ABSTRACT
The threat of George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society seems more imminent today than when he first published his dystopian warnings. After a decade and a half of war abroad, war has come home mobilized through a culture of fear, surveillance, and violence. Underlying the rise of the authoritarian state and the forces that hide in the shadows is a politics indebted to promoting historical and social amnesia. Politics and power are now on the side of legally protected lawlessness, as is evident in state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech, and many constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. In terms reminiscent of Orwell, morality loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which individual misery is denounced as a moral failing. If neoliberal authoritarianism is to be challenged and overcome, it is crucial that various social movements unite to reclaim democracy as a central element of a radical imagination.
