What has this to do with Trump? Surely, Orwell’s novel, with his insights into the manipulation of news and history, tells us something disturbing about Trump’s presidency? But this is where the Trump/Orwell analogy goes wrong. Trump isn’t Big Brother. He’s not a brutal totalitarian, “the policy of the boot-on-the-face”, with killing squads and torture rooms.  He will not shut down an independent judiciary or force the American news media into submission, certainly not in the way post-war Stalinist regimes did throughout Eastern Europe. There will continue to be anti-Trump rallies and demonstrations on both coasts and in college towns throughout America. The Democrats will oppose Trump, though they will be outnumbered in both houses of Congress at least until the next midterm elections. 

Orwell thought the new totalitarianism would last forever. Why wouldn’t it? Through propaganda and Newspeak they would control the past and the present and therefore the future. However, 40 years after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Soviet Communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. Two years later it fell in the Soviet Union and the Baltic republics too. What Orwell failed to understand about Soviet Communism was that it was riddled with contradictions: above all, in science and technology. Like Orwell’s imagination, it was stuck in the 1940s: big state, militarised, heavy industry. The new digital world left the Soviet Union behind. Television, the photocopier and the computer made it possible for people to see what kind of lives people in the West enjoyed and to disseminate images of that affluence.

These made life under Soviet Communism less and less bearable. Big dams and tractors are fine, but what happens when people also want jeans and pop music, fridges and cars? Whenever the Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich came to London he would go to Harrods and buy fridges to sell back home. Science and technology, as Huxley knew, and Orwell didn’t, was the future.

Trump isn’t an Orwellian Big Brother. He’s a reality TV star, whose views speak to his passionate core constituency, largely uneducated citizens from the South and Midwest. One of the most interesting infographics I have seen about Trump’s America was a map of the United States showing the biggest employers in each region. In the Trump Belt the biggest employers are retail and the military. By retail, I mean Walmart, and other big cheap supermarket chains, and by the military I don’t mean the Pentagon, but poor whites and blacks, out of high school, with no college education. Look at the East and West coasts and the biggest employers are high-tech corporations, medical research and hospitals, and colleges. In Boston, one hospital alone, Massachusetts General, employs more than 30,000 people.