How a decade of political doublespeak has been rehearsing a future the novelist warned us about. D onald Trump almost certainly never read Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems safe to say, as many observers have, that the novel's more nuanced warnings never found their way to his desk. And yet the decades he spent on the political stage suggest that the lessons George Orwell encoded in that dystopian masterwork were absorbed not from the page but from experience—from watching how language, power, and public memory evolve in the hands of those who understand their value. The comparison is not simply about mendacity. Politicians have always lied. What Orwell diagnosed—and what makes his novel feel less like prophecy than mirror—was something more structural: the deliberate erosion of language as a medium of shared reality. That is a different thing, and a far more dangerous one. Consider the arc from President Kennedy to President George W. Bush, and then from ...
Unusual Suspects Americans face seemingly insurmountable problems and need someone to blame. We have mastered the world. America is the most prosperous and powerful country on Earth, and we tend to take credit for that success. However, we cannot do everything and some things we do have unintended side effects that we cannot control. For example, we do not treat everyone equally. While many things point to why, the greater truth is we have not figured out how to make that workable. We have created a great deal but consumed a great deal to do so. This has created problems such as pollution, which we have struggled for decades to ameliorate with minimal success. We invest trillions in our military but cannot stop wars, and we provide others with weapons to fight. We reached the top but now watch others climb past us. We are the wealthiest country with the highest debt and have no plan to settle it....