Refining Orwell A Bit / Something Orwell Didn't Consider

Here's a suggestion about Orwell:

In an important way, he didn't give us a clean case in 1984. The strongarm authoritarianism and brutality of the 1984-state in a sense prejudices the case against his intellectual political target. What we'd need, in order to get a better fix on the contemporary left, is a picture of an irrationalist, alethic relativist-or-nihilist faction that doesn't brutally wield total power. That's what we're on a trajectory toward right now, it seems. Though the Gulags and the mass killings and the secret police and suchlike lie just a bit further down that trajectory, I guess... But what if they didn't? What if we were only talking about the soft totalitarianism of shrieking and "shaming" (man, I have come to hate that word)?

   Also consider prosperity. 

   I've often wondered how much of liberal democracy's victory over Communist totalitarianism had to do with prosperity. If they'd been the prosperous ones and we had been impoverished, would liberal democracy have won? (Of course many would argue that that's the thing about central planning: it's never going to win out, in general and in the long run, against people making their own decisions. But let's bracket that point.)

   In a way, we're kind of running that experiment now: the rich seem to be mostly lining up on the side of the thought-police. There's an important sense in which blue America is more prosperous than red--more poverty, but also more wealth. 

   Anyway. I'm afraid I know the answer to these questions. Soft totalitarianism has already been more successful--and more rapidly--than I'd ever have guessed. Even if people come to their senses tomorrow--and, of course, they won't--I fear permanent damage has already been done. And even if we win this time, all it might take is a little bit more crazy next time. 

   Conservatives often note that one of progressivism's main errors is thinking that progress is inevitable. But a more serious error (shared by many liberals) is the idea that every move to the left is progress. This idea is, IMO, part of what keeps moderate lefties from seeing that they have more in common with the center-right than they do with the radical left.