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Print January 19, 2022 12 comments

Orwell & the Right

James Tucker

2,583 words

Whenever a conservative or Right-winger accuses Leftists of acting like the Party from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the unerring refrain from the Leftist chorus is “Don’t you know George Orwell was a socialist!” The implication is that, especially in these politically polarized times, Orwell is the property of the Left. He wore their uniform, and so Right-wingers are, by invoking his name, committing a kind of theft.

Orwell’s best-known writings, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are dark satires of that exact attitude: A man’s thoughts ought to belong to a political faction, and that political faction has some sort of right to them. It is a childish argument that no one with critical thoughts in his head who took in either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four without immediately rejecting the principles Orwell was trying to get across could honestly make, but it raises interesting questions. Why is it that most of the contemporary admirers of Orwell, a self-described socialist who fought for the Trotskyist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification in the Spanish Civil War, are on the Right? And who was Orwell, this Leftist so beloved by conservatives? What did Orwell really believe, and why have his writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four, had such an impact on so many?

The most obvious answer to the first question is that Orwell was anti-authoritarian. In 1900, when most of Europe was ruled by monarchies, Rightists tended to have a strong authoritarian streak and Leftists were attracted to anarchist and libertarian ideas. While many of these radicals were savage and destructive Emma Goldmans eager to tear society into shreds, others, from intellectual leaders such as Peter Kropotkin and William Morris to humble American laborers who set out to form utopian communities, were genuine idealists. To anyone unfavorable to the contemporary regime, especially if they had an alternative vision of a (in their judgement) better society, anti-authoritarianism has a natural appeal. And if men act not in the way one thinks they ought to, society, and therefore the ruling elite that set the standards for belief and behavior, are the obvious villains.

Hostility to a particular elite naturally universalizes as a distrust of authority in general. In the nineteenth century, Leftist intellectuals were drawn to the Rousseauian idea of man’s natural virtue. Engels thought that the abolition of the property-based family would lead to the triumph of monogamous couplings based on love and a natural end to the vices of adultery and promiscuity. Kropotkin dreamed that, through the abolition of wages, all would willingly work four hours a day for the greater good and could freely take from the common pool while taking no more than they needed.

Modern conservatives have no visions so fantastical, but have a similar relationship to their rulers as did the nineteenth-century Leftists. Since the early twentieth century, when Leftist and labor movements started winning political reforms, conservatives have expressed skepticism towards government and especially its worth as a tool for positively reforming society. In the post-war era, with opposition to the goals of Leftist social engineering themselves growing more publicly unacceptable, conservatives have shifted from fighting Leftist goals to fighting Leftist means; their enemy is no longer egalitarianism, but the top-down government interference in society Leftists seek to achieve egalitarianism. Libertarianism has dominated post-war conservatism in the Anglosphere, and the dominant theme in Orwell’s books is anti-authoritarianism. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the principal antagonist is Big Brother, a personification of the government itself. Though he is presented to the people of Oceania as a real man and their leader, it is quite clear to the reader that, whatever the reality or unreality of the man within the world of the novel, Big Brother is in practice a symbol.

You can buy Kerry Bolton’s More Artists of the Right here.

This might explain why reverence for Orwell is mostly a conservative phenomenon now, but there are deeper reasons for Orwell’s appeal to the Right and his largely ambivalent reception on today’s Left, despite their loud insistence that “Orwell was a socialist!” and thus one of them. Orwell is among John Derbyshire’s favorite authors, and far more extreme figures like William Luther Pierce and James Mason made almost constant reference to him; he clearly had a great influence on them despite his own anti-fascist convictions. Both of the latter were strongly opposed to the anti-authoritarian counterculture of the 1960s, so there is something in Orwell beyond distrust of authority that spoke to them and many others on the Right.

