1985

 In his slightly tongue-in-cheek prophecy of the decade to come, 1985, Anthony Burgess (writing in 1978) accused George Orwell of getting the future wrong. "1984 is not going to be like that at all," he writes. He therefore offers his own bleakly comic view, in contrast, of what the future actually holds. Instead of a rapid descent into outright dictatorship organized around a cult of personality, Burgess appears to predict a gradual slide into pettifogging bureaucracy and self-righteous unionism. Instead of the 1980s being envisioned as a boot stamping on a human face forever, Burgess pictures it as a sort of endless wait at a DMV counter. And indeed, it must be said: his future is a fair extrapolation from some of the social trends most visible in Britain in the 1970s: rising inflation, depreciating currency, daily strikes and walk-outs in every major industry. 

The irony of the book, though, is that even as Burgess accuses Orwell of being mistaken in his prophecy, he appears to have been just as bad at guessing future trends. For the real 1985 would come to resemble Burgess's dystopia as little as it would Orwell's. Far from the trade unions acquiring ever greater power, they were crushed in Britain and the United States by a ruthless right-wing reaction. Elsewhere, Burgess conjures the phrase "right to work" as an expression of heroic individualism in a world dominated by closed shops, grievance politics, obligatory strikes, and ruinous wage-hikes—and he was right that the phrase would actually enter our politics; but it would not do so as a cry of protest against the hegemonic worldview, but as a cynical (Orwellian, really) slogan for a political movement that sought to bury the union movement even further, after it had already been mostly defeated. 

Burgess, then, seems to have been no better than Orwell was at predicting what the mid-1980s would actually look like in the democratic West. Perhaps both authors gave insufficient attention to the human capacity for backlash—the fact that instead of current trends continuing on in the same direction forever, people typically perceive and correct for them before it is too late: the problem is just, they are likely to correct too sharply, and veer off way too far in the other direction. The 1980s, after all, certainly solved Burgess's foreseen problems of inflation and excessive union power. They just accomplished this through triggering a massive recession at the start of the decade that sapped the workers' bargaining power, driving up unemployment, and otherwise curbing the influence of organized labor. As a result, wages stagnated, inequality shot up—but inflation at least returned to manageable levels.

Still, if Burgess seems to have completely missed the fact that the 1980s were going to be the decade of Thatcher and Reagan, rather than the likes of Michael Foot, he was not wrong in all of his predictions. In the essays that surround the dystopian fantasy at the heart of the book, Burgess occasionally speaks with the voice of genuine prophecy. Many of his best moments come when he allows himself to look beyond the merely annoying tendencies of modern social democracy, and contemplate the infinitely more disturbing scenario that Orwell—whatever else he got wrong—was at least willing to seriously entertain: namely, the possibility that the whole framework of liberal democracy could actually fall. 

Burgess, as we have seen, in the dystopian fictional portions of the book, is not greatly concerned with the specter of dictatorship and demagogy. He does not think Britain is ripe for it; and the real threat to individual liberty, as he sees it, is more likely to come from a trade union movement that perpetuates a spiral of inflationary expectations (the belief that inflation will continue leading to demands for still higher wages, leading to more inflation, etc.—or, as one worker in the book describes it: "I need the money, and what with prices shooting I need more all the time"), plus a government that taxes and spends without any real productive capacity to support it, steadily debauching the currency. But such a fear, as we have seen, is not really about the future—it was about Britain in 1978, when Burgess wrote it (much as Burgess accuses Orwell of actually writing about Britain in 1948, not 1984). The actual future, though, as we are experiencing it in 2023, almost fifty years later, seems to present us with a far more harrowing possibility. 

