MOFA Is the New MAGA: George Orwell’s Political Views and the Political Compass

Last updated: October 21, 2026

George Orwell was a democratic socialist, and he said so in writing: in his 1946 essay “Why I Write”, he declared that every line of serious work he had written since 1936 was written, directly or indirectly, “against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” On a two-axis political compass, that puts him on the economic left and against authoritarian rule, a position he reached by fighting with a socialist militia in the Spanish Civil War, being shot through the throat, and then being hunted by the Communists on his own side. Both the right and the left quote him today, often with the parts that embarrass their own side left out.

The meme gets there in two panels. On the left, a gloomy cartoon young man in a beanie and hoodie, cigarette in his mouth, sits on the yellow libertarian-right square of a political compass and says to Orwell: “Thank you for changing my life.” On the right, a photo of Orwell sits squarely on the economic left half of the chart, red above, green below, and he replies: “I’m literally a democratic socialist.” The joke is the gap between who reads Orwell and what Orwell was, and the gap is easy to measure from his own books.

Four Words of Small Print: “As I Understand It”

Orwell’s most direct statement of his politics is the 1946 “Why I Write” line about writing against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, and its last four words matter as much as the rest.

The essay first appeared in the magazine Gangrel in summer 1946, according to the Orwell Foundation’s text. Orwell dates his politics precisely: the Spanish war and other events in 1936 to 1937 “turned the scale”, and after that, he says, he knew where he stood. He also admits his starting point is “a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice”, an admission that his politics began as a feeling before it became a theory. The qualifier “as I understand it” marks out a socialism of his own definition, and the rest of his work makes plain that it excluded the Soviet model. In a 1947 preface written for a Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (the English original is lost, so the surviving text is a back-translation), he says he became pro-socialist out of disgust at how poorer industrial workers were treated, more than from admiration for a planned society.

Barcelona, Winter 1936: Where the Socialism Got Real

Orwell’s politics were settled in Spain, where he fought with the POUM militia and then watched the Soviet-backed Communists in the Republican camp suppress it.

Homage to Catalonia (1938) opens in Barcelona in late December 1936. Orwell describes it as the first town he had seen “where the working class was in the saddle”, and says he recognised it immediately “as a state of affairs worth fighting for”. Asked what he was fighting for, he writes, he would have said “Common decency.”

A Fascist sniper shot him through the throat at Huesca, as he recalled in 1947 (the Orwell Foundation says the neck). Then, in mid-1937, as the Ukrainian preface puts it, the Communists gained control or partial control of the Republican government and began to hunt the people they called Trotskyists. Orwell and his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who fled to France with him on 23 June 1937, were among the hunted, and he wrote that they were lucky to get out of Spain alive. In the Ukrainian preface he presents Spain as the experience that showed him how Soviet-style propaganda worked, so his anti-Stalinism came from the left: he was a socialist whose comrades were jailed by Communists.

A Socialist Who Loved England and Read Hayek Carefully

Orwell’s economic programme was clearly left-wing, yet he defended patriotism and agreed with parts of Hayek, which is why both sides find quotable material in him.

In The Lion and the Unicorn, published on 19 February 1941 with the subtitle “Socialism and the English Genius”, Orwell sets out a six-point programme. It starts with nationalisation of “land, mines, railways, banks and major industries”, caps the highest tax-free income at ten times the lowest, and demands Dominion status for India with the right to secede. The same essay insists that “Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism” and calls England a family with the wrong members in control. Three years later he reviewed Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom for The Observer (9 April 1944). He granted that the negative part of Hayek’s thesis held “a great deal of truth”, then warned that a return to free competition would mean for most people “a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State”, as the libertarian magazine Reason quotes the review.

Where Orwell Lands on the Political Compass

On a political compass, Orwell sits on the economic left and the anti-authoritarian side of the social axis, roughly in the libertarian-left quadrant, with honest caveats about patriotism and the Cold War.

