Name: Free Ex on the Weekend: John J. Miller and Kyle Smith on George Orwell
Uploaded: 2026-06-12T19:11:00Z
Duration: 9 min 18 s
Description: Free Expression columnists John J. Miller and Kyle Smith reflect on the writings of George Orwell. Would Orwell still be a democratic socialist if he saw the downstream effects of socialism today?

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Free Expression columnists John J. Miller and Kyle Smith reflect on the writings of George Orwell. Would Orwell still be a democratic socialist if he saw the downstream effects of socialism today?

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260612/cdf1de9f-1f0f-4174-96ea-2deeb1b7735d/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Free Ex on the Weekend: John J. Miller and Kyle Smith on George Orwell

Hi, Kyle. It's great to see you. I really enjoyed your free expression column on George Orwell. This didn't have a news peg. Why did you wanna write about George Orwell?

The genesis was I was walking my dog and I often listen to books on tape when I'm walking the dog. Even though I'd read Orwell's "Selected Essays" before I came across the essay on antisemitism in Britain, and I thought, "Wow, this is just tremendously spot on accurate for Britain today." You could say all the same things about how Jews are treated in Britain today. Later in the book, there's an even more oppressioned essay, I think called "Writers and Leviathan." In this case, Leviathan is the ideology, right, which was at the time communism, often Stalinism, and today it's international wokeism.

I really like the nonfiction of George Orwell, the essays, the journalism, but of course, people forget if they even knew that Orwell was a nonfiction writer, that he was a journalist. He was a hack writer, just like you and me, Kyle. But then he went on to write these great books that a lot of people know. What do you like about the essays? What drew you to them as opposed to listening to "Animal Farm" again?

He wrote a tremendous amount of work, like almost a whole shelf of books, even though he was, what, 47 when he died, I think, or 48. And those two books, the two famous ones, came at the very end of his life and he was a total realist the whole way through. The journalism's great. I know you've read the Orwell biographies and there's some discussion about whether he exaggerates certain details. What I love about is the clarity of his prose. He was the foremost essayist in the language, I think, at the time he was alive, and maybe even today because he was so clear. There was no BS, there was no obfuscation, there was no jargon. It was as clear as it could possibly be, not just the essays, but also the reportage. "Homage to Catalonia," great book. The one about the coal miners, "Road to Wigan Pier," tremendous. He was just the great realist writer of his time, and I think he would be kind of stunned to know that he's known after his death as the great imaginary writer of political ideas of his time.

A word we often hear associated with Orwell is prophetic. You said in your piece that his nonfiction may be even more prophetic than his fiction. You believe that's true?

I've often thought, and many others have made the same point, that "Brave New World" is sort of a more accurate prophecy of where we are in the 21st century than the sort of cold gray Stalinism of 1984. He sort of foresaw a privation and sort of uniformity and none of that really came to pass. If anything, we're sort of more amusing ourselves to death. Huxley is the one who foresaw all this in "Brave New World," and there's this drug called soma that everyone's on, a mood altering drug that kind of, it's like a happy pill. We can certainly identify with happy pills today, the paradox of having too many choices, too many options, too easy a life is something that we have to think about more than the privation of the Stalin estate he foresaw in "1984." But if you just read the journalism, so often, just by looking at what was going on around him, he was telling us what would be happening 70, 80 years in the future. I think "Writers and Leviathan," every word of it about how writers kind of are not honest with the reader because, you know, their devotion to international socialism comes above all things, everything has to be tailored to that. It is incumbent on the writer, Orwell said, to separate his political ideology from his writing, because if you're not writing the truth as you see it, you could be wrong. If you're not writing the absolute truth as you see it unfiltered through any ideology, unfiltered through any party program, unfiltered through any desire to seem like you're on the right side of history, then you have no integrity as a writer and you're useless as a writer.

"Animal Farm," the text works pretty well with kids. I teach a course on George Orwell at Hillsdale College, and the students very often have already read "Animal Farm" when they show up to the course, and they will have read it as like seventh graders. It appealed to them as an animal story and, you know, the communism metaphor, the allegorical part, you know, that takes a teacher, especially nowadays, now that we're not in the Cold War, but it operates on both those levels.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of willingness or eagerness on the part of the culture, Hollywood and academia to just sort of, let's forget about the whole Stalinist period. Let's forget about the whole Bolsheviks experiment. It's not that it's necessarily about Stalinism, although it is, but that it's about total control of people who say they're acting in your interest and say they want everything to be equal and say they wanna share everything. No, they don't. Don't trust them. They want power for themselves, and they're going to use you to get as much power for themselves as they can. That is the evergreen message of "Animal Farm."

One of the really interesting aspects of Orwell, something I think about a lot, and you raised it in your column, is that everybody wants Orwell on his side. He is revered by people today on the right and on the left. Someone once said that he's every liberal's favorite conservative and every conservative's favorite liberal. Orwell is a unique figure of enduring interest.

What our friends on the left always like to point out is that he wrote something like, "Every word I've ever written in the last 20 years has been in favor of Democratic socialism." That's fine, but if you read "The Road to Wigan Pier," you'll see that the poor had basically nothing going for them at the time. And right around the time he died, Britain was building this huge welfare state that basically gave to the underclass everything he could have dreamed. You know, free healthcare and handouts of the amounts to minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and all these things that he would've loved to have seen in his lifetime. The critical question for Orwell admirers is, you know, looking at the housing estates of Britain today, where you can hardly find a person with a job, much less a job working in a coal mine, the worst possible employment, which was the kind of thing he was drawn to. If Orwell saw that that was the downstream results of the socialist turn in Britain, he was tremendously against any kind of system or apparatus that would result in people not working, not actualizing themselves. There's literally millions of people, you know, men of working age, men between 18 and 50, prime working years. Millions and millions of people in both Britain and America who weren't even doing anything to contribute to the economy. I think Orwell as a sort of cultural conservative, you might say, an economic liberal and a cultural conservative, I think he would be completely baffled and outraged by that. And that would be a good example of how, you know, the sort of economic social justice system that he badly wanted, had cultural reverberations that he perhaps would not have liked and would not have anticipated. How do your students react to him? What do they think of Orwell?

Well, one observation is, a lot of students come in with some familiarity. Many of them already have read "Animal Farm" and/or "1984," so they come in with some ideas. What they have not done is read any of the essays or the nonfiction. They're almost completely unfamiliar with it, and I love introducing that to them, because that's really some of his best work. And you mentioned in your free expression column, you mentioned his essay "Politics and the English Language," which I make sure, not only in this Orwell class, but in some of my other writing courses, nobody gets out of a course with me, virtually no course with me, without reading that piece because it is so important and it's so full of just good general writing advice, but then also lessons about propaganda and how to avoid it and not to succumb to it and sort of the tricky ways in which that can work against speaking the truth, if you're not in control of your own language. We have a good time thinking about George Orwell and his legacy. So let's wrap up with this. If someone's gonna read one work of nonfiction, one essay by George Orwell, what do you recommend? I'll go first and I'll say "Politics and the English Language."

"Road to Wigan Pier" is so great because he went and lived with these coal miners. The way the life of the working person has changed in the last 80, 90 years, it's just extraordinary. These guys were completely covered with coal dust. They would just wash their face and hands at night. They didn't have bathtubs. Go right back to work the next day. And of course, they're ingesting tremendous amounts of coal dust. The average age, you know, of death is probably in the forties at this point. When people think about the plight of the working class, the working class has it so much better today than they did in previous eras that that book will knock you for a loop, I think.