Although some liberals made reference to Orwell during the Trump years, these were mostly meaningless, such as suggesting that Trump was an Orwellian tyrant while also believing that Julian Assange ought to be treated as an enemy of the state for spreading distrust of the authorities, and that deciding on facts and suppressing contrary ideas as misinformation is the purview of the government. This speaks only to a personal lack of self-awareness and shows a total want of critical thinking. The only intellectually serious Leftist to frequently cite Orwell is Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky reached his peak of popularity in the 2000s as a critic of the American government, and this was mostly because at the time Leftists felt locked out of power by the ascendant neoconservative hegemony of the Bush years. Orwell briefly enjoyed popularity on the Left at the time and was frequently cited in opposition to the PATRIOT Act and other neoconservative assaults on civil liberties, but afterwards, all but a minority of the Left (the latter of which came to center on the more anti-establishment wing of the Bernie Sanders movement) returned to cheerleading for the American security state — as they had in the Clinton years — during the Obama and Trump administrations. Hence, Chomsky’s popularity has fallen, as have Leftist references to Orwell.

There is something deeper in Orwell than distrust of authority for its own sake. Unstated but implicit in Orwell’s work is a Rousseauian understanding of man as naturally good. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the protagonist, Winston Smith, concludes while watching an old working-class (called “proles” in the lingo of Orwell’s dystopia) woman washing her clothes through a window that hope lies in the lower sections of society, which are least corrupted by the Party. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell writes:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Orwell clearly believed that the totalitarianism he opposed was not in accord with human nature, and came unnaturally. He sees it not as the natural state of man, and identifies the language that defends it as necessarily equally unnatural. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published three years later and expands on many of the same themes in detail through fiction. As men’s thoughts are naturally hostile to the Party and the order it has imposed, language itself must be corrupted to unnaturally alter their thoughts. The Party’s attitude towards sex is another example of how Orwell, through his fiction, creates a dichotomy between the natural, healthy, and virtuous inherent nature of man and the corrupting influences of a totalitarian social order, and it is maybe the most poignant in the novel.

The Anti-Sex League must not be misunderstood as repersentation of tradional prudishness; it is clearly stated to be an initiative of the Party, and something novel:

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and — though the principle was never clearly
stated — permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.

Nor should Orwell’s presentation of his villains be misunderstood as advocacy of free love. The healthy alternative to the Party’s anti-sexual ideology  is presented to the reader in his relationship with Julia. Winston’s ultimate act of rebellion is loving another person over Big Brother, forming a natural and healthy bond over the false, artificial, and sick bonds Oceania’s citizens feel for Big Brother. The climax of the book comes when the Party finally strips him of his love for Julia, the one natural, human feeling he had experienced in spite of them. While Orwell was in favor of socialist political reforms, it cannot be overstated that the final victory of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four is social engineering overcoming Winston’s human nature. The true evil of the Party is in separating man from his nature.

Orwell shares his belief in the natural virtue of man with Kropotkin, Morris, and other nineteenth-century socialists, and in a different sense than those on the modern, post-Christian right such as Derbyshire, Pierce, and Mason, but in no sense the same as with most modern Leftists. In the nineteenth century Christianity informed the Right’s understanding, as well as that of nearly all ordinary people and even many egalitarian radicals. In the Christian worldview, man is innately tainted by sin and needs. In the Catholic and Orthodox understanding, the loving guidance of a firm, hierarchical church is needed, and in the Protestant view a strong personal relationship with God and conviction in Christianity, to protect and raise him above his own basal nature. Rousseau turned this entirely on its head by proclaiming the natural virtue of man and the corrupting influence of society. This same view was held by the idealistic socialists of the nineteenth century.

Though obviously anarchism was never implemented as national policy anywhere in the world during the twentieth century (unless one counts small enclaves formed in the midst of civil wars in Ukraine and Spain), many Leftist reforms were, and though some of them, such as the welfare state, have arguably led to improvements in living standards, none of them ever managed to pull the hidden goodness of man to the surface as Rousseau might have imagined. As the Left has failed to uncover the true nobility of man, and worse, has found it even more elusive as their goals have moved away from economic equality and towards universal brotherhood among men — something explicit even in early Leftist writings, but often tempered by a concern for racial preservation, a scientific understanding of sex, and subordinated to economic egalitarianism –, it has been mostly replaced with an understanding of man not so different from the Christian one it originally opposed. Even the term “original sin” is used when explaining the Leftist
understanding of racism and slavery’s significance.

Though both the modern Left and Orwell are egalitarians (Orwell was a socialist), Orwell saw man as too divorced from his nature, while the modern Left sees man (or at least white man) as inherently racist and sexist, stained by original sin. Like Orwell’s villains, they want to “fix” man. The obvious similarity between the Party’s agenda in Nineteen Eighty-Four and today’s Left is not lost on their conservative opponents, and plays a bigger role in Orwell’s popularity on the Right than his anti-authoritarianism.

