From “Alternative Facts” To “Big Brother”

Within hours of Donald Trump's January, 2017 swearing-in ceremony, White House press secretary Sean Spicer declared, contrary to all evidence, that it was the best attended inauguration ever, “period.” Two days later, on Meet The Press, top Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway “clarified” the matter with her chilling “newspeak” contention that Spicer was merely offering “alternative facts.” Conway’s message, echoing the controlling language used by the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was, “The state never lies, because the government decides what the facts are.”

Totalitarians know they must obliterate the notion that a shared objective reality exists before they can impose their own “reality” on the masses. Spicer and Conway’s handiwork was, at the time, the latest reminder of why “Orwellian” is a term that will remain relevant in perpetuity. Nineteen Eighty-Four quickly shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, adding credence to the claim many critics, educators, and cultural commentators make that Orwell is the most influential of all the 20th century’s distinguished authors. While previously celebrated authors such as John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren have failed to sustain the literary luster they once enjoyed, the British writer's ideas and subject matter have lost none of their relevance; they never will. Orwell’s work didn't just survive the past century—it's still one of the primary lenses used to view the politics of this century.

Orwell remains famous due to his prescient warnings about the perils of government overreach. His influence spans literature, politics, and the English language. How did the writer reach this pinnacle? The short answer is that he capped off his writing career by penning, before his death at 46, an allegorical novella that satirizes the betrayal of the Russian Revolution by Joseph Stalin, followed by a novel offering a chilling depiction of a dystopian future where the state monitors every action and thought. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were what cemented his reputation as a literary lion and cultural talisman, but the surprise is that it may have taken one more, non-literary event to keep him on the top all the way into the Trump era.

Eric Blair changed his name to George Orwell at the beginning of his writing career to avoid embarrassing his “gentile” family. In order to write his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London—1933—he purposefully impoverished himself (in Paris, working as a dishwasher) to experience first-hand the miseries of the moneyless. The name change also represented a deliberate break from Orwell’s past as a member of the British establishment, for which he'd served as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police.

Orwell tossed aside his role as an enforcer to become, early on, a hard-working advocate for the lower classes and a critic of censorship. Many of his essays focused on promoting democratic socialism, opposing totalitarianism (both fascism and Stalinism), and advocating for social justice. Those essays were the form he used to hone the ideas and writing style that eventually fueled his two legend-making novels that have for so long been classroom staples, serving as cautionary tales on the threats—from both the Left and the Right—of totalitarianism.

Orwell was an advocate for a prose style defined by clarity, directness, and moral purpose. He believed the truth is best delivered unembellished by flashy literary “style.” It's safe to say that the author wouldn’t be impressed by Salman Rushdie’s maximalism, Virginia Woolf’s internal landscapes, or Vladimir Nabokov's clever wordplay. Like Hemingway, Orwell was a proponent of stripped-down writing. He wanted his prose to be “transparent, like a window pane,” to achieve maximal  political and social impact.

Orwell spelled out his stylistic preferences in his famous 1946 essay, “Politics and the English language,” in which he posits that the degradation of language characterized by vague, cliché-ridden, and pretentious prose is a direct gateway to foolish thinking and political manipulation. Sloppy language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts. Dishonest, dangerous politicians use vague language to hide the truth. To wit, Donald Trump's 2018 statement: “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.”

While assessments of Orwell’s impact over the decades are often connected to his role as a polemicist and rhetorician, his importance as a literary figure cannot be overlooked. “England's Prose Laureate” had a foundational influence on the "Angry Young Men," a group of 1950s British writers, including John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, who adopted his straight-talking, anti-establishment style. The author's work also paved the way for American “New Journalism” writers like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. Decades before Hunter S. Thompson coined the term "Gonzo journalism,” Orwell popularized the idea of reporters inserting themselves directly into the story.

In works like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell didn't just observe poverty; he lived it. In the work of both Orwell and Thompson, the writer's experiences and reactions are on par with the events being reported.

Hemingway and Orwell have had the most impact on shifting the reigning prose style from the ornamental, Latinate style of writers like Dr. Samuel Johnson and Thomas De Quincey toward the "plain English" style. But it took time for Orwell to receive the respect he deserved in the literary world. Author Anthony Burgess, referring to Animal Farm, once disparaged the literary value of “allegories with animals.” Until the late-1980s and early-90s, Orwell was relegated to the “middlebrow” category in academia, where “modernist” writers like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf long held sway. Orwell’s intense anti-Stalinism also worked against him in an academic environment in which the Soviet Union, despite the gruesome revelations of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, was viewed as a positive, progressive force in the world.

Orwell gave us an entire vocabulary that became part of everyday English—"Orwellian," "Big Brother," "doublethink," "Newspeak," "thoughtcrime," "memory hole"—that remain common shorthand when referring to modern phenomena such as surveillance, propaganda, cancel culture, political spin, and tech overreach.

There's a case to be made that Orwell needed television. In 1953 NBC released a widely praised adaptation,”1984,” followed by a BBC broadcast of the novel. The latter propelled Orwell into the highest rung of fame in mass culture, in which he became the ultimate Cold War patriot. Within five days almost 14 million British viewers had watched the BBC production. Overnight, “Big Brother” became a household phrase. “Orwellian” would soon follow. Rarely has the power of television to bridge the gap between literature and popular culture been put on such full display.