"The object of power is power"

In this time of plague, we've been subjected to myriad hot takes on George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Everything from mask mandates to social media removing content has been labeled "Orwellian". Of course, the people doing this are, not to put too fine a gloss on it, morons.

Meanwhile, we have this:

When House Republicans ousted Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, it spoke to the direction of the Republican Party in at least one specific way: what should happen to those who publicly break with former President Donald Trump? So, we surveyed the nation's self-identified Republicans to learn what they thought of the week's events. They still very much want their party to show loyalty to Mr. Trump and adhere to the idea that President Biden didn't legitimately win.

Their views on Cheney, in turn, now reflect those wishes.

Eighty percent of Republicans who'd heard about the vote agree with Cheney's removal — they feel she was off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she's wrong about the 2020 presidential election. To a third of them, and most particularly for those who place the highest importance on loyalty, Cheney's removal also shows "disloyalty will be punished."

For a more graphical view:

This is what would more accurately be called "Orwellian": "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Now, of course, the saving grace is that the percentage of those willing to call themselves "Republican" is shrinking. But it's still startling that 57% of a party's adherents cling to conspiracy theories about the November election, and consider the current US government to be illegitimate. 

These voters send people to Washington not to effect policies which will improve their lives, but to attain and maintain power for its own sake. Again, from Orwell:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

The modern Trumpist GOP has attained that purity of essence so lovingly described by O'Brien as he was preparing to torture Winston Smith. Its quest is for power solely for its own sake. Not to do good, but to oppress others in pursuit of maintaining that power. And if its members have any delusions that they wouldn't be next on the chopping block, well, these aren't smart people.

Of course, we have a few things going for us. For all its faults, the United States is a rambunctious, ornery country. For every Trumpist spitting venom at a New York Times journalist in a diner, there are two or three voters who will crawl over broken glass to make sure they don't succeed. November showed that. But Americans are also fickle, and tire easily. There are so many amusements and entertainments, not to mention just the grind of getting through the day.

Make no mistake, though: modern authoritarians are learning lessons from the failed ones of the past. They are dispensing with talk of doing good, uplifting the downtrodden, rectifying the nation. What they are offering is nothing but grievance, and hope to ride that wave of animus to eternal power. That things don't work like that—that their opponents have agency—is not the point. The damage they will do is. I have faith that it won't work, ultimately. But at what cost?

As Joe Biden repeats: We are at an inflection point, not only as a nation but as a world. What worked in the past won't work for the future. How we ensure decent lives for ourselves and those after us is the question which will dominate the coming years.