George Orwell's 1984 was published 70 years ago this month, and he died a few months after it was published. Suppose that he hadn't, though. Suppose that he'd been cryogenically frozen in his last days, and reanimated in 2019. Whose side would he be on in our trying political moment? What would he think of us?
His first reaction, I think, would be to pull a Moscow on the Hudson and, like Robin Williams's Russian defector when confronted by the superabundance of coffee choices in the grocery store, collapse in a heap of confusion. “How did I get it so wrong?” he would ask. The world did not, as he foretold, divide itself into three totalitarian superstates. Nor did the stark gray privations of Soviet central planning or wartime rationing, which continued in Britain until four years after Orwell's death, become permanent. It is not today the norm to live in something like a forced-labor camp powered by terror. Orwell would surely notice that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with its tranquil populations of pretty people living in a pleasing soma tupor, was closer to the mark than 1984. Weighing the evidence on central planning, he would be forced to conclude that it had never produced the desired results and had instead sown lies and illiberalism.
Orwell had already turned away from the radical Left by the time he died; late in life, sensing the Soviet menace, he compiled a list of 35 public intellectuals he believed were “crypto-communists and fellow travelers,” and sent it to the British Foreign Office. Yet claiming he stood for the Right while he was alive would be a fool's errand. Christopher Hitchens once put it well: “George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics.”
Like Thomas Jefferson, he had a tendency to consider a matter from different vantage points, and like Hitchens, a talent for provocation. Always there was a core of between-ness, a quality of being both one thing and the other, Eric Blair and George Orwell. He stood out as an Englishman in Burma, and within the English he stood out as peculiarly sympathetic toward “the natives.” He went to Eton, but as a scholarship boy, not a child of privilege. On the other hand, when he went undercover to lead a pauper's existence for Down and Out in Paris and London, the real hobos knew he wasn't one of them: His posh accent betrayed him.
