In a backhanded appeal to Democrats hoping to brighten a rather grim, midterm election year, George Will recommends that the party's sizable and deeply sincere left wing rehabilitate its sprawling habit of unleashing obscure language on the rest of us. He sensibly observes that "normal people, who might want to toss anvils to progressives drowning in their jargon ['wokeness,' 'intersectionality,' 'BIPOC,' 'microaggression' and the like], should modify George Orwell’s axiom that 'the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.'"
Clearly, Mr. Orwell was wrong and Will is right. As the latter explains, in reality "the enemy of clarity is the scary sincerity of progressives who are politically inflamed about everything" — and have since attempted to douse the flames with foul-tasting, aqueous English.
This general insight on the relationship between sincerity and language was more succinctly expressed 130 years ago by Oscar Wilde, who divined that "all bad poetry is sincere." Likewise, progressives are trying to be politically poetic when they toss around their weird, neologistic inventions. (Not to be pedantic, but Wilde actually wrote that "all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." The shorter version, passed down to us through generations, is catchier, though, and thus has become the standard Wildeism.)
What I wish to alternatively touch on, however, is Orwell's ensuing observation, which was as misguided as his "insincerity" remark was mistaken. Lamented the author in his essay, "Politics and the English Language": "When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.... [The words quoted here immediately followed his 'insincerity' comment.] In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."
The difficulty with that passage lies in two of its phrases: "In [his] age," and its generally "bad" political atmosphere. Orwell cast his lamentation in the year of 1946. That one refuge of political scoundrels was "long words and exhausted idioms" was certainly nothing new in the postwar era, as Orwell surely understood. But what of singling out that age as somehow uniquely bad in politics, along with the citizenry's inescapable involvement in it?
Which is another way of asking, Just when has public politics not been nestled in a generally wretched atmosphere? Here at home, even a cursory glance at our history and its politics reveals an uninterrupted flow of — to further condense Orwell's summary — monumental troubles. Each successive era seemed indomitable in its agonies; some, possibly the end of America as its contemporaneous residents knew it:
The embryonic nation's near collapse contained in the raging "war" between Federalists and Anti-Federalists; the antebellum era's immense, sectional tensions; the bloody bridge from tensions to actual civil war; the contentious challenge and then unforgivable shame of Reconstruction; the beastly ferment of the Gilded Age and the Progressive movement's tortured and ultimately disappointing battle against it; the penetrating pain of the Great Depression; two hot global wars; a paranoid Cold War; the oppressive McCarthy era; the embattled age of civil rights; the ominous rise of Reaganism, then its beeline to seemingly endless culture wars — and Trumpism.
Plus a gazillion other agonies amid it all: racism in each of its hideously varied manifestations, second-class womanhood, wage suppression and their combined, inexorable results of widespread socioeconomic inequality and ever-narrowing concentrations of wealth — not to mention harrowing struggles over nativism, nationalism, and imperialism.
None of this is to say, or in any way imply, that today's obscenities of Trumpism and its ghastly dangers to American democracy are to be dismissed as a kind of ho-hum affair. Both present a nearly incomparable gauntlet. But such has been the history of America: just one damn thing after another.
Orwell was misguided in believing that his era — transatlantically — was especially afflicted.