Things Get Weird

Over the years since first reading George Orwell's two masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984, it could be said that they prompted a look backward--we conjure up recollections of totalitarian and authoritarian states but have been less capable of recognizing rather than envisioning dystopic societies such as that depicted in 1984. But today there have been many clear indications that such a future is not so distant and unlikely. 

Orwell's perception, moreover, extended to a clear analysis of not only why socialism has not been widely accepted in the U.S. but the reasons why its prospects here remain dim--as evidenced by how easily the Republicans wielded the scare propensity of the very word to successfully resist any "Blue wave" that might have accompanied Biden's victory. This has usefully been summarized from what may be his most continually relevant work, The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 :                    

    Why then are we not all socialists?

Orwell attempts to answer this difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies five main problems:

1. Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle-class socialists do themselves no favors by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate the large section of the population that is economically working-class but culturally middle-class.
2. Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. He criticizes H. G. Wells in particular on these grounds.
3. Crankiness. Among many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people.
4. Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with "notwithstandings" and "heretofores" and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
5. Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

Applying Orwell's analysis to our milieu more than eighty years later, we can point to those who, in focusing entirely on economic factors, diminish the significance of the "culture wars". Recently, we have beginning to hear acknowledgment of the negative power of elitism, condescension, perceived favoritism toward minorities, and use of such terms as "deplorables" in firing up people who didn't go to college to turn to those who surely do not have their interests at heart or in mind except to draw on the anger of people who feel neglected, insulted, or passed over. Resentment remains and is now again being recognized as a powerful generator of negative voting.

This counts for a lot. Lincoln observed, "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them." He also employed the self-deprecation tack since successfully used by politicians who seek to counter the tendency of many who are struggling to make ends meet to express misguided respect for rich candidates who inherited or made a fortune on their own. Some rich men may not steal; we have seen, however, that that is not true across the board, any more than it is the case that any economic group has a lesser propensity to engorge off the public trough. 

Asked about how his early life led to his success, Lincoln said that his early years could be summed up in a phrase from Gray's Elegy: "the short and simple annals of the poor." Lincoln was able to use these responses so well because he did rise from an impoverished and hard-scrabble background. Only those who did live a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story are thus able to employ this approach: it is akin to the now-iron rule that only members of ethnic groups can make jokes about their group.