In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote in 1948,George Orwell imagined the “Ministry of Truth” to be the central institution that Big Brother used to reinvent reality and make war on the recent past. Three quarters of a century later, Steve Benen, the Emmy award winning producer of the Rachel Maddow Show, revisits Nineteen Eighty-Four and sees the Republican party as a reincarnation of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In his eponymous new book, Benen argues that the raison d’etre of today’s GOP is to wage war on both reality and the recent past. Ontologically and historically, then, today’s Republican party has literally become Orwellian - a particularly chilling reality given that almost half of the American electorate will vote for Republican candidates in November.
Steve Benen is a producer on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The MaddowBlog. Benen's articles and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, Salon.com, and other publications. He's also been a guest on several radio and television programs, including NPR's Talk of the Nation and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. For his work on TRMS, Benen has received two Emmy Awards, and he's been nominated for three more.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
Episode 2160: Steve Benen on how the Republicans have become the Orwellian Party of Big Brother