The post-Christian, anti-egalitarian Right has a different idea of virtue than a socialist like Orwell, but like Orwell, Morris, and Kropotkin, they share the belief that man is naturally virtuous. They are differentiated from Rousseau by their belief that, rather than being hidden behind the corrupting influences of society and in need of emancipation, man’s true nature is already apparent and good as it is, and from the socialists by their belief that this nature is already reflected in inegalitarian societies. John Derbyshire is a secular conservative informed by biological science rather than religion. While most conservatives are either not intellectually serious enough or too cowardly to attack Leftist ends and not merely their means, Derbyshire contests the idea that equality is achievable or even necessarily desirable. A conservative, he is content with man as he is, and sees no need to redeem him through either supernatural or policy means.

Pierce and Mason are much more radical; they are National Socialists. Unlike Derbyshire, they are not necessarily content with man as he is, and want to continue man’s natural biological development. But they understand man’s nature not as an obstacle to his further development, but as the product of millions of years of evolution and imbued with the instincts and drives to survive and continue to advance. Both these men express a religious veneration of nature and look to it for meaning. Any attempt to change man’s nature away from its natural form and ends and towards different ends — ends decided upon by man instead of nature and in opposition to nature — is the highest sacrilege for them. All three felt Orwell’s stories of tyrants corrupting man’s virtuous nature in a much deeper way than merely relating to their anti-authoritarianism.

For the mainstream conservatives who contest only the Left’s means, Orwell’s socialism is not an obstacle at all, but rather make his stories easier to swallow because his villains are not motivated by egalitarianism, but by power itself. Orwell never criticizes the ends of egalitarianism in any of his works, because he agreed with them, though he believed them to be fully aligned with human nature. Conservatives can read and cite Orwell without ever running afoul of post-war egalitarianism. Had Orwell been a conservative in the 1940s, his novels would have been anti-egalitarian and conservatives would not cite them in polite society today.

*  *  *

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Tags

1984anarchismAnimal Farmanti-authoritarianismauthoritarianismChristianity and the LeftconservativesGeorge OrwellJames MasonJames TuckerJohn DerbyshireNineteen Eighty-FourNoam Chomskyoriginal sinPeter KropotkinPolitics and the English Languagesocialismthe leftthe RightWilliam MorrisWilliam Pierce

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12 comments

  1. Flel says:
    January 19, 2022 at 3:49 pm

    I have always read Orwell as exposing the dangers of totalitarian government, be it left or right? As a socialist he certainly wanted to see the system thrive, but evidence made it difficult to support even for a believer. I guess modern leftists wonder why a leftist would expose the negative aspects of their preferred system and that’s why they choose to berate those on the right that point to him as foretelling the future. Socialism or communism fail because it takes sheer power to get acquiescence, the barrel of a gun per Mao. I read 1984 and Brave New World at the same time and it definitely started to move me away from the foolishness of youth. The current left hates Orwell for exposing them.

    1. Lord Shang says:
      January 20, 2022 at 2:09 am

      Your last sentence is a big part of it, certainly. Orwell depicted modern leftism at its logical end point. The left at its core hates individuality (including now the very existence of ‘individual’ races and ethnocultures). The tendency of power, moreover, is to consolidate, intensify, and expand. Give the left enough power, and the end result is Orwell’s dystopia.

      I think too much is made of Orwell’s nominal “socialism”. Are we sure of what he meant by that? That he meant the same thing we do? Would Orwell have been a Corbynite or a Bernie Bro? Having read his sympathetic treatment of the “lower orders” in his Down and Out in Paris and London, my impression was that his “socialism” was more the stance of someone antagonistic to the then still very much evident British, feudal-originated class system. Many early socialists were actually not much more than believers in what we Americans take for granted (or did, prior to affirmative action and contemporary Negrophilia) as equality at law. Moreover, many were resentful of the unearned privileges of aristocrats, and their attendant injustices as experienced by the plebs, especially the talented excluded (think of Jude the Obscure). People like Orwell also understood that the wealth of many British capitalists did not arise solely or even mainly from their own entrepreneurial industry, but from an interconnected lattice-work of inherited privileges, including legal ones. They objected to the structural economic injustices which resulted from them, and saw in “socialism” a chance to expose and clean out legal privilege. Such views are ironically, however, every bit as compatible with a populist libertarianism as with egalitarian socialism.

