Like most of you, I have found our current presidential candidates to be prime examples of some of the kinds of political speech that George Orwell strongly critiques in his essay. For example, from watching speeches from several of the Republican and Democratic candidates, I can definitely agree with him when he speaks about the vagueness of political speech and the meaningless words that are used. However, I disagree with him in the fact that political discourse can be made better through the use of the six rules that he pointed out. The reason I believe this is because in this political race we have seen several candidates who were not politicians and thus did not use political jargon, yet we still find their content to be very vague and barbaric. An example that jumps out to me on this subject is Donald Trump.
In an interview, Trump was asked about how he intended on making Mexico pay for the wall that he intended on building, and he responded by saying, “I will and the wall just got 10 feet taller, believe me. It just got 10 feet taller” (Trump, 2016, Breitbart). Obviously, this is a very vague answer and fails to give us any type of relevant answer at all. However, Trump seems to follow all of the rules that Orwell put in place to correct the collapse of the english language in politics. We have seen several other candidates take the same approach of simply dodging the question completely. I almost wonder if this new approach to political discourse gives us less information than what we are used to hearing from politicians in past years.
I do agree with Orwell when he states that language can be “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes” (Orwell, pg. 127). However, I disagree with the notion that his ideas are still relevant to modern day political dialogue. Using figures of speech in order to deceive or manipulate is not nearly as effective as it was during the time and culture that Orwell wrote his analysis in. I believe that today people have the ability to decipher what politicians are saying regardless of how they say it. Even though some political figures, like Trump, have adopted what Orwell advocated in his article, I think it is hard to argue that this has caused a remedy to the problems that Orwell cited. I believe that, if anything, this simplified use of language is found by most to be even more repulsive and barbaric.
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