Ignorance is Weakness, War is Hate, Freedom is Freedom

Using Orwell to consider MAGA extremism and modern-day "doublethink."

Photo by Ethan Rougon on Unsplash

The citizens of George Orwell’s 1984 have no problem with contradiction. While they well know the price of chocolate steadily rises throughout the novel, nevertheless, they “believe” the official media when it tells them that the cost of chocolate has gone down. They effortlessly shift from viewing the same country as enemy or ally depending on what their “telescreens” and radios tell them. Each day they collectively stop what they’re doing to look at images of the enemies of the state and scream and screech at them for their “2 minutes of hate.” At the end of their rage-filled outburst, the image of Big Brother fills the screen, and their hatred melts away as they accept that Big Brother loves them, and all they need do is swear fealty to him for everything to forever be all right. The citizens of Orwell’s Oceania have no problem with the “Ministry of Love” being grounded in hatred. They accept the constant surveillance of their telescreens, their nightmarish quality of life, where even the things they eat taste vile, their cigarettes fall to pieces, their alcohol removes the enamel from their teeth. The innate contradictions of the party’s famous slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength,” trouble them little. 

Teaching Orwell over the years, I’ve often emphasized how he takes things from the ordinary world and exaggerates them for effect. Surely his envisioning of “telescreens” has an eerie resemblance to how much less private we have all become, each carrying our own mini-telescreens around with us in our pockets. We now relinquish our privacy freely, letting the general public witness our picnics at the beach, our private dinners out, or our children’s soccer games. Orwell has also helped me (and my students) think about the power of language, the malleability of “truth,” the dangers of authoritarian systems of government on the rise in Orwell’s time (having a resurgence now in our time)—the frailty of democracy….

But not until recently have I ever really considered 1984 to be a non-dystopian, literal depiction of reality. To see anything wholly like it in the real world, one used to have to look to the iron-fisted, fantasy-land of North Korea. Now, however, a look at the modern Republican/MAGA Party provides a painfully literal manifestation of many dynamics at play in Orwell’s cautionary tale. 

To be MAGA, you have to be able to put Lindsay Graham’s 2015 adamant dismissal of Trump as a serious candidate, describing him as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, bigot” alongside the current version of Graham kissing the ring last week during Trump’s visit to DC, describing a now-convicted felon who has doubled down on his xenophobic worldview, promising to imprison millions of undocumented aliens, as the one true savior of the party and people. 

To be a pro-Trump Republican, you have to accept that a man who falsified business records to pay off a pornstar he had an affair with while his wife was pregnant is worthy of holding the highest elected position in the land. You have to recalibrate your logic and morality in such a way that allows you to accept that someone who by any measure is a bad person is still worthy of your praise and your vote, while all the while you pretend there is nothing wrong with this contradiction. 

In short, you have to become like a citizen of Orwell’s Oceania and wholly embrace the notion of “doublethink”:

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to
know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it…to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety:  consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink. 

You have to pretend to forget the disaster of Trump’s first term, the revolving door of staff and cabinet members who left, who now all denounce him in the strongest terms (after seeing in an up close and immediate way how utterly unqualified he was for the job)—including the unprecedented denouncement of his own former vice president. 

You have to work hard to find a way to believe that things will be “good again” under Trump, even as he has clearly laid bare a range of potentially catastrophic policies: not supporting NATO or Ukraine at a time when Putin is working hard to build alliances with China and North Korea and initiating a new cold war. Positing an abolishment of the income tax and replacing it with a system of 19th-century-like extreme tariffs. Abolishing the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA (we can’t have anyone studying the myth of climate change!) among others. Re-staffing governmental agencies in the same way he dissolved the RNC—so that only those who are 100% MAGA will remain. (See John Oliver’s chilling—and hilarious—take on the details here:)

You have to accept the stark paradox of seeking to do just what he baselessly accuses the Biden administration of doing—“weaponizing the justice system” and getting “retribution” of those who he ridiculously claims are responsible for his own, overt crimes.