The site politicalcompass.org says its starting point was in 2001; its FAQ credits a journalist and an academic who found the single left-right line inadequate and added a second, social scale running from authoritarian to libertarian. On the economic axis, Orwell’s nationalisation programme and ten-to-one income cap put him well to the left. On the social axis, his writing opposes one-party rule of any colour. In his preface on the freedom of the press, written in 1945 and only published in 1972, he defined liberty as “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Three facts complicate the dot. He thought patriotism usually stronger than class hatred, he backed Britain’s war effort, and in 1949 he cooperated with a government propaganda office. A fair placement is lower left, with an asterisk that the meme leaves off. The compass is also a 21st-century tool laid over a 1940s mind, so any dot on it is an interpretation rather than a measurement.

Much of the confusion behind searches such as “was George Orwell a socialist” starts inside Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Party there rules in the name of “Ingsoc, or English Socialism”, as the novel’s appendix on Newspeak puts it. Orwell rejected that reading in 1949: according to the Open University, a statement he issued in July, a month after publication, made clear the novel attacked neither the Labour Party nor democratic socialism. Ingsoc is a warning about what a socialist label can be bent into once a single party owns it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Claimed by Everyone

Both left and right claim Orwell because Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four attack totalitarianism in general, and each side reads the attack as aimed at the other.

Orwell answered the first wave of claimants himself. On 16 June 1949, the month the novel was published, he wrote to an official of the United Automobile Workers that the novel was “NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party”, of which he called himself a supporter, as quoted from Bernard Crick’s biography by the Dublin Review of Books. The same review quotes an internal memo in which his publisher, Fred Warburg, reckoned the book “worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party.” In 1983 the editor Norman Podhoretz argued in Harper’s that Orwell would have been a neoconservative, as the Christian Science Monitor reported at the time. In 2023 the socialist magazine Jacobin answered with “How the Right Gets George Orwell Wrong”.

The word “Orwellian” moves the same way. In January 2017, three days after a White House adviser defended a disputed crowd count as “alternative facts”, Nineteen Eighty-Four reached number one on Amazon; the Boston Globe noted that commentators called her phrase Orwellian, while saying the cause of the surge was unclear. Four years later a Republican senator called a publisher’s decision to drop his book “Orwellian”, as the Associated Press reported. Orwell had a name for the habit. In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945) he described the partisan who judges actions by who does them and who has “a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about” his own side’s atrocities.

The List He Gave the Foreign Office

Orwell’s list is one of the most contested episodes of his politics: in 1949 he gave a British anti-communist propaganda unit the names of 38 writers and journalists he thought should not be trusted to work for it.

The facts are set out by the historian Timothy Garton Ash in “Orwell’s List” (New York Review of Books, 25 September 2003). On 2 May 1949, writing from his sickbed, Orwell sent Celia Kirwan of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department a list of people he judged to be crypto-communists, fellow travellers or inclined that way, who in his words “should not be trusted as propagandists.” Garton Ash concludes that Orwell was plainly a cold warrior but not a secret-police informer, found that nothing bad happened to the people on it he could check, and still calls the collaboration unsettling. The distinction he draws is between advising a propaganda office, which in 1949 answered to a Labour government, and informing to a secret police. Left-wing readers tend to skip this chapter, much as right-wing readers skip the nationalisation programme.

MOFA, MAGA and the Case for Keeping 1984 Fiction

“Make Orwell Fiction Again” turns the MAGA slogan into a demand that Nineteen Eighty-Four stay a novel, and Orwell’s own letter supports the optimism behind it.

The joke has a stranger cousin. “MAGA communism”, an online current that UnHerd describes as emerging on X in 2022, tries to recruit Trump voters for communism while rejecting identity politics and leaning pro-Russia. Whether that counts as Hegel’s Aufhebung or simply as confusion is a question for our post on Hegel and the dialectic. Orwell’s warning has a structural point that outlasts any one election: power that controls information tends to rewrite it, whoever holds it. That surveillance thread runs on into Foucault and Deleuze, which our post on the society of control follows. In the June 1949 letter to the autoworkers’ official, Orwell said he did not believe the society of his novel “necessarily will arrive”, only that something like it could, according to John Dale’s study of the letter, which leaves the outcome to readers.

For a case of tech power borrowing a philosopher it has not read closely, see how Thiel and Karp misread Nietzsche.