"The actual model for 1984″ was Stalins USSR of circa 1948. No regimes today (maybe North Korea) can match the total police-state fear of Russia at the height of the purges, which Orwell was extrapolating into the future as if the Communists had achieved their goal of supplanting the democracies of the West.
Still, conservatives have always sensed pretty clearly that the contemporary liberal-left is a lot closer to Bolshevism then it would ever acknowledge, or even understand. (This after the 1930s, in which the parlor pinks, the limousine liberals of that era, were explicitly pro-Soviet.)
Lefties dont really agree with pluralism- the imperative to live and let live alongside lifestyles or opinions they disagree with. They want to stamp them out. Like Marxism, and its offshoots feminism, environmentalism, and related isms, it represents an ersatz religion, a secular system of belief that, like religions, has difficulty coexisting with apostates.
Certain quarters of the right- religious nuts most prominently, but also extreme nationalists (who trend toward fascism) share the same trait. But generally the right has more libertarian and realist DNA in its makeup than the left. Even traditionalism (think Burke) implies a tolerance for the quirks and failings of humanity, not a Utopian desire to eradicate them in the name of abstractions. Certainly today, when the left has already won most of the social battles of the last 50 years, the right can either accept those victories as new traditions, or retreat into a crankish fantasy land. (Note to the GOP: choose wisely.)
So Obama-era liberalism, as viewed and amplified through sage NYT reportage, Stewart/Colbert amen-corner mockery, Vanity Fair puffery, or were-smarter-than-you sites like Slate, Salon, and countless others, collectively amount to a shockingly intolerant sort of groupthink- intolerant of precisely those values and institutions that built the country into a world power and industrial leader. A Freudian/generational perspective might add that those values were more or less those of the parents of the Boomers, who rebelled against them in their adolescence 45 years ago and, in a sense, never really stopped doing so.
No gulags, but control of the media/entertainment/legal/political levers of society amount to a deck seriously stacked against the proles.
I suppose my motivation was to show that, in point of fact, there is a pretty clear link between Orwell and todays lefties with blinkers."
Still, conservatives have always sensed pretty clearly that the contemporary liberal-left is a lot closer to Bolshevism then it would ever acknowledge, or even understand. (This after the 1930s, in which the parlor pinks, the limousine liberals of that era, were explicitly pro-Soviet.)
Lefties dont really agree with pluralism- the imperative to live and let live alongside lifestyles or opinions they disagree with. They want to stamp them out. Like Marxism, and its offshoots feminism, environmentalism, and related isms, it represents an ersatz religion, a secular system of belief that, like religions, has difficulty coexisting with apostates.
Certain quarters of the right- religious nuts most prominently, but also extreme nationalists (who trend toward fascism) share the same trait. But generally the right has more libertarian and realist DNA in its makeup than the left. Even traditionalism (think Burke) implies a tolerance for the quirks and failings of humanity, not a Utopian desire to eradicate them in the name of abstractions. Certainly today, when the left has already won most of the social battles of the last 50 years, the right can either accept those victories as new traditions, or retreat into a crankish fantasy land. (Note to the GOP: choose wisely.)
So Obama-era liberalism, as viewed and amplified through sage NYT reportage, Stewart/Colbert amen-corner mockery, Vanity Fair puffery, or were-smarter-than-you sites like Slate, Salon, and countless others, collectively amount to a shockingly intolerant sort of groupthink- intolerant of precisely those values and institutions that built the country into a world power and industrial leader. A Freudian/generational perspective might add that those values were more or less those of the parents of the Boomers, who rebelled against them in their adolescence 45 years ago and, in a sense, never really stopped doing so.
No gulags, but control of the media/entertainment/legal/political levers of society amount to a deck seriously stacked against the proles.
I suppose my motivation was to show that, in point of fact, there is a pretty clear link between Orwell and todays lefties with blinkers."
