Early in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the all-powerful Party announces that chocolate rations must be reduced to 20 grams per week. Later, the Party claims that the ration has been increased to 20 grams per week and reports spontaneous demonstrations of joy and gratitude. It doesn’t matter whether these demonstrations really happened, because all that matters is what the Party says. “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.”
Consider what we, the people of the United States, have been presented with in the past few months. The former president, leading the polls at the time, was shot by a would-be assassin less than a month ago. The news media have largely moved on, essentially sending the story down the Orwellian memory hole. Many prominent leftists either claimed the shooting was a hoax or lamented that it did not succeed, but few faced any consequences.
The current President of the United States, who allegedly won the most votes in American history just four years ago, announced his withdrawal from the campaign via a PDF posted to Twitter. This came just hours after he vehemently told the American people he was staying in the race.
Despite having won zero primaries, either this year or in her initial campaign in 2020, and despite not a single Democrat casting a vote for her in this campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris was nominated for president with zero debate or alternatives.
The most astonishing thing about these events is not how unprecedented they are, but how quickly the American people have acclimated to this new normal. Have we become so distracted by social media and vain pursuits that we are unable to notice the seismic shifts in our society happening before our very eyes?
To understand the gravity of the moment, we must first have at least a cursory understanding of what has come before. Without knowing how our country operated for its first 248 years, we cannot articulate what is so radical about the present moment. The chickens of decades of dumbed-down American history have come home to roost in a population that is blissfully ignorant.
In 1912, the American people elected a far-left college professor who wanted to fundamentally change our society. Woodrow Wilson only had the chance in the first place because William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote, but World War I gave him the excuse he needed. Wilson cracked down on the free press, censored the mail, and took control of several industries to prosecute the war. He engaged in central planning at home and attempted to redraw the maps of the world through his Fourteen Points.
The American people had a longer memory back then. Wilson’s transformation was quickly undone by Republicans in the 1920s, leading to a decade of enormous prosperity and a return to the traditions of freedom we cherished. Yet when the Great Depression and World War II arrived, Franklin Roosevelt was able to permanently change our government and society. Today, few of us, even those who proudly proclaim the spirit of the American Revolution of 1776, can dream of returning to a pre-1929 country. Time, in many ways, has stopped. History has ended, as Francis Fukuyama announced at the conclusion of the Cold War.
Things that once mattered no longer do. There was a time when exaggerating one’s military service was the death knell for any politician’s career. An anonymous Twitter user called Fischer King pointed out that despite his boasting about being the inspiration for Love Story and “inventing” the internet, Al Gore assiduously avoided exaggerating his military experience. He went to Vietnam as a journalist, never seeing direct combat, and to his credit, never tried to claim anything more.
Contrast that with Minnesota governor Tim Walz, now Kamala Harris’ running mate. He served part-time in the Minnesota National Guard for 24 years, including a stint in Italy supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. However, despite signing on for an additional six-year term of enlistment, he chose to retire after only four, allegedly after learning that his unit would soon be ordered to combat in Iraq. In doing so, he forfeited his provisional promotion to command sergeant major, yet he nevertheless used that rank in his campaign materials for Congress and the Minnesota governorship.
Walz also claimed to have carried rifles “in war” in speeches promoting a gun control agenda, and testified that he had psychological issues resulting from his deployment.
There was a time when men would feel shame for lying and exaggerating about their military service for political gain, but that time has long passed. What is more extraordinary is that neither our media nor half the American people care. Their narrative seems to be: Why dig up the past? The only thing that matters is the perpetual now, and right now, voting Harris/Walz is the only way to stop the evil Donald Trump.
Living in the perpetual now means losing any sense of historical context. The same people who want us to believe that the 2020 lockdowns are ancient history and not worth talking about anymore also continue to hammer us with stories about Emmett Till, Black Wall Street, redlining, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin — all to program us with the narrative that America is an irredeemably racist nation that must be fundamentally transformed into a totalitarian state where equity is enforced at gunpoint.
By keeping us in a state of perpetual now, politicians and their media lapdogs can say with a straight face that the January 6th protest was the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. They not only ignore big events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor but smaller ones such as in 1954 when Puerto Rican nationalists shot five people in the Capitol, or in 1983 when left-wing terrorists exploded a bomb in the Capitol. An ignorant citizenry is a compliant citizenry.
Even pop culture seems frozen in time. Popular music is stuck on the same handful of megastars as ten years ago, while movies and television continue to reimagine old ideas rather than innovate new ones. Every single movie among the top ten highest-grossing films of 2024 is a sequel. Entertainment has become a vicious cycle where production companies need surefire hits to justify their budgets, and the only surefire hits are the old and familiar.
Older Republicans seem stuck in 1984, where the next inspiring speech will surely lead to a 49-state landslide and morning in America again. Older Democrats seem stuck in 1968, where street protests promised an end to war and racism. Millennials like me look back fondly on the 1990s, while Generation Z is entirely unmoored from the past or the future. Young people today have little hope of owning a home and building a family the way previous generations did, and have given themselves over to irony.
With no understanding of our place in history, our moment in time, it’s hard to have hope for the future. Totalitarian societies always try to dismantle a people’s connection to the past lest it give them hope of escape from the dystopian present. The French Jacobins created an entirely new calendar, one not based on ancient and Christian traditions but based on Science and Reason. Mao’s Cultural Revolution sought to destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. The Party in Orwell’s 1984 continually changed the past to keep its people in ignorance.
Today’s would-be totalitarians tear down statues and rewrite history books for the same reason.
This is why we need large collections of old books. This is why I keep copies of speeches and historical events on a private server. We can’t count on others to remember the past for us; we must do it ourselves and teach it to our children. Only by understanding those who came before can we prepare the next generation for what is to come.
The hour is late, and the clocks are striking thirteen.
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