George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four was a self-avowed socialist until his dying day. Credit: Creative Commons / The Orwell Society

Charles González, a San Antonio native, who together with his father, Henry B. González, represented Texas’ 20th congressional district for more than 50 years, said he knew the exact moment he would retire. It was when he witnessed the rise of Tea Party Republicans in the wake of the inauguration of Barack Obama.

“In 2010, there were about 50-something members of the U.S. House that were elected on the Republican side, and they were there to bring down Congress, not build it up and make it responsible,” González explained this spring on PBS interview program Texas Talk.

The GOP brass cynically chose to coddle and empower far-right populists. But “when you ride on the back of a tiger, you can never get off,” González said. “And when old-style Republicans got off, they
got eaten up.”

Fifteen years later, with the wrench-throwers in the Tea Party transmogrified into full-on MAGA authoritarians, you can almost count on one hand the number of moderate conservatives officeholders who remain undevoured.

And wouldn’t you know, the venue for the three-day Texas GOP Convention Froth-A-Thon earlier this month, where the party faithful adopted an even more extreme party platform, was downtown San Antonio’s Henry B. González Convention Center.

Though intransigent speeches by the likes of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz grabbed most of the headlines, plenty of lesser-known fruitcakes were undeservedly ignored.

Take outgoing Texas GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers, for example.

“You and I know that to do nothing is to let the socialists win,” she proclaimed to the assembled
delegates in general session. “The state and the country are at a tipping point like no other I’ve ever ever seen in my lifetime. The federal government is being weaponized against the average American
person. It will not just be the political leaders who are targets. This is right out of Marxist doctrine of controlling thought, behavior and movement in society. That is Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Only, George Orwell was a self-avowed socialist until his dying day.

In 1941, pounding his typewriter while German warplanes flew overhead dropping bombs on London, he sketched out the kind of socialism he wanted to see implemented after the war, which included nationalization of land, mines, banks and major industries. In addition to a reform of educational systems “along democratic lines,” he also sought more equal distribution of incomes — including a cap under which top-earning citizens couldn’t make more than 10 times the amount of those at the bottom.

Find me the “Democrat socialist” today who advocates nationalization of all major industries or capping incomes as Orwell proposed. With the minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour, a full-time worker makes around $15,000 a year. That would set the highest possible income at $150,000. Sorta puts Sen. Bernie Sanders’ idea to tax all income over $1 billion at 100% into perspective, doesn’t it?

And what did Orwell mean exactly by democratizing education?  The suppression of England’s thousands of private schools, as the state would take responsibility for the intellectual development of every student.

“It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education they deserve,” he
wrote.

We can be sure he would have known where to tell Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stick his voucher scheme, which, thanks to this month’s primary, is now very likely to pass in 2025.

In 1949, concerned about the very misinterpretation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that Myers offered in her speech, Orwell wrote a letter to the United Auto Workers in the U.S., clarifying things matter-of-factly: “My book is not intended as an attack on socialism.”

An actual reader of the novel would already know this.

“The Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past,” protagonist Winston Smith discovers.

And what was Orwell’s opinion of the bearded Satan himself, economist and labor organizer Karl Marx? We don’t have to guess.

“The most important part of Marx’s theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’,” he wrote for the UK Tribune, citing the Bible verse Matthew 6:21. “But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”

Perhaps that also explains why right-wingers today feel the need to keep the anti-Marxist hate alive.

These days it’s not enough to disagree over policy directions. No, your political opponents are enemies of the state who represent a fifth column intent on eroding from within all that’s precious in society. Channeling his best impression of Joe McCarthy, here’s how the almost un-stomachable Ted Cruz characterized recent anti-war demonstrations:

“Look at the sickness that has taken over the far Left, the angry, Israel-hating, America-hating, leftist communist idiots. And you know what? Those children are repeating the lies their professors have told
them. Those children are repeating the indoctrination because we’ve allowed our universities to be taken over by Cultural Marxists who hate our nation and want to tear it to the ground.”

Or as McCarthy intoned circa 1952: “One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.”

Cruz continued: “The forces targeting this country — they’re organized, they are incredibly well-funded, and they are committed. You notice these anti-Israel, anti-American, antisemitic protesters on college campuses; you notice how their tents all match? They are being paid for by a handful of gigantic Democrat donors that are the same donors that are funding Joe Biden and the same donors that are funding my opponent, Colin Allred.”

After boos from the audience inspired by the mention of Allred’s name subsided, Cruz said, “I’ve got to tell you, they have put a bull’s-eye on the state of Texas.”

Never mind that the magazine Wired summarily debunked the matching-tents conspiracy theory in a piece titled “No, a Shadowy Figure Is Not Buying Tents for Columbia Student Protesters.” Students simply bought the cheapest tents which were the top search-results on Google. Welcome to the product homogenization of late-stage capitalism.

Funny though that Cruz didn’t direct a mumbling word of criticism at the Christian nationalist billionaires who have kept the Republican Party of Texas afloat or who bankrolled his career in politics. Apparently, their passion is authentic “grassroots democracy” while the passion of progressives necessitates a conspiracy among wealthy liberal elites. That students might be genuinely horrified by the gruesome atrocities they’re witnessing in real-time — war crimes the US taxpayer is actively funding and complicit in — is taken for an outlandish hypothesis. No, it must be currency speculator and billionaire philanthropist George Soros who has put the “communist idiots” up to it and is pulling the strings behind the scenes, not unlike Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s novel.

“The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. His was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard — a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness… He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought…

“But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, and books, his
theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all of this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.”

But if one’s truly worried about thought control, as Myers claimed, why belong to a party dedicated to
banning controversial library books and forbidding classrooms from even mentioning Pulitzer Prize-winning historiography like The 1619 Project? If one truly cares about liberty, why sign onto a party platform which seeks to prosecute as murderers those who choose to terminate their own pregnancies? And if one truly values freedom of movement, why criminalize and terrorize those who travel across a border to look for work or ask for asylum?

I wholeheartedly agree we must oppose the “weaponization” of the federal government against our fellow citizens. But where were conservatives when progressives and libertarians tried to curtail the
National Security Agency’s authority to conduct mass surveillance on average Americans? Where were they when we were protesting militarized policing and catching hell for it? Are these not the sorts of issues that admirers of last century’s greatest critic of totalitarianism should find time for?

“If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon,” Orwell wrote of one Adolf Hitler, in a short 1940 review of Mein Kampf. “It is easy to say he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. … He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.”

Now does that sound like anyone we know? Or someone many purportedly freedom-loving Texas Republicans are eager to follow?

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This article appears in May 1-14, 2024.