{"id":37491,"date":"2022-05-11T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=37491"},"modified":"2022-05-02T19:58:20","modified_gmt":"2022-05-02T23:58:20","slug":"where-the-biden-administration-diverges-from-george-orwells-1984-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/11\/where-the-biden-administration-diverges-from-george-orwells-1984-playbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Where the Biden administration diverges from George Orwell&#8217;s 1984 playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Comparisons between the Party in George Orwell&#8217;s <em>1984 <\/em>and the Democrats currently ruling the U.S. are becoming more frequent, e.g., <a href=\"https:\/\/theweek.com\/articles\/662656\/beware-liberal-thought-police\">referring to the Silicon Valley censors as the Thought Police<\/a> (from 2016), the new Disinformation Governance Board as the Ministry of Truth (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/biden-establishes-a-ministry-of-truth-disinformation-governance-board-partisan-11651432312\">WSJ<\/a>), etc. Democrats are now apparently about to receive comprehensive data on which Americans support their opponents (see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2022\/05\/02\/politics\/rnc-marketing-email-ruling-january-6-committee\/index.html\">&#8220;Judge rules January 6 committee can obtain RNC and Trump campaign email data&#8221;<\/a> (CNN)).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is at least one area where today&#8217;s Progressives diverge from Orwell&#8217;s Party. From the appendix to <em>1984<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>[a Party member&#8217;s] sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by GOODSEX\u2014that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Regarding sexuality, in other words, 21st century governments that decide how to allocate an ever-larger share of GDP and thus occupy an ever-larger role in an individual&#8217;s life went in exactly the opposite direction predicted by Orwell. Orwell was correct in predicting that church-established moral rules would be dead, but he thought that even more strict sexual morality would be imposed by the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(Note that, in <em>1984<\/em>, the Proles enjoyed more freedom of all kinds, including sexual, than Party members, but their sexual freedom was pretty similar to what was available in 1940s England not what we have in the U.S. right now. Contraception is never explained in <em>1984<\/em>, unlike in <em>Brave New World<\/em>. The only women who have babies are married women, despite the existence of some sex outside of marriage, and family sizes seem to be small.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comparisons between the Party in George Orwell&#8217;s 1984 and the Democrats currently ruling the U.S. are becoming more frequent, e.g., referring to the Silicon Valley censors as the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biden-harris"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - 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