Modern Socialists-Let Hypocrisy Be Thy Name
George Orwell’s brutal takedown of elite socialism still applies. Performative outrage and selective empathy don’t change the world—they insulate it.
Modern Socialists – Let Hypocrisy Be Thy Name
I’m guessing that not many, at least in this century, have read one of George Orwell’s best works. No, I’m not talking about 1984. I’m talking about The Road to Wigan Pier. I had to read it in college while taking a 19th-century history class. I didn’t think much about it at the time; to me, it was just another assigned reading I had to find a way to complete. Orwell—1984—that’s all I knew. People were beside themselves in that same year as the title of the book, underlining passages, reciting quotes, and looking for any sign that the apocalyptic predictions of Orwell were upon us.
“Orwell was right!”
“How did he know?”
Those were the things I heard as I made my way to class, still wondering what the hell I was doing there. I was a Melrose Park kid. The only reason I was in college at all was that my father insisted I go because, in his words:
“You’re too smart to make pizzas for a living, Mike. Get that sheepskin. Then, if you want to come back to the restaurant, it will be here. Just do me a favor and get that sheepskin.”
Like Orwell, I grew up in a middle-class family. We weren’t wealthy by any stretch, but through the combination of my father working eighteen hours a day, six days a week, we were solidly middle class. Dad made sure I (and my sister) went to private grade school and high school too, all by the sweat of his brow.
He also made me work at the restaurant. In high school, I worked forty-two hours a week, driving one hour there, then one hour home. He didn’t want to hear any excuses, either. Work. The work I did initially was the stuff usually reserved for the other employees. Cleaning grease traps was one of them. A mixture of slime, stench, and decaying food filled my nostrils as I dug my ungloved hands into the mixture. I had to sit next to it, shove my nose into it to make sure I got all the repulsive gunk into a bucket to throw into the grease container behind the restaurant. I think my hands still smell like whatever was in that trap.
I scrubbed floors, mopped, did dishes, and even went back with him in the middle of the night if the oven broke to fix the thermocouple. Again, one hour there, one hour home—only to get up for school the next day. I hated it at the time, railed against it when I was doing it, but like most things, I came to understand later how necessary it was.
I was a middle-class/working-class kid in a working-class neighborhood, living with working-class people. I’m proud of that. Still am.
Orwell did much the same thing. For those who don’t know, Orwell was an avowed socialist. In 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, he published what I believe to be his seminal work: The Road to Wigan Pier.
The front half of the book chronicles his travels through the miserable industrial towns of England, where the conditions made the grease trap I described earlier seem like a vacation spot in Galena. He communes with them, lives with them, eats with them—essentially becomes a member of the downtrodden class to get a clearer picture of who they are and how they live. He even adopts their dress, foregoing his “lower-middle-class life.” The one thing he cannot lose, much to his remorse, is his accent, which immediately identifies him as not one of the working class. He knows it, and they know it. Orwell laments that he’s stuck with it. The funny thing is, most of those he comes into contact with don’t really care.
If one wishes to truly understand working-class life before the calamity that was World War II, get the book. While you’re at it, read Down and Out in Paris and London as well, wherein the reader can journey with Orwell and experience true poverty in that long-ago time.
But that is not the end of the story.
The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is the part most skip. It’s Orwell’s scathing criticism of British attitudes toward socialism during the Nazi era. He rails against those who call themselves socialists, and one can actually hear the contempt in his words as they jump right off the page. The question is: Why would he attack those of his same political bent? Why would Orwell disavow those who so clearly supported socialism and the downtrodden?
As I worked my way through the second half of the book, the answer became perfectly clear.
George Orwell was disgusted by those who advocated for socialism but didn’t want to live among those socialism purported to help. In other words, Orwell saw much of the British middle class as little more than hypocrites—unwilling to embrace the living conditions or philosophy themselves, even as they continued to live their comfortable lives. Orwell lived among the poor. Those “others” did not.
Why? Because, said Orwell, “they stink.” They actually smelled bad, and the middle class—those with servants and polished fingernails—couldn’t stand to be around them. In today’s parlance, they talked a big game but wouldn’t put their money where their mouth was.
Here’s George Orwell:
“The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting…
...One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
“With no intention of forfeiting.” That’s the part that jumps out. Talk is nice, but action is better—and precious few are willing to act. It’s much easier to tilt at windmills than engage in battle. And “battle” is more than holding picket signs or arguing in seminar halls at Harvard or the University of Illinois.
What most of these so-called intellectual socialists forget is that it’s far easier to talk than to live the life. Birkenstocks and ponytailed men on Haight-Ashbury be damned.
Words are always easier than action.
Are climate “warriors” willing to live as the Amish do? To forego everything made from petroleum? To farm the land and churn their own butter? My guess is no. The dirt under their fingernails is anathema to their curated lives.
Are modern socialists prepared to live in government housing at the government’s whim? To double their taxes and have their lives regulated by the very bureaucrats they lionize? Again, my guess is not in this lifetime.
I recall not long ago so many of our elites railing against the ravages of capitalism—Bernie Sanders and the like—while selling books and buying homes across the country. Where are the Hollywood activists turning their multi-million dollar homes into housing for the downtrodden they claim to champion?
They should be subsidizing homes for each one of them—or better yet, disposing of their vast wealth to become them, the lavish dinner parties cast aside like so many dirty clothes.
I don’t begrudge anyone what they’ve earned. Earning is not a zero-sum game. I applaud those who’ve made it, including the Hollywood elite—especially those who donate a portion of their wealth to the less fortunate, even if it’s a fraction of what they could give if they truly meant it.
What one earns, one should keep.
But…
Do not lecture, foster, or incite revolution—do not advocate for socialism or any of its cousins—if you are not prepared to lose it all, as the Founders did when they created this nation. Their willingness was made clear in the final line of the Declaration of Independence.
There will always be radicals—those who crave chaos because it’s in their nature. But they are the minority.
It’s quite another thing to advocate radical policies from a safe bubble, never suffering the consequences. “Rules for thee, not for me” has become the operative philosophy of our time—just as it was for Orwell’s English middle class.
They fear reality, not theory. Theory exists only on the page.
George Orwell was right when he wrote:
“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”