What Ortega y Gasset and Orwell Both Foresaw

“Both Ortega and Orwell concluded that the Left was in trouble as a result of these developments, and their analyses and diagnoses pointed the way forward to the situation we have today in the West.”

In both the United States and the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century the working class has been betrayed by the Left. Millions of working-class people living in America’s “flyover country,” and millions living in the former industrial heartlands of Northern England, are feeling abandoned. Today’s Left—dominated by woke progressives obsessed with identity politics, social justice, climate change, and international humanitarianism—views the “rubes,” and their English counterparts the “little Englanders,” as being ignorant, narrow-minded nationalists blinded by racism and xenophobia. But the “rubes” and “little Englanders” are refusing to conform to the role that the Left’s ideologues have in mind for them: helpless pawns in the politics of international socialism and paternalistic interventionist universal humanitarianism. So the “rubes” and “little Englanders” rejected the message of the Left and found solace in supporting what is derided by the Left as the “populist” political appeals of former President Donald Trump and Brexit.

Despite calls for the Left to reconnect with working-class causes, there is no sign of this happening. The reasons for this go far beyond what Julian Benda called—in 1928—the “betrayal of the intellectuals.” Benda’s message—that the intellectual elite in the West has largely abandoned the disinterested pursuit of truth in favor of pursuing its own political philosophy and allowing this interest to corrupt its intellectual and moral values—remains as relevant today as in the late 1920s. But of far more significance today are the penetrating insights offered by José Ortega y Gasset and George Orwell on the betrayal of the working class by the middle-class socialist ideologues of the West and their well-meaning but politically naïve supporters.

Ortega—a Spanish academic philosopher—published his The Revolt of the Masses in 1930 and intended it as an exposé of the moral and intellectual degradation of a new kind of middle class, mass movement political activist. He used the term “mass man,” but it is better translated as “mass movement man.” Informed by his own liberal republican and democratic socialist values, Ortega concluded that the appeal and usefulness of political mass movements served to corrupt the values and ideals of the Left, just as much as had happened on the Right.