Should people stay quiet, or speak their truth?
On the political crisis, President Biden, 'Democracy' and 'Fascism', George Orwell.
In January 1923, three months after the fascists had marched on Rome and taken over the Italian state, Benito Mussolini invited the international press to meet with him at his compound in Lausanne. Hundreds of journalists gathered in the room, including an American fresh from Paris. As the American later wrote in The Toronto Daily Star,
“Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into the famous frown. He was registering Dictator… Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents. ‘As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.’”
Mussolini knew the press, and how to work a crowd. He had once been the firebrand editor of Italy’s largest socialist newspaper, Avanti, before abandoning the Left and becoming the world’s first fascist leader. But the American writer didn’t buy the show that the dictator was putting on. “Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff.”
The writer left the group of correspondents and went closer to Benito Mussolini. He tiptoed around the leader’s desk, to see what he was reading. ‘Il Duce’ was studying a copy of an English-French dictionary, it turned out. When Ernest Hemingway peered closer and looked at the pages, the bluff was proven. Mussolini was holding the book upside down.
When one of the world’s most powerful leaders is revealed to be a farce, what should a person do? Close their eyes and pretend that they saw otherwise? Smile to the crowd and lie to them too? ‘You don’t understand. Benito has been on a whirlwind trip of Europe. He’s tired, jetlagged. He also has the Spanish Flu.’ Or do you witness this new fact, digest it, and weave it into your worldview, and open yourself up to the possibility that something like ‘truth’ might have unintended consequences?
George Orwell wrote in his (excellent) Politics and the English Language; “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible… (political language) is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” To me, it is completely indefensible to gaslight a person and tell them that they didn’t see what they clearly saw. It is incomprehensible, perhaps evil, when one does this to the entire world.
On June 27th, over 80 million people watched the presidential debate and saw that the proverbial emperor had no clothes. The President of the United States was a shell of his former self. He stared lifelessly into blank space, could not string together clear sentences, flubbed the easiest talking points imaginable.
The debate was disastrous. The panic was instantaneous. Immediately the Democratic Party rushed to dampen the fire, calling those scared by the performance ‘bedwetters’ who were ‘clutching their pearls’. Later the campaign clarified that Biden ‘had a cold’. And then that he was tired from a trip that had ended twelve days earlier. Or that he had not practiced enough, despite practicing for a week at Camp David.
When Biden recently sat down for an interview, he said that “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down,” despite him being an elected leader who is ostensibly beholden to voters! When the interviewer asked Biden how he would feel if he lost to Donald Trump, Biden said “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did [as] good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,”, despite how the Democrats have constantly labeled Donald Trump as a borderline fascist who is a threat to democracy.
I could go on and on about the polls and all of Biden’s ridiculous slip-ups. But this letter isn’t about that. It’s not even concerned with what is ‘best’ for Democrats, or what would increase the likelihood of defeating Donald Trump.
No, I want to pull back to the initial question of this piece. When you suddenly discover that the emperor has no clothes, or the dictator holds the book upside down, or that the president is not the person he’s assured everyone that he is, how should a person act? Is there a responsibility to follow what is strategically ‘correct’, or to be honest – even if being truthful carries perceived risk?
George Orwell’s famous essay is absolutely about craft, and word choice, and how to be a better writer. But he thinks there’s something morally essential about the words we use, and how we write about the world. “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration…”
He calls out ‘dying metaphors’, and what he thinks of as ‘meaningless words’. One of those words is at least half of the subject of this letter. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’,” he writes. Orwell also digs into the other subject of this piece. “In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides… when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy.” If this is the case, then maybe it’s worth questioning what we even mean when someone says ‘democracy’.
For years the Democrats have called Trump a uniquely dangerous threat to ‘democracy’. But since the debate Biden has increasingly attacked the press, belittled voters, and desperately sought to silence dissent in his party. He has started to call into news programs randomly to yell at the tv, just as Trump did as president. In one of these calls Biden bemoaned, “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites…”. This is his new line. Increasingly Biden is attacking the media, holding them responsible for ginning up hysteria, casting himself as an outsider.
The same tactics are being felt by public officials. Despite more public figures urging Biden to step down, most Democrats have decided to, at least publicly, look away. As Annie Karni wrote recently in The New York Times, “… The consensus among many Democratic lawmakers was that Mr. Biden himself was the problem. Their unwillingness to say so was reminiscent of how congressional Republicans behaved during Mr. Trump’s presidency, when they would criticize and mock him privately but profess total fealty in public…”.
At the end of the Trump presidency, there was a discourse over how the media should cover Biden. Trump had effectively used the presidency to bully the media and threaten the press, so should the media go easier on Biden? Or at least soften the coverage a tad? Take this piece from the Washington Post in 2021, which called on the press to be specifically friendly to Biden;
“We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”
Frankly, the media has been easy on Biden. The president’s age and cognitive abilities have long been questioned, but it was not given much thought in the major outlets until the calamitous debate. The Biden administration has been one of the most guarded administrations when it comes to press access. Biden by far has the least number of press conferences and media interviews of the last seven presidents. The administration has largely avoided major journalistic scrutiny, not just on his age but on his record as well. Well, what good has that done us now, being partisans of ‘democracy’, pretending that the president was actually holding the book the right way up all along?
There’s a part of George Orwell’s essay that is so uncannily familiar that it made my skin clam up when I re-read it last night. I’m including the full passage,
“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases… one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them… A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved…”
When Biden stumbled through his talking points at the debate I first thought, ‘this is a very old man who is dying’. Mostly everyone I know had to physically shut their eyes while they watched the debate. I think there’s a tenderness in most people that seeks to shield the privacy of those that are leaving the Earth. Biden’s face, his waxy complexion, his bony hands. So many of us have seen those cheekbones in the people that we loved, we have seen it in them as they slowly diminish and let go. We have seen it, too, in the forms that are laid out in open caskets, the ones that smell like perfume and formaldehyde, the ones that we examine and probe to see if they still have some glimmer of the person we loved.
But then at some point that image left me. It was something in his mouth and his eyes. He was suddenly a robot, like a Disneyland animatronic that had broken down mid-speech. His lines were there, waiting to be said. ‘Democracy’, ‘Roe v Wade’, ‘this is the most important election of our lifetimes’. But the words did not hold, did not come. They slipped off and dissipated into the air like static. And the eyes. “Blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.” It was like you could look through those blank discs and into something far more horrific. They were a portal into the absurdity and the rot of this system. This is not just a man desperately hungry for power. It’s the craving for power itself. It is power detached from consequences and purpose, power accumulated for its own sake alone. Power that is answerable to nothing except itself. Power that would rather make itself a black hole than come to terms with its own impermanence.
Language, words; they are not the whole story. But they are part of it. “… The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” Orwell wrote. Fixing the language won’t end the maladies, but it is some part of the solution. There is no way forward without admitting that, yes, the dictator’s book is upside down, that the emperor has no clothes, that the president is unfit for the job.
On that note. Hans Cristian Andersen’s story The Emperor Has No Clothes is based, supposedly, on a Spanish collection from 1335, Libro de los ejemplos. Anderson read the tale in the German translation, So ist der Lauf der Welt, or That’s the way of the world. What a fitting title. It is, after all, the way of the world for a powerful man to desperately cling onto his power, to thrash about and to do anything to hold onto his control, even to drag everyone else down to Hell with him. This has been happening since Ancient Greece, since Babylon, since the Führerbunker in Berlin. That’s the way of the world. As Vonnegut would say, ‘so it goes’. But I still hold onto that nagging hope; it doesn’t have to be that way.
So painfully brilliant, this