The Orwell Exception
13 min read
1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.
With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?
But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.
And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”
The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”
A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be.If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.
Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.
But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.
The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.
Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.
One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.
Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”
The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”
But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”
Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.
In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.
When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.
The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.
But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.
The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.
The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.
The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.
“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)
Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.
The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.
In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”
The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.
The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.
Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.
He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.
This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.
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