By Brigitte L. Nacos
“There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.” George Orwell
The current state of the Republican Party, better understood as Big Brother cult, has hit us 37 years later than the Orwellian nightmare of 1984. But when reality unfolds in front of us, it is more shocking, more frightening than the fictitious warning shot.
Big Brother and his servants in GOP are signaling the upcoming purge of Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post in the House in purely Orwellian terms: While ideologically fully in tune with the GOP’s far right policies, she refuses to embrace and repeat the Party’s Big Lie that Leader Trump won the 2020 election, that Biden is not the legitimate president, that January 6 was a patriotic Stop the Steal act.
The other day, Cheney stood again her ground, when she said,
“We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."
But telling the truth means in today’s GOP to be disloyal to the Party and its Dear Leader. As the Orwellian Party propagandist explains, “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
That describes today’s loyalty test in the Republican Party. You cannot claim that 2 times 2 equals 4, when Big Brother and his cultists insist that 2 times 2 equals 5. If you do not follow the party’s lies, you become the enemy.
Do all of the pure Trumpian GOP officials believe the Big Lie and many other lies? Probably not. But they all understand that the vast majority of the party’s core followers hold the Party’s truth to be the truth. And only loyalists in that sense can look forward to be renominated and reelected next year. Again, the Orwellian fascist model provides a plausible explanation for the scarcity of truth tellers in the rank of GOP officeholders, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…Power is not a means; it is the end.”
The news that the ban of Trump from Facebook will continue for the time being renewed the discussion over a private company’s right to decide who can use its social media platform. But since the hate speech is not criminalized in the United States, I believe that right now it is best to deny the former president and his servants to once again disperse their Big Lie and a bunch of supportive conspiracy theories via global social media.
Four months without Trump’s posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram did not diminish Trump’s influence in his movement.
Elected GOP office holders are very much aware of this. They all want to please Dear Leader Trump and his base. Holding on to power is much more important than upholding truth and reality.
One political science scholar (Thomas Patterson)asked the same question and tried to answer it in his book,
How Americans lost their Mind.
Posted by: Brigitte Nacos | May 10, 2021 at 12:55 PM
Not we know what souls can be sold for. A congressman makes about $175,000 per year and that always struck me as a relatively low paying job to so attractive. Someone said only a politician would spend several million dollars every two years for such a poor job..
I still don’t understand how someone like Trump can draw so many people in.
Posted by: Hugh Sims | May 08, 2021 at 07:26 PM