“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident … Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
– Karl Rove
I wrote an article last week in which I compared the foreign policy and associated rhetoric of the GOP, specifically of the Bush administration (though little has changed under new leadership) with that of the authoritarian Party from George Orwell’s 1984, which was motivated principally by the clear — and unnerving — similarity between the above quotes. The other area of general policy of an administration, which remains to be discussed, is domestic policy.
The governments of the world of 1984 are police states, totalitarian to the point that there is no real individual privacy at any level. They rely on fear and total control of the media and education and achieve this control in the public mind by enforcing a government sanctioned language called “Newspeak.” Newspeak is a simplified language intended to diminish the range of thought and expression of the average person. It contributes to the cognitive dissonance — called doublethink in Newspeak — required by government officials and normal citizens to justify their frequently self-contradictory actions and thoughts. Doublethink is explained in 1984 as, “basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.”
If the GOP really is like the Party of 1984, or like a precursor in spirit, and I believe that it is, then its politics would rely on a manipulation and misrepresentation of facts to push the public toward policies that do not actually benefit them.
George Mason University conducted a study of truth-value assessments made by the political fact-checking site PolitiFact of 100 total claims made by Republicans and Democrats in 2012 between Jan. 20 and May 22. PolitiFact assigns levels of dishonesty to claims ranging from half-true to pants-on-fire lies and found that 54 percent of Republican claims made within this period were at least mostly false, compared to 24 percent of statements made by Democrats. This is a trend that matches, in principle, Republican economic policies that form the bulk of their domestic rhetoric outside of social issues like gay marriage and abortion rights.
The GOP’s official platform of 2012 states that, “We are the party of maximum economic freedom and the prosperity freedom makes possible,” and it goes on to claim that “Our vision of an opportunity society stands in stark contrast to the current administration’s policies that expand entitlements and guarantees, create new public programs and provide expensive government bailouts,” as well as that they do not support “policies which, for the last three and a half years, have stifled growth, destroyed jobs, halted investment, created unprecedented uncertainty and prolonged the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” This ignores the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was based almost entirely on stimulus and creation of public programs, mitigated the effects of the Great Depression. It also puts in conflict the concept of an opportunity society and entitlements despite extensive evidence that social welfare programs keep millions of Americans out of poverty. So, unless the GOP thinks that Americans somehow have greater opportunity in life when they are living below the poverty line, the assertion that opportunity is lessened by entitlements and guarantees is entirely wrong.
Later in the platform comes support for extensions to be made to the Bush tax cuts and the assertion that such extensions would help the economy. Largely, they wouldn’t. Rather, a continuation of those cuts would increase the budget deficit because of lost revenue from the tax breaks, which contradicts aggressive Republican criticism of Obama over the deficit. This criticism of Obama’s proposed budget is especially Orwellian in the context of the Republicans’ proposed plan, which claims to support the middle class, though its policies would effectively only benefit the very wealthy. Republican doublethink over fiscal issues is primarily in the service of their incredibly wealthy campaign contributors. When Representative Paul Ryan says that rising costs of living are “a serious problem for many Americans,” yet proposes a budget plan that takes away health care benefits and education grants, he is engaging in exactly the kind of anti-reality propaganda that the Rove and Orwell quotes endorse.
Republicans in government have lied and misrepresented their economic policies. The contradiction between their attempts to be the party of the common man — represented by their deification of people like Joe the Plumber — and their support for policies that help the wealthy more than other classes (if they do not actively harm other classes) is resolved in the context of American politics. That is, movement toward an Orwellian propaganda model fuels the success of the Party. The Republican Party, like Orwell’s Party, is trying to create their own reality, a reality in which America would be ruled not by the people but by a wealthy few.
Alec Woodard is a College freshman from Burlington, Iowa.
