But in one important respect, these commentators are missing something important. When it comes to language, Trump isn’t the kind of person Orwell was worried about. In fact the plain-speaking president represents something closer to Orwell’s imagined solution to a problem that consumed him, the use of public language to hide meaning. If you look at how Trump talks—and the similar rhetoric in Britain around Brexit, and the broader populist wind across Europe—it is proof that Orwell got some big things wrong when it comes to language’s ability to protect us from politicians who would rather have us not know the truth…
Orwell was confident that simple language itself would be a defense against much of what was wrong with politics. Clarity would make it near impossible for leaders to say stupid and dishonest things, or to fall into lock-step dogma, without realizing that they were doing so—and without exposing the speaker as a fraud or a villain. As he wrote in “Politics and the English Language”: “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.” His famous six rules for writers, which close the essay, are instructions on how to strip one’s words of such clutter.
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