Red vs. Blue Is a Lie: Both Parties Are Selling You Orwell’s Nightmare

'I stumbled on a meme the other day, thank you Rick Merlin, that listed “10 lessons from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four,” and though I continuously write about it, I was still stopped me in my tracks. What struck me was how little it read like a warning from a dystopian past and how much it resembled a description of our present reality.... at least for those of us who keep our eyes open.

Orwell wrote 1984 as a cautionary tale, a story meant to sharpen our senses to the dangers of unchecked power. Yet here we are, decades later, living in a world where those same lessons feel less like fiction and more like the daily news cycle. What Orwell feared, we have normalized. And our two political parties, Republican and Democrat alike, have turned his novel into a manual.

The manipulation of truth is one of the starkest parallels. Orwell showed us how easily reality could be bent by those in power. Today, truth has become partisan, a commodity people purchase with loyalty rather than evidence. On Fox News, we’re told one version of reality: elections are stolen, immigrants are dangerous, the system is collapsing. On MSNBC, the opposite story is sold: democracy is always at risk, dissent is dangerous, the system is thriving. Truth is no longer a shared baseline but a battlefield where each side insists their narrative is the only one that matters. As Michiko Kakutani (2018) points out in The Death of Truth, once truth itself becomes flexible, manipulation becomes effortless. When a society can’t agree on what’s real, the door is wide open for those in power to write their own version of reality.

Part of how that manipulation takes hold is through language. Orwell’s invention of Newspeak was designed to show how limiting words limits thought. We live in a modern version of that, where political slogans and buzzwords, “woke,” “patriot,” “radical,” “fake news”, act like linguistic landmines. They’re not designed to clarify or invite discussion; they’re designed to shut conversations down. The second one of these labels is thrown at you, the debate is over. You’ve been dismissed, boxed, and stripped of nuance. George Lakoff (2004) argues in Don’t Think of an Elephant! that political language doesn’t just describe reality, it shapes it. If you can’t name injustice without being branded an extremist, how do you ever hope to challenge it?

Beyond language, surveillance has become one of the defining features of modern life. Orwell’s “Big Brother is watching you” once sounded like an exaggeration; now it feels like a tagline for our digital age. Every movement, every click, every conversation is tracked. We don’t just carry devices that monitor us, we pay for them, upgrade them, and brag about them. The government doesn’t even need to construct the panopticon anymore; Silicon Valley built it and sold it to us in shiny packaging. Edward Snowden’s revelations made it clear just how vast the surveillance state had become (Snowden, 2019), but the most disturbing part wasn’t the scale, it was the shrug with which the public received the news. Freedom hasn’t been stolen from us in the dead of night. We’ve traded it away willingly for convenience and entertainment.

All of this is made easier through fear. The Party in 1984 controlled not through love but through terror, and we see the same mechanism at work today. Every election cycle runs on fear. Both sides weaponize it with the same script: “If they win, America will be destroyed.” Republicans tell us to fear immigrants, socialism, and cultural decline. Democrats tell us to fear authoritarianism, climate denial, and the loss of democracy itself. The details differ, but the product is identical: a population paralyzed and obedient. Noam Chomsky (1999) has long argued that fear is the simplest way to manage populations, and our leaders know it. Fear keeps us voting, donating, and obeying without asking too many questions.

The result of this constant manipulation is a culture of conformity that crushes individuality. Try voicing the opinion that both parties are corrupt, and watch how quickly you are attacked. You’ll be labeled a traitor, a secret agent for the “other side,” or simply dismissed as naive or a Russian bot. Orwell’s characters Winston and Julia dared to love freely, and their relationship became an act of rebellion because it resisted the demand for conformity. Today, something as ordinary as dating across political lines is often viewed with suspicion. Our society has reached a point where individual thought and choice are punished, not celebrated.

Propaganda makes this conformity possible. Orwell’s slogans, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” were deliberately absurd, yet no more so than the slogans we accept today. We hear “enhanced interrogation” instead of torture, “job creators” instead of billionaires avoiding taxes, “peacekeeping” while bombs fall overseas. The repetition of phrases like “Make America Great Again” or “Build Back Better” doesn’t work because they mean something profound. They work because repetition itself creates belief. Walter Lippmann (1922) explained nearly a century ago that the steady drumbeat of propaganda doesn’t need to persuade, it only needs to drown out dissenting voices until people accept contradictions as truth.

What frightens me most, though, is not just obedience but the erosion of humanity itself. Orwell described totalitarianism as an attack on private loyalties and emotions, a demand not just for obedience but for domination of the soul. Look around today, and you’ll see how loyalty to political parties often outweighs loyalty to family, neighbors, or community. We are encouraged to view anyone who votes differently not simply as mistaken, but as an enemy. This erasure of our humanity is subtle, but it is everywhere.

And yet, as Orwell suggested, freedom always begins in thought. Winston’s quiet realization that “two plus two makes four” was an act of rebellion in a world that denied it. For us, rebellion begins the moment we say, “I don’t buy either side’s story.” That’s dangerous to both parties. Independent thought is poison to their system, and that is why both sides work so hard to keep us locked into their narratives. But it is also the first step toward reclaiming freedom.

At the heart of it all is Orwell’s most brutal lesson: power seeks power for its own sake. The Party in 1984 didn’t care about justice, progress, or truth. It cared only about expanding its power. Our politics is no different. Campaign slogans promise liberty, justice, equality, or security, but once the elections are over, the real work begins serving the donors, corporations, and lobbyists who keep the system running. Orwell (1949) put it simply: “The object of power is power.” Look at Washington, Sacramento, Ukiah and even at your own city hall and you’ll see the truth of it.

The greatest danger, though, isn’t surveillance or propaganda. It’s complacency. Orwell’s final warning was that people who ignore abuses of power will eventually accept them as normal. That’s exactly where we are. Endless wars, mass inequality, record corruption, and invasive surveillance have all become background noise. We scroll, swipe, and binge while democracy erodes around us. Timothy Snyder (2017) makes the point in On Tyranny that democracies rarely collapse in sudden coups. They die slowly, while citizens convince themselves it can’t happen here.

What makes all of this harder to swallow is that both parties are guilty. Republicans shout about freedom while stripping privacy and rights. Democrats shout about justice while abandoning the working class. Both answer to the same masters: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and defense contractors. The red team and the blue team keep us fighting each other so we never notice who is really pulling the strings.

That meme wasn’t just a list of lessons from a novel. It was a mirror. And what I saw reflected wasn’t pretty. We are already living inside Orwell’s nightmare, not as brutal, not as obvious, but every lesson is here if we’re willing to look. The first rebellion is thought. The second is conversation. That’s why I write things like this. Because if we remain complacent, if we keep buying into the slogans and the fear, one day we’ll wake up and realize 1984 isn’t just a book from high school, it’s the world we built by looking away.

References

• Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order.

• Kakutani, M. (2018). The Death of Truth.

• Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant!

• Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion.

• Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• Snowden, E. (2019). Permanent Record.

• Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.