These are still early days, but it is striking that among Trump’s biggest critics are some of America’s biggest corporations. Recent Budweiser and Coca-Cola TV commercials have stood up for immigrants and America’s diversity as a nation. Companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and eBay filed legal documents in Washington against Trump’s immigration ban. There are no equivalents to Coca-Cola or Facebook in Orwell’s fictional world. How could there be? He never anticipated the kind of consumerism and new technology that are at the heart of Huxley’s vision.

There are two Americas today, not one. Two sets of values, two kinds of politics. Trump speaks for only one. That’s why he’s not an Orwellian figure who could control the way opponents think. Opponents know exactly who he is and what he stands for. They were fractionally outnumbered in a small handful of states in November. That could change dramatically in two or four years. If it doesn’t, it’s because Trump’s policies will continue to speak to voters, maybe even bringing them prosperity.

Trump won last year’s election for several reasons. One is that corporations were closing down whole towns in order to find cheaper labour abroad. Meanwhile, computer scientists are inventing new machines which will provide even cheaper labour. The dystopian future is not about Newspeak, it is about the robots that are being developed in Silicon Valley. They will have the biggest effect on the future of the West for generations to come. In recent years, millions of people have lost their jobs to cheap Mexican and Chinese labour. Soon many millions more will be losing their jobs forever to robots.

There will be populist protests against this, just as there have been against globalisation. But in southern California scientists are also inventing new forms of entertainment that will pacify and delight future generations of people in the West. This is closer to Huxley’s vison of a population distracted by drugs, sex and boundless consumption. That is Huxley’s brave new world, not Orwell’s 1984. We are not the children of George Orwell. We are the children of his old French teacher, Aldous Huxley.