1984 and its alternatives

Did you recognize when it happened? When politicians began over-promising, even saying things they knew weren’t true? When the party in power began strictly controlling the information it put out? When presidential spokesmen started spouting obvious falsehoods with a straight face?

But wait—hasn’t that been happening for a while now? I remember a certain president making a bare-faced denial about a young female intern while shaking a finger at the camera. Another president smoothly promised that his sweeping healthcare program would not disrupt anyone’s current insurance plan.

To culture-watchers on the left, all that is down the memory hole. They caught the frightening drift in January, when presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway chose two ominous words to describe conflicting reports about the size of January’s inauguration crowd: alternative facts. Those words sent nervous policy-watchers directly to Amazon.com, where they boosted George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 into best-sellerdom. To them Orwell’s warning couldn’t be more relevant: “Alternative facts” was akin to Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia. They would not be surprised if the administration proposed a Ministry of Truth dedicated to spreading lies. Ms. Conway was obviously auditioning for the job of “Secretary of Alternative Facts.”

Others see the administration targeting culture, with its purported proposal to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. In protest, art-house theater owners across the nation have named April 4 as the date for special screenings of the film Nineteen Eighty-four (released, oddly enough, in 1984) starring John Hurt. The event website warns, “Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience, and demonizes foreign enemies, has never been timelier.” A portion of the proceeds will go toward “underwriting future educational and community-related programming”—presumably before education and community fall as casualties to our grim totalitarian future.

And ladies be warned: Though it was in production long before Nov. 8, the television miniseries of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will hoist another red flag when it premieres on April 26. The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of a young woman forced to serve as a breeder for an oppressive theocratic state. Atwood, who is Canadian, recalls three distinct reactions from the Anglosphere when her dystopian novel first appeared: “The English said, jolly good yarn. The Canadians, in their nervous way, said, could it happen here? And the Americans said, how long have we got?” (That was in 1985, when another supposed Republican theocrat was president. Somehow we never get to dystopia.)

I remember a certain president making a bare-faced denial about a young female intern while shaking a finger at the camera.

Then there’s education. On the CNN website, Alexander J. Urbelis eyes with alarm “the truly Orwellian-sounding concept of ‘school choice,’” which sounds benign but “actually siphons much-needed funds from public to private education institutions.” In Orwell’s novel, the only educational option was a public “common core” of state propaganda. To label school choice “Orwellian” calls to mind another fictional title: Through the Looking Glass.

Urbelis thunders on: “We cannot afford to mince words: President Trump and his staff have used and will use lies and deceit to create a false perception of reality that suits their political agenda.” Not to mince words, but that sounds like standard presidential procedure for the last three decades.

Speaking of education, here’s how Allan Bloom began The Closing of the American Mind (1987): “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Journalists who came of age in the 1990s felt free to shape the facts to fit their worldview, to the point where, in 2010, Time declared “The End of Objectivity.” This was seen as a good thing, allowing reporters to be “passionate” about what they chose to report. The current furor over “alternative facts” disguises the real issue: In a worldview without absolutes, all facts are alternative.

Selective reporting and skewed interpretation look different from the other side of the mirror, but this is the future left-wing journalism signed up for.