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Americans of a certain age are well acquainted with the idea of totalitarianism—a regime or form of government that exercises total control over all aspects of life in society. We were bombarded with warnings about the totalitarian Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. George Orwell’s 1984 showed us a world where people could never escape the all-seeing eye of “Big Brother.” If they acted in any way the Party considered suspicious or subversive, they would be brainwashed or vaporized.

The United States was widely assumed to be the counterweight to these totalitarian systems, given the principles of liberalism—government limited by the individual rights of people with protections against the arbitrary exercise of power—that legitimized our constitutional system of government. Yet, Orwell himself was critical of Western groupthink during the Cold War, and the US had launched the long era of post-WWII imperialism and consumer-driven capitalism.