You have to pretend you didn’t hear the phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Raffensperger, asking him to “find votes” that would overturn the already recounted and thoroughly vetted results. You have to get behind his vow to officially abolish any acceptance of the notion of gender other than that traditionally affiliated with your birth sex, and his claims that LGBTQ and other “woke” agendas were only “invented” by the radical “communists” who follow Biden “a few years ago.”

You have to turn a blind eye toward his unfathomable stupidity that was always on display during his first term (injecting bleach or using ultra-violet light to kill COVID once it has infected you).

You especially have to forget the chaos, violence, death he brought on when he incited an insurrection we all watched on live television as the most sacred chambers of our democracy were overrun by his rabid supporters. 

The list is so very long it is easy to forget the thing that resulted in his first impeachment—his call to President Zelensky of Ukraine in which he promised weapons in exchange for dirt on his political opponent—that “perfect phone call” we all heard. It’s easier but no less tragic to forget his decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria without consulting congressional or military leadership, allowing Turkish soldiers to move in and kill untold numbers of innocent Kurds.

To support him, you have to become almost identical to the good citizens of Orwell’s Oceania, somehow finding ways to allow for the acceptance of a multitude of contradictions and to consider anything that disagrees with the MAGA-truth of the moment as merely “false memories.” Yes, all those boxes of classified documents in Mar-a-lago bathrooms were only relevant as a potential pretense for Biden’s FBI to use deadly force against him. You have to view any who oppose MAGA as enemies and “vermin,” as Trump characterizes liberal Democrats, letting your hatred toward them rise up and fill you with a rage only your leader can extinguish. You somehow have to doublethink your way into believing that Biden is too old, frail and weak to lead, even as you just as adamantly believe he is an evil mastermind controlling the deep state, pumped up on drugs, out to convert your healthy, heterosexual children into commie drag queens.

But MAGA even manages to out Orwell Orwell. In the world of 1984, Winston’s job before his arrest is to “rectify” the past, tossing any material proof of anything at odds with the official Party version of events down the “memory hole.” In 1984, “The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been destroyed…Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” While for MAGA the lie continually becomes truth, destruction of the evidence of what really happened or is happening is not even required. The many hours of footage of the January 6 insurrection do nothing to dissuade the overt re-casting of that past event as just a “tourist visit” or a band of patriots employing their right to protest. No matter that these arguments starkly contradict the claim of being the “party of the rule of law,” who spoke out so adamantly against BLM protests. It was simply “necessary to forget this” in order to craft your lie into a truth according to the principles of doublethink.

Reports that “New FBI data confirms previous indications that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising" don’t stop Fox News and other MAGA-Media sources from claiming these numbers “don’t tell the real story,” and their graphics of screaming sirens and vivid descriptions of violent crimes work daily to convince their viewers to ignore the facts and accept their lies as truth. 

To be a card-carrying MAGA, you also have to turn a blind eye to the unprecedented schism in the Republican Party. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney renounces Trump in the sternest of terms, as does the very conservative daughter of a former Vice President, Liz Cheney and, like John McCain before him (another Republican presidential candidate), the war veteran, Adam Kinzinger has renounced Trump at great personal cost. The Lincoln Project, a group of conservative (former) Republicans, have perhaps been the most vocal in their campaign to stop him, and their most recent ad is remarkably powerful and worth a watch (and share).

At the end of 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, has been utterly transfigured by the torture and brainwashing of the sinister O’Brien (Stephen Miller, who purportedly wanted to bomb migrant boats and is master-minding the plans to deploy military troops to the border and round up illegal immigrants into concentration camps in a second Trump presidency, could play this role well). Winston runs his fingers through the dust of a chess board, famously writing out 2+2=5, accepting this overt untruth as truth in the world of Big Brother as he joyously listens to the telescreen announcing another victory against the enemies of the state (never mind that yesterday they were allies). The MAGA movement is no less broken, pathetic and sad. To accept Trump as a viable candidate for president of this democracy you are no better than Winston, feebly scratching untruths in the dust and feeling tears well up when the clarion call of your Big Brother reaches your ears. 

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