Within days of Donald Trump's inauguration, George Orwell's 1984 shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list. Trump's America is not Big Brother's Oceania or Airstrip One. (Hillary Clinton's America would not have been, either.) But however far Orwell's dystopia is from becoming our reality, it's good for Americans to reacquaint themselves with his warnings. They might do the same for Friedrich Hayek's warnings in The Road to Serfdom.
On the other hand, there's a sense in which, valuable as these books are, it's too late to return to them. America has already gone down a road to serfdom, if not the one Hayek envisioned, and reached its destination. Hard totalitarianism of the kind Orwell described has not come to our shores, but a pervasive surveillance state aspiring to “Total Information Awareness” (as one Bush-era program was briefly and ignominiously called) has sprung up within our still liberal and still democratic society. The perversions of language and human character that Orwell and Hayek analyzed so acutely have emerged in new contexts in our own lives. We have adapted the techniques of totalitarianism to a troubled free society.c
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