iraq for ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Though that was the reason put forth for the invasion, as Tim Weiner writes in his book The Mission, The CIA in the 21st Century, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began discussions on an Iraq invasion on September 12th, 2001; a full 18 months before the war began, and just weeks before we invaded Afghanistan.
Americans would be fighting and dying in the two countries for approximately 20 years. In that span of time, more than 7,000 Americans died. More than 50,000 were wounded. According to Brown University, nearly 1 million people were killed as a result of post 9/11 military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. More than 400,000 of these were civilian deaths.
The financial cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Between $4-$6 TRILLION. Some estimates, including ongoing veterans’ care go as high as $8 trillion. For perspective, American’s current debt obligation is $38.1 trillion according to the Pete Peterson Foundation.
In his last address before he left office in 1960, President Eisenhower warned the American people of the specter of the “military-industrial complex.” As Orwell couldn’t imagine that we would walk ourselves into 1984, Ike would be hard-pressed to imagine just how accurate his warning would be or how little we as citizens heeded it.
Wither the Proles
Winston writes:
“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.”
The proles make up 85% of Oceania’s population. We would call them the working class or working poor. They are not party members, do not have higher education, and relegated to mostly manual labor and rundown neighborhoods.
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
The proles loved the lottery, the idea of making it big, and becoming rich at the drop of a hat. We have lotteries, too. But for The Party of 2025, it’s not enough to simply keep the proles down. They bleed them, little by little. We have online gambling. We have payday loan schemes, overdraft fees, and unaffordable (or unattainable) basic healthcare. When the financial industry destroyed the global economy, we took their houses.
While Congress enjoys its paychecks and gold-plated healthcare, everyday Americans, nearly 50 million of them, are facing the realization of empty cupboards and hungry kids. None of this ‘just happens.’
In America today 57% of citizens live paycheck-to-paycheck. They are looked down upon by the elite of both parties, either as unworthy or as cogs to be kept angry and in line in a cynical ploy to distract them from what’s been taken from them. It should be no surprise that a recent Wall Street Journal/NORC survey indicated 70% of respondents believed that the “American Dream” is dead, or never existed at all.
Orwell was a socialist, and Winston’s writing about the proles communicates a desire for class consciousness. “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
Both Sidesism
Given his experience during the Spanish Civil War, which he illustrates in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell understood that self-deception did not confine itself to the political right. Today we see Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, and its host, the Republican Party in constant state of self-delusion (on a good day) and downright fiction (the rest of the time.)
The American left, however, is not immune to the syndrome: The unwillingness to understand why someone like Trump could win once, let alone twice, is downstream of a lack of self-awareness and reflection Democrats need if it is to restore itself as something more than just ‘the other bad option’ in American politics.
Establishment Democrats’ hypocrisy, too, is further eroding what’s left of its credibility with its own base, working class, and younger voters. This week’s New York City mayoral election is a case-in-point. Andrew Cuomo, driven out of office as sex-pest, is now the choice of many wealthy, liberal New Yorkers, despite the fact that Zorhan Mamdani is their party’s nominee.
The Party
Winston Smith resides in the Outer Party. As Orwell wrote, Winston’s caste is ‘expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but..also…be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.’
Be smart, but not too smart. Go to college, get your degree, find your place in the world, and settle onto the conveyor belt of just-a-little-better-than-last year. Do not, under any circumstances, though, have an independent thought. If you do, for God’s sake, keep it to yourself.
The Inner Party, though, that’s where the power lies. Today, anti-establishment conservatives might call it the Uniparty. Left-leaning reformers (like me) call it the Duopoly, but the meaning is the same. At their cores, the wealthy elite, Republican and Democrat, maintain a level of authority, privilege, and wealth unimaginable to the other 98% of the country.
Even if Republican and Democratic voters see the world in much different ways, those that control the levers of power, stock the White House and major agencies, or are part of the permanent political bureaucracy (the revolving door) know the world works for them, both literally and figuratively. If, when a president takes office, the first people they hire are senior lobbyists, wealthy supporters, or Wall Street bigwigs, they are the continuation of a decades-long system that, while unstable, is far from falling.
Cui Bono?
As we look back on Orwell, let’s ask ourselves this question: Who benefits? All of the money, noise, intrigue, and spectacle redounds to the benefit of a very small, and shrinking, group of people for whom the United States and here people are simply a means to an end.
Orwell told us what could happen, but he didn’t know how, and we didn’t listen. He tried to warn us, but like so many others, he was the Cassandra of his time: To know the future but never believed.
Make Orwell fiction again
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength . Great essay Reed…. I wish it wasn’t so accurate. The dualopoly needs to be replaced…. I know you have done the research and there is just not a practical approach to a third party