You may know people who still expect you to scoff at the idea that President Trump thinks like a monarchist/fascist. You may also know people who expect you to scoff at the idea that Democrats such as leading NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani are communists. Both these groups of people are stupid and/or evil, including any libertarians who might be among them.
No one should be providing camouflage for the blatant authoritarians of either the right or the left at this late date, not after Trump has had people murdered for trading in forbidden chemicals and Mamdani has exulted at the thought of “seizing the means of production” (though the corrupt Poynter Institute and its PolitiFact site nonetheless refuse to call Mamdani a communist, and a surprisingly large number of online dolts these days will weigh in to claim that even the Soviet Union wasn’t communist but instead “state capitalist,” as if some Trotsky-era wordplay can revise history such that the Soviet Union’s collapse was due to overly free markets).
The authoritarians’ last-ditch strategy (at least in the two centuries since the monstrous Hegel wrote) is always to distract you from the horror of your overall situation by trying to switch your attention back and forth between two authoritarian “options.” You hate Team A? Oh, look! Team B just arrested your cousin! You hate Team B? Oh, look! Team A just seized all your money! The evidence suggests the authoritarians can keep this scam going indefinitely. You’ll probably help them do it. You might even enjoy the game. Stop.
Orwell, though no libertarian himself, implicitly criticized that endless authoritarian switcheroo distraction tactic when he wrote about the dystopian government in 1984 being able to turn on a dime and declare a formerly allied nation an eternal enemy or a former enemy a long-trusted ally. Mustachioed leader Big Brother was not merely-Stalin or merely-Hitler. He was both, since both lie and coerce.
But truly brainwashed villains of the mid-20th-century, such as folk singer Pete Seeger, would suspend or renew their artistic attacks on Hitler as new marching orders came in from the Soviet Union, a regime that oscillated between alliance with and deadly enmity against the Nazis. Likewise, observed Orwell, Trotsky was a friend to the Soviets one minute and his followers all contemptible “Trotsky-fascists” the next, as the Soviet regime’s whims shifted.
It’s that pretense that truth is malleable that’s the particular target of the current documentary Orwell: 2+2=5. It isn’t a perfect film. Too French, for one thing, and I say that not out of mere chauvinism but because French intellectuals have a tendency to focus more on symbolism than on concrete political actions such as arrests and bomb-lobbing. The film also manages, in showing how Orwell’s warnings still apply, to identify misleading propaganda in, say, efforts to deride Ukraine but passes over pro-Ukraine propaganda largely without comment. It denounces as demagogic Argentine president Milei—and, it goes without saying, Trump—while finding little time to deconstruct the establishments against which they’ve both railed.
Roughly speaking, we’re supposed to become an audience of proudly skeptical yet NPR-respecting citizens, one suspects, which may help the documentarians with distribution. The documentarians probably also think we’re supposed to be alert to dogmatic slogans such as “War Is Peace” but not think “No More Kings” may also be an example of oversimplifying. Their deeper message should be that neither Air Strip One nor Eurasia, so to speak, can be trusted.
Truth be told, our whole culture has gotten so bureaucratic and prone to weasel-language that even what are intended to be ordinary clarifying instructions for customers are often hopelessly obfuscatory and indeterminate. It took me, and no doubt many other cinephiles, several frustrating cinema outings to figure out that “closed captions” are not the opposite of “open captions.” In fact, the latter are merely one type of closed captions, so God help you if you’re trying to use those phrases alone to figure out whether you’ll have to see words at the bottom of the screen during your movie outing.
The struggle to use that fairly new lingo on ticket-selling pages online leads to phrasing like this from the text about screenings near me of the Orwell documentary: “Showtimes on this page are for screenings of ORWELL: 2+2=5 without open captions (on-screen display of dialogue and sounds). For non-open captioned screenings, see here…” Double-plus un-good phrasing, if you ask me. And we do have politics, not just markets, to blame for the sudden eruption of such clunky sales phrases, since deaf activists such as Marlee Matlin have been storming out of cinemas that don’t deploy functioning closed captions (open or non-open) immediately, threatening lawsuits or legislation, fuming almost like Peter Dinklage discovering rival dwarfs at work in a Disney movie.
I admit my cinema complaint will probably seem trivial in just a few months, when the whole of New York City, the same New York City where the World Trade Center was destroyed by Muslim terrorists just a generation ago, is likely to be governed by a socialist Muslim. Among other things, he says he’ll arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli leader visits, which will be quite the hairpin turn for law enforcement after a couple years of watching the Columbia campus for violence from anti-Israel activists (not to mention Giuliani briefly arresting Arafat what seems like only a few years earlier). We’ve always been at war with—well, we’ll see who loses the election next month.
Next year, the Columbia campus will probably strive to avoid running afoul of Trump’s regulations saying schools must not trash-talk the U.S., even as primary education in the surrounding city becomes by Mamdani’s decree so egalitarian that there will not be special programs for “gifted” students, like the greatly-appreciated ones that gave me a little more time to read philosophy and a little less time to be derided by jocks when I was a child.
Whether you dumb down education in the name of nationalism or egalitarianism, though, you risk creating a generation of students so politicized and so torn between factions that they start thinking the safest answer to give on math quizzes to the question “What does 2 + 2 equal?” may be 5 after all, depending on which answer the current king or commissar likes to hear. I like hearing the truth, even when it has no faction supporting it at all.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey