This chapter discusses the abuse of language as symbolic warfare in the realm of politics. It considers a particular use of symbolic violence to humiliate and crush one’s political opponents in public settings with the backing of institutional power. The current populist US president Donald Trump is such a case. His manipulation of language and of the television cameras are the two main elements of the symbolic warfare he wages against anyone who challenges his authority. His use of disparagement and ridicule, his conman-like manipulation of the interactional context and his use of Twitter to address his supporters directly, not only discredit the very institutions that have brought him to power but are raising fundamental questions as to the future of presidential power and democracy in the United States. They have led to a constitutional crisis that is forcing Americans to rethink the very bases of their electoral system, the separation of powers of their government, and the undemocratic values promoted by their commander-in-chief.

This chapter argues that we should take seriously Orwell’s claim, in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, that ‘what I  have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art’. By examining how this ambition of yoking art to politics plays out in Orwell’s final novel, it places Nineteen Eighty-Four within the context of the literary problems and practices of Orwell’s precursors and contemporaries. First, it considers his relationship with literary modernism and its legacies, with particular reference to his analysis of the work of James Joyce and Henry Miller, for instance in the 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’. Next, it examines Nineteen Eighty-Four in the light of earlier dystopian and speculative fiction by William Morris, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Jack London, Katharine Burdekin, Storm Jameson, and others; it also considers the influence on Orwell of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Finally, it assesses depictions of writing and the politics of language within the novel, and how their treatment might relate to Orwell’s sense of his place within twentieth-century literature.