To hear some people tell it, America entered a dystopia long before the coronavirus and measures undertaken to combat it altered everyday life almost to the point of unrecognizability. As for which dystopia, and when, well — that depends on whom one asks.
For many on the left, the annus horribilis was 2016, the instigator was Donald Trump and his election victory, and the dystopia was that imagined by George Orwell in his 1949 novel 1984. It wasn’t long before the comparisons took root. Just after Trump’s inauguration, when a now-quaint-seeming row over the crowd size of the event unfolded, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway claimed to proffer some “alternative facts” in response to what she deemed misleading statements from the media. This unfortunate phrase provided ample reason for those so inclined to imagine Big Brother on our shores. “George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Suddenly a Best Seller” reported the New York Times, noting a surge in the book’s sales. 1984 “was far better and smarter than good times past allowed us to think,” Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker. The comparison has cropped up sporadically in the years since, in The Nation, The Guardian, and other outlets.
In one sense, this is a bit surprising. Parts of the Left have always had a complicated relationship with Orwell’s novel. Orwell himself was something of a socialist apostate: a “Tory anarchist” who remained committed to democratic–socialist ideals while breaking with many of his contemporaries to condemn Hitler and Stalin equally. The nightmarish vision of 1984 draws from Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and other hellscapes, though it was primarily aimed at Stalin’s real-world dystopia, which at the time was still among the most powerful regimes on Earth — and one that too many of his fellow intellectuals were willing, to varying degrees, to tolerate or worse. Orwell’s was a thinly disguised world of material deprivation, omnipresent surveillance, unrelenting state oppression, children informing on their parents, and the complete obliteration of the individual.
Partly as a result, the intelligentsia’s preferred dystopia back then was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Published in 1932, Huxley’s novel imagines a world dominated not by pain but by pleasure, soaked in commercialism, soothed by drugs and sex and entertainment. Gopnik gets at this when he writes that he used to think 1984’s vision was “too brutal, too atavistic, too limited in its imagination of the relation between authoritarian state and helpless citizens” and recalls praising the “far more prescient” work of Huxley.
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