In so many ways, America has entered into a time that can only be described as Orwellian. For those of you who’ve forgotten the world described in 1984, or who missed Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language, allow me to suggest their renewed relevance.
As a recent essay in the Atlantic pointed out, “Newspeak” language is violence by another means, an adjunct of totalitarian strategies.
Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Orwell’s essay is often referenced by political scientists who emphasize the importance of clarity and shared meaning to the political process. As the Atlantic essay notes, however, American discourse increasingly lacks both.
But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.
And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.
In yesterday’s post, I considered the real-world implications of the vast right-wing propaganda apparatus and its coordinated messaging. That messaging employs a language akin to Newspeak, a vocabulary intended to mask, rather than communicate, reality.
Donald Trump is certainly not an intentional purveyor of Newspeak–indeed, calling anything this twisted and unselfaware man does “intentional,” is to give him credit he clearly doesn’t deserve. But like so many tools used by would-be autocrats, he has unconsciously adopted its essence, what the essay calls the “dark art of plausible deniability”– Orwell’s doublespeak—a “jargon of purposeful obscurity.” He says whatever comes to mind, and reserves the right not to mean it.
When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.
It isn’t only Trump. That right-wing media ecosphere amplifies the practice. The Republican cult adopts it. And the results go far beyond a lack of clarity. Americans not only occupy different realities, we have lost the ability to explain our respective frames of reference to those who do not share them.
We can no longer communicate. And without communication, political negotiation and compromise–even basic human kindness–becomes impossible. (The essay makes the point that clear language is a basic form of kindness that considers the other person.)
Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.
The quoted essay was published before the election of the Newspeak Administration. Had Trump lost, the threat posed by what we politely call “disinformation” would still be troublesome, but what we now face is a threat to our ability to understand political reality.
I don’t think most members of the “chattering classes”– the “mainstream” commentariat busily finding fault with those who still live in the reality-based community–even recognize the enormity of the problem posed by Americans’ increasing immersion in the language of delusion and our corresponding inability to communicate.
Cool Hand Luke
I am reading Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”.
From Wikipedia:
“Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 1976) is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.”
From the book: “King Hammurabi decreed that people are divided into superiors, commoners and slaves. Unlike the beehive class system, this is not a natural division – there is no trace of it in the human genome.”
“If the Babylonians could not keep this ‘truth’ in mind, their society would have ceased to function. Similarly, when Hammurabi passed his DNA to his offspring, it did not encode his ruling that a superior man who killed a commoner woman must pay thirty silver shekels.”
Even “truth” sometimes is a temporary myth by an influential person who is powerful enough to hold sway in a group of homo sapiens. Among Babylonian, King Hammurabi was influential.
In the US Trump is and has been for 70 years because his family and Roy Cohen knew the value of wealth and publicity.
Once the first lie is accepted, it becomes so much easier to accept the next one, and so much more difficult to admit that you have been lied to.
Interesting, but, like most of my work, not of any consequence. How does one communicate clearly about very complex matters? How does one explain the Middle East state of warfare in clear language to those who have no concept of space or time? How many of us can untangle the concept of the federal debt so that those who can not balance a checkbook will understand?
A clear signal sent fails if there is no receiver capable of understanding the message.
While listening to a Trump outpouring of garbage, this line sums it up perfectly: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” His lies, bombast, filth, hate and bigotry certainly did corrupt any remnants of thought his followers may have had. That phenomenon, of course, created the monstrosity that we’re about to experience.
This language alteration to our version of “Newspeak” began with G.H.W. Bush hiring Karl Rove and Lee Atwater as strategists for the RNC. I really doubt Bush had any clue about the consequences of his actions. His sole mission was to win elections. Enter Newt Gingrich and the insertion of even more inflammatory language became the norm for Republican campaign rhetoric.
And here we are with the worst, most disgusting, most evil human this country has ever produced for politics – never mind the presidency – and we have, for the next 4 years AT LEAST, the 1984 Orwell warned us about.
Well done voters, especially to those multiple millions who didn’t vote at all. Your as culpable for America’s demise as those 75 million who voted for the monster.
Sorry. You’re as culpable …
Eric Blair was shot in the neck and nearly died in the Spanish Civil War. He was one of the ca. 2,500 foreign volunteers who fought alongside citizens of the newly-elected Spanish Republic, formed after the 1931 overthrow of king Alfonso XIII.
Blair and the Spanish Republicans fought from 1936-38 against Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists. Hemingway, Gellhorn, and other journalists pleaded with the FDR administration to provide arms to the fighters for Spanish democracy, who eventually lost that war led by Generalissimo Franco.
Blair got some of his ideas for writing “1984” from that war, for which FDR chose neutrality for the U.S.
I like 1984 but enjoy reading Noam Chomsky, a linguist, historian, and truth-teller. In the 1980s, he blew the press away and explained how they used a “propaganda media model.”
The purpose of open-minded liberals (I know this is redundant) is to raise their level of consciousness. However, as Morton Marcus alluded to, a closed-minded person has no interest in raising their level of consciousness. They don’t even know what it means. As we’ve witnessed from them, a liberal mind is equated to Satanic worship. This has morphed into Democrats doing the work of the Devil.
I often see that reference in the memes these people share with each other. One shared last night on Facebook that the younger generation is really going to appreciate what Republicans do in the next four years under Trump.
After a few exchanges, none of them believe they will be negatively affected by Trump’s policies. They have not read anything about Project 2025 because Trump said he knew nothing about it. None of them know what Christian Nationalism is and how it will impact our country. One Republican woman bragged about owning a business, having a large retirement fund, and not wanting a Democrat to tell her about her future. After calling her a “snobby bitch,” I asked her who she thought all the anti-women policies would impact. Clearly, she thought she was isolated from anything Trump/Vance would do, didn’t even know about P2025, and enjoyed the thought that some version of Christianity would be the centerpiece of our government. #amazing #self-centered
The MAGAt cult is clueless. So, for the record, “snobby-bitch” is considered hate speech and bullying on Facebook. LOL, it was worth the few minutes the post was up and knowing the snobby bitch reported it to Facebook. 🙂
Alexander Hamilton discussed the safeguards that would prevent someone like Trump being elected. He noted in The Federalist (No. 68) that the provisions in the Constitution for electing the President would prevent any man “who has talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity…to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union or so considerable a portion of it to make him a successful candidate for the office of President.” How wrong he was!