The Banality of Autocracy

David Nurenberg

11 min readJun 30, 2020

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What Orwell got right, and wrong, about power in the Age of Trump

The prescience of George Orwell’s 1984 is near-universally acknowledged across America. In this 1948 dystopian sci-fi novel that exhaustively details the workings and philosophies of a terrifyingly successful totalitarian government of the future, we find an analogue for seemingly every act of deception, repression and cruelty perpetrated by modern…

David Nurenberg

Written by David Nurenberg

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Educator, consultant and author. His latest book is entitled, “What Does Injustice Have to Do With Me? Engaging Privileged White Students with Social Justice.”

More from David Nurenberg

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Jar Jar Binks and the crisis in Western Democracy

Boris Johnson’s sweeping victory in England made me think, hardly for the first time, that the only purpose in being a liberal/globalist…

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Jagged Red Pill — A review of Matrix: Resurrection

The Matrix Resurrections is the latest entry in the recent spate of flamboyantly self-aware re-treads of classic 80s, 90s (and now, it…

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For the past four years, liberals have struggled to understand Donald J. Trump’s consistently strong appeal to (if polls are accurate)…

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Why science is losing the war

It’s not surprising that the Trumpian “war on science” has gained so much traction, and that empirical, rational thought continues to lose…

3 min readMay 5, 2020

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