My father Leo is a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet city of Ufa. As his 19-year-old son, I left home for college last year well-versed in the evils of communist double-think, party propaganda, and the disastrous policies wedded to generations of poverty. (Oddly enough, that knowledge would soon prove useful in navigating a university campus enmeshed with riotous, degenerate protesters, but I digress.)
Those same evils were captured in formal writing promptly after the end of the Second World War by British novelist George Orwell, most notably in the luminary political commentaries of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s works, so articulate, comprehensive, and resonant with immigrant families like mine, have long been required readings in many high schools and entry-level college courses on historical politics across the country (that was before the left’s system-wide jettison of material that dares to speak ill of communist violence).
To my dismay, American University professor Laura Beers, in her recent work Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century, offers what can best be described as a reinvention, repackaging, and repurposing of Orwellian thought—in that order.
The Orwell you knew—the one whose contempt for far-left revolutionary tendencies rivals that of even the coldest of cold warriors—is apparently not the real Orwell. No, he was a robust democratic socialist who, if alive today, would march in the streets shrieking into a bullhorn about the racist, imperialist inferno known primarily under its alter ego, the United States. He was, it turns out, Bernie Sanders—without the batty streaks of white hair, irritating Brooklyn cadence, and word economy the size of a chickpea.
This startling pitch to modernity is not without a clearly defined agenda. For one, Beers seeks to dispossess the modern political right of its ability to cite Orwell as an “anti-totalitarian prophet” and use his purported leftism to stonewall use of the term “Orwellian” in describing the censorship of conservative dissent by government bureaucrats and Big Tech. Equally paramount to her project is satiating the palate of the modern left, which drools at the chance to retroactively cancel writers like Orwell for daring to operate within the social frameworks of their times. A valiant, balanced mission indeed.
In the opening of Orwell’s Ghosts, Beers scolds conservatives and old-school liberals alike for their use—misuse—of Orwellian. They have taken “the complexity of [Orwell’s] political thought” and contorted it into a “two-dimensional caricature,” Beers alleges.
The banning of former president Donald Trump in 2021 from then-Twitter over claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The fallout from President Biden’s now fossilized Disinformation Governance Board. Right-wingers who “cry foul” over the “supposed cancellation of … old or dead white men.” None of it is actually Orwellian, Beers insists.
What does qualify, you might ask, according to Beers?
“In the United States,” she answers, “we see attempts to control reality through the control of language in Florida’s 2022 ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law … to stamp out queer sexualities by prohibiting their discussion.” Right, one can imagine Orwell imploding at the thought of parents shielding their third graders from school-sanctioned porn.
Beers’s strange application of Nineteen Eighty-Four to Florida’s parental rights bill was, to my surprise, not her most offensive attempt to tug Orwell into modern relevance. She aligns Orwell’s well-known socialist politics with French economist Thomas Piketty, longtime proponent of “socialism, participative and decentralized”—whatever that means—as well as Black Lives Matter, which Beers lauds as an Orwell-esque guardian of “discussion about the ways in which history continues to be taught.” (Fact check: Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four describes how, following the history-washing by the Party and Thought Police, “every statue and street and building has been renamed” and “every date has been altered.”) I’m sorry, Professor Beers, you were saying?
A complete induction of Orwell into the progressive hall of fame does, however, require first repenting for his “traditionalist” baggage. Beers includes vapid overanalysis of Orwell’s at-times unpleasant word choice and occasional racial insensitivity, as well as the secular humanism which led him to personally abhor abortion—all of which Beers addresses ad nauseam as a way of justifying Orwell’s sins and repackaging him as a slightly chipped, yet still precious little socialist gem.
The attempt to then repurpose Orwell as a mouthpiece of the left comes to fruition in the book’s final section, “Blueprint for Revolution: Making the Case for Democratic Socialism.” Upon reaching that sentence, the ensuing pain from my burning eyes nearly made me scream in agony—but, at the request of my own integrity, I also struggled to completely write Beers off.
Speaking as the loudmouthed conservative son of a Russian immigrant, I am no more a democratic socialist than Kentucky’s freedom-loving darling Rand Paul. But maybe conservatives would be better served in not kicking Orwell’s Ghosts and adjacent texts to the curb, and once again failing to grapple with why someone as anti-communist as Orwell identified with such a hideous label. Perhaps because he recognized that totalitarian ideology has no better friend in Stalinist violence than it does in unbridled sums of money—a message that should resonate with anyone currently frustrated with the suppression of the Trump assassination attempt by Big Tech oligarchs, pro-crime prosecutors funded by George Soros, or most recently, the swift, and yes, Orwellian, page-one rewrite of Kamala Harris by corporate media.
The attempt to place George Orwell in the kin of Bernie Sanders or AOC is nothing short of literary gerrymandering, no better than the “two-dimensional caricature” Beers laments in her opening. But she is also right: Orwell was not a free market capitalist. Of course, that in itself is no compelling reason why we conservatives can’t be; but it forewarns what happens when radical ideology purchases assets, private planes, and shares in Google or Facebook.
Capitalism is good. The free market is good. Limited government is good. But a word to the wise: Just as rich people can support conservatives, they can support radical leftists too—the kinds whose aims, you might say, are Orwellian.
Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century
by Laura Beers
W.W. Norton, 205 pp., $27
Owen Tilman was an intern at the Washington Free Beacon and is a sophomore at Yale University.
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