To be sure, we are having our own problem now with inflation and excessive government debt. Burgess on this limited subject sounds rather prescient, when one compares his prophecy to what actually happened around 2020 (when, let us recall, there was a Republican in the White House). Tell me, truly, does not Burgess's 1978 prophecy in this regard sound rather like what actually happened during the pandemic? "The Federal Reserve was printing too much money, desirous of quelling the panic by increasing—in fact, doubling—the cash flow. Too much cash in the United States. Twice the amount of cash chasing the same number of consumer goods. Stores closing down, their shelves empty, an awareness among the economically literate that inflation was spreading like a southern California fire." To be sure, the Fed had little choice but to step in to buttress demand at a time when the economy was virtually shutting down—and the results if they had not done so could have been far worse than what actually happened, for there are in fact even greater economic evils in this world than inflation. But the result that came did, it must be said, rather follow Burgess's script. 

But inflation and unemployment, insufficient supply and excess demand—these are all questions of economic management that our existing democratic institutions have actually proven themselves able to navigate rather successfully. The Fed has largely tamed the worst excesses of the post-pandemic inflation, just as central banks eventually curbed the steep 1970s-era inflation (albeit at great and unfairly distributed cost). Likewise, policymakers were able to end the pandemic recession (even if doing so created new problems to manage in turn). The far greater menace than any of these run-of-the-mill economic problems, therefore, is that we might lose the institutions we have used to such success to mitigate these problems—namely, the possibility that a demagogue might come along and try to call the very foundations of our system of democratic decision-making into question. And this, as we have seen, is a possibility to which Burgess devotes scant attention. 

Except, that is, for a handful of moments—and these, as I say, are the instances when he rises to the role of a genuine prophet. Take, for instance, Burgess's view of modern technology. For someone writing in 1978, he offers a remarkably prescient warning about government's capacity to acquire ever-increasing amounts of personal data on its citizens. He also saw clearly that there would be a strong commercial motive to invade people's privacy in this way and exploit the vast troves of data that can be harvested and collected in a computerized age. "[S]ome of the secret information was going to be leaked to commercial organizations," writes Burgess—sounding very much like contemporary digital privacy advocates—"The police easily get access to this kind of stored information." He acknowledges that a state can collect information about its citizens for fundamentally benign purposes; but then asks us to think what would happen if a dictator came to power, with all this knowledge at his fingertips, and all the power that came with it—a tyrant's dream!

But could such a dictator actually arise in countries pledged to democracy? Burgess thinks it is unlikely to happen in Britain (and he's been right so far—knock on wood). But, he acknowledges, America is another story. He refers approvingly to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, saying that "it shows how a tyranny can come about through the American democratic process, with a president American as apple pie, as they say—a kind of cracker-barrel Will Rogers type appealing to the philistine anti-intellectual core of the American electorate. Core? More than the core, the whole fruit except for the thin skin of liberalism. [...] Every repressive act justified out of the Old Testament and excused jokingly in good spittoon style." 

A country with Donald Trump as the leading GOP nominee and Mike Johnson as speaker of the House (men who want to install themselves as dictator and host a constitutional convention eviscerating the post-Reconstruction federal government, respectively), seems much more likely to enact this latter prophecy than it is to fulfill Burgess's other nightmare about trade unions and runaway inflation. 

As much as Burgess, therefore, like conservatives today, would like to convince us that the greatest danger to our personal freedom comes from the special pleading of aggrieved interest groups and self-righteous left-wing activists, they can at best only succeed in making these forces seem annoying (which they often are). They fail, however, to genuinely terrify us—which is perhaps why Burgess can only present his dystopia in the mode of dark comedy, rather than the genuine nightmare that Orwell was able to conjure. Pace Burgess, Orwell's earlier book hit closer to the mark: the real threat to individual liberty remains the obvious one—the one that it has always been: that a disaffected citizenry will tire of the burdens and obligations of preserving free institutions, and roll the dice by backing an authoritarian system instead that promises easy answers. 

With the dismal 2024 election looming and the all-too-realistic danger that Trump will emerge from it as the victor, it seems we are far more likely to soon be living in 1984, than in 1985.