The Novel 1984 by George Orwell describes a dystopic nation governed by a faceless and nameless Party called “Big Brother” that watches and listens omnisciently to the words, thoughts and feelings of every subject, everywhere, all-at-once, and all-the-time. “Thought-police” detect even the smallest revolutionary inclination in a single individual and exact the ultimate punishment of death (also called “vaporization” and “disappearance”) upon those who dare to think unapproved thoughts, feel unapproved feelings, and act outside proscribed behaviors. Independent intellectual and creative pursuits are forbidden.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And this process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” (75th Anniversary Edition, p. 155)

What about resistance to the Party’s intimidation? How could so many citizens submit and become passive to the pathological lying, the loss of freedom, and the rewriting of history without fighting back? Orwell explains:

“The Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” (p. 156)

I began re-reading 1984 after hearing a number of commentators use the term “Orwellian” when describing Donald Trump’s attack on our democratic freedoms, institutions and norms, and I wanted to match, if possible, the novel’s dystopia to our contemporary political and governmental reality.

I first read the novel in high school. I didn’t remember much about it except that the world of “Big Brother” was something I never imagined could occur in the United States. I assumed that fascism could not supplant democracy here, that the constitutional framers’ intent in fashioning our complex system of governmental checks and balances would spit out any want-to-be-dictator and that our liberal and free society based upon a system of justice and fact-based truth, reason and science would guide public policy and international relationships all within a democratic framework.

However, I was stunned by Rachel Maddow’s two season Podcast of “Ultra” (2022) in which she brilliantly described the near take-over of the American government by Nazi fascists in the 1930s.

George Orwell’s prescient novel is a remarkably weighty tome, and despite his terrifying vision, the book is worth reading again in this 75th anniversary year since it was first published in 1949, four years after the close of World War II and the Shoah, and in the midst of Stalin’s purges and murder of millions.

Though we Americans are a very long way from what 1984 describes, nevertheless, an illiberal, hateful, intolerant, oppressive, and anti-democratic passive culture is spreading across America and becoming normalized day after day. The evidence is mounting –  the corporate take-over of so much of the traditional media that now controls free speech; his planned elimination of the Department of Education, the National Institute of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and his taking control of the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence services; his appointment of incompetent inexperienced sycophants to his cabinet whose loyalty is not to the US Constitution but rather to Trump; his following (despite claiming to know nothing about it in his presidential campaign) Project 25, a massive blue print for the destruction of America’s democratic order and our social safety net (Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) and the enhancement of a unitary presidency; his approval of the government’s release of all private information into the hands of DOGE; his take-over of the Board of Directors of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that promotes the arts and culture in our pluralistic creative American life; his take-down in the Oval Office of the democratically elected President of Ukraine and openly siding with the brutal Russian dictator who invaded Ukraine, killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and kidnapped 90,000 Ukrainian children to raise in Russia.

Trump’s bullying, his demand for submission, loyalty and obeisance from his Cabinet and the Congress, his massive unchecked corruption, grift and violation of the Emolument Clause of the Constitution, his un-accountability as codified by the United States Supreme Court, his unilateral and illegal firing of millions of experienced and competent government workers that have assured our nation’s security and well-being, his pathological lying and ignoring the law and virtually all democratic norms, and his condoning of intolerant Christian nationalist extremists all suggest his fealty to the fascist playbook.

I’m waiting for the Democratic Party and its leadership to get its act together and begin with one voice to undertake a massive media and legal campaign of protest to what Trump and MAGA Republicans are doing, to call out their incompetence, illegal behavior, hate and cruelty, to use every means available in the media and the courts to challenge them, to educate the public about what’s really happening, to lay out the Democratic Party agenda that will appeal to Independents and former Republican voters across the country so that control of the levers of governmental power can be taken away from MAGA in 2026 and 2028 and restore competent democratic (small “d”) leadership, reaffirm common decency, human rights, respect for the law and democracy, and defeat Trump’s fascist agenda.