      Whatever Orwell may have called himself, I don’t think he would have been an acolyte of Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez. They object to truly earned wealth, and seek to redistribute other people’s money for purposes of egalitarian social leveling, as well as personal vote buying. I think Orwell would have exposed their hypocrisies and self-interestedness, too.

      1. Kök Böri says:
        January 20, 2022 at 9:43 am

        Orwell was a Trotskyist, not Stalinist. Goldstein in “1984”, and the pig Snowball, both are modelled of Lev Trotskiy, and they are depicted much more positiv and sympathetic, than the Big Brother and Napoleon, who were both modelled of Stalin. But so were his views in 1930 and 1940´s, so nobody can say what he would say and do today.

  2. kolokol says:
    January 20, 2022 at 8:54 am

    George Orwell was an economic socialist only. He was on the left on economic issues – he was conservative, otherwise.

    He was a social conservative – he wrote against buggery and political correctness.

    And he was a nationalist. He was against British imperialism, but that’s different from nationalism.

  3. Connor McDowell says:
    January 20, 2022 at 12:08 pm

    It’s an interesting thought experiment to suppose that Orwell would be a right-wing dissident if alive today.

    Unfortunately, if he were alive today, he would just as pertinently be a product of our time as the rest of us. If he had the brass tacks to be intellectually honest and not indulge in dissonance, he would undoubtedly be relegated to using pseudonyms and publishing his work on marginalized websites with limited reach. Otherwise, he would have done what the rest of the western left has done over the last half century and abandon his principles at the same pace as his fellow travelers and in proportion to his cohorts ascension to power. The key to understanding the folly of liberal democracy is understanding that real democracy was never the goal of the progressives. Their goal was always to strip the conservative types of their power by backing them into a corner from which there was no escape, and once achieved, democracy would exist in name only.

    1. Beau Sauvage says:
      January 20, 2022 at 2:57 pm

      intellectual honesty. that’s what attracted O so many fans of note. simone weil is the only other leftist of the period who springs to mind, who was eager to apply universal standards universally and to be as rigorous, or in her case more so, on herself than the ‘other’.  it goes w/o saying that the strategy of the left, ((( ))),  has always been to hold the ‘other’ to universal ethics while practicing an aggressive ingroup tribalism that has no interest whatsoever in universalism. hence the outsized animus …

  4. Beau Sauvage says:
    January 20, 2022 at 2:45 pm

    Ah, good piece…

    George was McCarthyite before McCarthyism was cool. The traitor’s list he submitted to British intelligence–while on his deathbed–was surely the last straw for any real leftist remnant yet in his thrall.

    I guess Norman Podhoretz was the first to claim Orwell for the ‘Right’, understood merely as the force protective of individual liberties, aparticular & universalizing. But George had during his lifetime attracted the admiration of ‘reactionary’ skeptics like Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh.

    Also, one shouldn’t overlook Orwell’s antisemitism. But that’s no claim to infame since every single writer of merit in the last 200 years has been accused of AS.

    Rousseau traced man back to pre-linguistic mammal, a solitary creature whose life was monstrous, brutish, but not unrelievedly Hobbesian: it was sweet between savage interludes. Innocence. I believe any careful, comprehensive engagement with his corpus thrusts one strongly towards the right and romantic peoplehood: His aim should in no way be understood as anchored in the ‘goodness of man’ .

     

    1. James Tucker says:
      January 21, 2022 at 5:31 am

      By the ‘goodness of man’ I am not talking about the descriptive claims that any of these writers made about human nature. I am talking only about the value that they attached to human nature.

      I agree that if one attaches positive value to human nature, then nationalism is inevitable. Man is naturally racist and sexist and homophobic. We naturally like to be around our own kind. The modern left has no regard for human nature at all. They are happy to talk about unconscious bias because it is a way to blame whites for black failure. If human nature held any value for them, they’d be as opposed to talk of unconscious bias as they are of talk of race and IQ.

