Basically, people want to believe facts that align with their ideology and reject facts that do not. This keeps people focused and less distracted by doubts.
In 1984 this gets exploited in a regular manner.
I think this frankly is hard to understand until you're somewhere past 30.
It's hard to understand, when you're young, that basically everyone in the press is lying to you in little ways, even though they're 'mostly telling the truth' - that there is a huge game behind it.
I'm reminded of when E. Germany had to be re-integrated into the West, the problem was that the vocabulary relating to politics and democracy had been erased in the East. Several generations of people grew up without even thinking about various aspects of politics. There literally was no language for the W. Germans to use to re-introduce E. Germans to political dialogue.
You can erase democracy by suppressing language, and therefore by suppressing thought. It doesn't exist if nobody is thinking about it.
The idea is to enforce the rules through the daily rituals, language, constructs that people use - there's no need for facts or ideology then.
The beginning of this I think happens more or less out in the open with certain subjects now in 2020, when we see language and culture shifting - but it shifts slow enough that it's not noticed.
Go ahead and look at episodes of '30 Rock' - a brilliant, first rate, amazing production from literally just 10 years ago --> it's couldn't be made today, or rather, it would have to be 'heavily censored' today because so many of those jokes are just a little to un PC (jokes about women's pay, harassment in the workplace). But today, it wouldn't be 'network censorship' - it would be a kind of 'thought and behaviour censorship' right from the writers room and producers edict. When I look at '30 Rock' from a 2020 communications perspective I'm actually very, very concerned - the level of suppression that has slowly been sinking in is alarming.
1984 is very difficult to map directly on to US politics because liberal/neoliberal capture of the universities and mainstream journalism are kindof total the way that American conservatives allege, but also George Blair hoped that figures like Trotsky of the Red Army and Perez of the POUM would win out in the end
Orwell would not have been friends with the pepper Christian homeschooler, the glad-handing inside dealing Mar a Lago member, the little local lord like the area car dealership owner, the conspiracy theorist YouTuber, the Rad Trad anti Vatican II syncretist, those supremely Trumpist figures.
You kindof have to visit with George the man, his actions, and his times to understand his story. But that tends to muck up any chance to put him to use purely for your side.
(He was a socialist though, til the day he died, so he'd be voting Biden were he here in Wisconsin right now : P)
Not sure if that was sarcasm referring to labeling of Biden as socialist by Trump and co?
Because I doubt any real socialist would consider Biden a socialist.
On the other hand, despite the fact that my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek when I wrote it, such Debbie Wasserman Schultz haters as Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky have adopted the 'Vote for Biden and keep protesting' angle so who's to say how the real socialists are voting this year?
And I think you can infer Orwell's position enough from this essay itself - he is concerned about "the liberal tradition" being the last bulwark against worldwide fascism just one sentence before criticising England's liberal tradition for not being willing to actively stand up to evil because that tradition believes good will win out because good is good. Liberalism is hardly sufficient, but it's necessary.
(Another way of putting this: Orwell is not an accelerationist. You can see from this essay that he's quite concerned with the material conditions of the working class in a realistic way, and the idea that they should get worse so that the people will revolt is neither convincing nor appealing to him.)
I doubt Biden would last as President until Inauguration Day.
Thankfully, all signs are pointing to a DJT victory tomorrow! ;-)