As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America.
Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty" manipulated the economy to impoverish the people while enriching the ruling class. God was expelled and absolute truth abolished, while "doublespeak" was promoted.
Oceania's Thought Police was the Ministry of Love's enforcement arm, while the Ministry of Truth undertook the task of rewriting history in service to the Party slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Today the left has a Ministry of Truth, because it knows that twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals and so has to disguise its policies to deceive the majority. Its Ministry of Peace would be better-named the Ministry of Bipartisanship, which, in the name of reaching across the aisle with a friendly hand, slices it off with a partisan dagger. Its Ministry of Love is more aptly named the Ministry of Tolerance, which dictates one way of thinking and demonizes dissenters. The Ministry of Plenty is alive and well in the Obama administration's cadre of economic advisers.
The liberal establishment's Ministry of Truth extends throughout our culture, having taken over our educational institutions, the arts and the sciences. How slavishly our academics hew to the Party slogan. They have planted themselves in positions of cultural influence to "control the present," in order to rewrite the past (to conform to their dogma), for purposes of "controlling the future."
Our professors of history, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, journalism, law, the hard sciences and other fields deride Western civilization and characterize our founders as Christian-mocking deists devoted to enlightenment principles of the philosophers. They speciously tie our unique freedoms to our "secular" founding to argue that we must banish God from the public square, lest we lose our liberties. In the name of academic inquiry, these academic and cultural "Thought Police" indoctrinate and intimidate students who dare deviate from their thought mandates.
Their textbooks tell us that Franklin D. Roosevelt not only was not a domestic liberal but also saved capitalism through socialism. (Talk about "doublespeak.") They say his New Deal spent us out of the Great Depression, while current historians not housed in the Ministry of Truth tell us it exacerbated our economic woes. Based on the ministry's revisionism, Keynesian economists were empowered to reflect those myths in their textbooks for a half-century. Armed with their revised lessons from history, Obama's Ministry of Plenty advocated passage of the "stimulus" bill, which was doublespeak for "rampant redistribution to its allies, sucking the oxygen out of the private sector and suppressing the economy."
The left's Ministry of Truth, with the full-throated support of the "unbiased" mainstream media, has given us such Orwellian originals as "pro-choice" while suing an 80-year-old prayer-warrior for standing outside Planned Parenthood's abortion factory to share important information with pregnant mothers to help them make a fully informed choice. The ministry seeks to shut down conservative talk radio, with the "Fairness Doctrine." It forbids private ballots for employees to vote anonymously on union membership for the purpose of intimidating them to join -- in the name of the "Employee Free Choice Act." It boasts of "budget cuts" when it slightly reduces the rate of increases in spending. It calls the budget-busting Obamacare legislation the "Affordable Care Act." It calls a bill that would further expand unemployment a "jobs bill." It fabricates and manipulates a consensus on "climate change" and ostracizes dissenters as science-averse. (In Oceania, science had "almost ceased to exist.") It conspires with its Ministry of Tolerance to describe political dissent from its effort to legalize homosexual marriage as "hate" and to brand political conservatism as "racism." While the rapacious Obama administration recklessly squanders our national wealth in its lust for power, its ministries of Plenty and Bipartisanship vilify the wealthy -- who are paying a disproportionate share of taxes -- for not paying their fair share. The Ministry of Plenty, while presiding over the destruction of the private sector, castigates job creators for hoarding all the wealth.
2012 won't be so much about two competing visions as it will be a contest of truth. Without the left's Orwellian ministers and their deputies in the press and academia, it would be a historic blowout and rejection of their vision. I'm betting it will be anyway.