  5. 3g4me says:
    January 20, 2022 at 7:58 pm

    I’m not really comfortable with your claim that Orwell believed in man’s “natural virtue.”  One can accept that man has a basic and essential nature, both physical and spiritual, and not feel the need to alter or bend it to one’s will, without considering said nature inherently virtuous.  Although perhaps the question is what one means by virtue.  As a Christian and a nationalist, I can accept that man may be fallen and sinful yet still retain his innate essence as created by God, which requires no alteration.  Accepting and even appreciating the reality of human nature does not necessitate a belief that said nature is best in its most ‘natural’ form.  Savagery may be natural, but I prefer the constraints of civilization.  I’m no expert on either Orwell or Rousseau, but I don’t know that I’d agree they shared a similar view of mankind.

  6. Andrew Hamilton says:
    January 20, 2022 at 8:55 pm

    It is difficult to think of Orwell as a true Leftist at the most fundamental psychological level. 1984 is one of the most profound anti-Leftist works ever written. Therefore, it was “properly” banned in the Soviet Union.

    Orwell erected his intellectual superstructure on the wrong foundation (Leftism/Trotskyism/Socialism). His foundation and superstructure are incompatible. Philosophically and morally he needed a different foundation.

    Orwell was only 46 when he died, so it is hard to say how his thinking would have evolved.

    By the time he rose to prominence, the wartime and postwar institutional environment can’t be ignored.

    Orwell’s fame is to some extent accidental, like Solzhenitsyn’s. The work of each was touted by the powers-that-be for ideological and political reasons extraneous to literary or philosophical merit.

    As a former Trotskyite, Orwell was close to the Jewish-intelligence agency cabal of early neoliberals/neoconservatives soon known (among themselves) as the NCL (“Non-Communist Left”). Unfortunately, long-term this was just another family squabble, so today we are saddled with the ugly (thesis-antithesis-) synthesis, neo-Communism.

    After Orwell’s death in January 1950 the NCL utilized his work as anti-Soviet propaganda. This was true of his two most famous books (his Jewish publisher Frederic Warburg being a member of the Jewish-government clique), and the animated feature film Animal Farm (1955) and the movie 1984 (1956). Jews and the CIA were heavily involved in the production, distribution, and promotion of both films.

    With Orwell and Solzhenitsyn one is tempted to say that the “anti-Communist” Jews and their white orbiters, in their eagerness to undermine their Communist brethren, created golems that turned upon their creators.

    In a sense this is obviously true. On the other hand, the bad guys show no signs of losing their grip, so it was a misstep rather than a fatal error.

     

     

  7. Crawfurdmuir says:
    January 25, 2022 at 11:29 am

    I’m somewhat surprised that no one has yet mentioned The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which Orwell writes scathingly and at some length, not so much about socialism as a political philosophy but rather about socialists:

    “The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, snd, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

     

    “Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.”

     

    “The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist… who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilisation down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn… from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class… Still more unfortunately it includes – so such so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of – the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like blue-bottles to a dead cat.”

     

    “…as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so… ‘Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists world feel thoroughly at home. This does get harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.”

     

    It is astonishing how accurately Orwell’s portrayal of the English socialists of 85 years ago has in common with the American left today: the same overweening air of moral superiority, the same carefully assumed bohemian persona – almost to the point of self-parody – of the types that “come flocking to the smell of ‘progress’ like blue-bottles to a dead cat.”

     

    The difference between 1937 and today is that these types are now in charge of our universities, mass media, popular entertainment, and the current political establishment. Should anyone wish to write a book about this remarkable turn of events, I can think of no better title for it than Orwell’s phrase – A Dictatorship of the Prigs.  Since I’m probably not going to write that book, anyone who might care to do so is welcome to it.

     

    1. James Tucker says:
      January 29, 2022 at 8:05 pm

      Ha, that would be a brilliant title.

      At this point, it is no longer that socialism draws the prigs, to use Orwell’s term, but that the prigs are the draw of identifying as a socialist or leftist. It is a class marker for our morally and intellectually bankrupt system intelligentsia that dominate academia. A socialist can convince himself and his fellows, all of whom share his conceit, that he is a radical, a man of ideas; a real intellectual. And with the system constantly pushing for more equality, they can imagine that they are the intellectual and moral leaders of the entire thing, that they are the ones guiding society and holding it to its own ideas, when really they are but propagandists for power.

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