Culture

The series features a Democratic presidential administration led by President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, and his loyal White House staff negotiating political challenges with character, competence and a fair bit of humor.

It sparked cultural commentary long after it ceased its original run in 2005.

In 2016, The Guardian’s Brian Moylan asserted that the “The West Wing” was appealing because it portrayed “a world where the political system works. It reminds us of a time, not too long ago, when people in political office took their jobs very seriously and wanted to actually govern this country rather than settle scores and appeal to their respective bases.”

In 2025, Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh mused that “The West Wing” might be dismissed by younger audiences as a “form of science fiction” or lauded by the demographic currently watching “Jed Bartlet fancams scored to Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’” on TikTok.

Audiences have been comfort-streaming the “The West Wing” since Trump’s first term. Interest in the series spiked after Trump’s election in 2016, and it served as an escape from the contentious 2020 campaign.

When the cast reunited at the 2024 Emmy awards, the Daily Beast’s Catherine L. Hensley remarked that the series’ “sense of optimism about how American government actually functions … rang hollow, almost like watching a show from another planet.”

Nonetheless, Collider’s Rachel LaBonte hailed its Netflix return in late 2025 as a “balm for these confusing times.”

“The West Wing’s” transition from broadcast television behemoth to “bittersweet comfort watch” in today’s streaming era reveals a lot about how much our media and political landscapes have changed in the past 25 years.

As professors of media studies and political communication, we study the fracturing of our media and political environments.

The shifting appeal of “The West Wing” during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026? Or does the new political reality demand engagement with the seamier side of politics?

‘The West Wing’s’ optimistic big tent

“The West Wing” premiered on NBC in the fall of 1999, blending political intrigue with workplace drama in a formula audiences found irresistible. The show surged in viewership in its second and third seasons, as it imagined responses from a Democratic administration to the values and ideology of the newly installed Republican President George W. Bush.

But the series was undergirded by an ethic of political cooperation, reinforcing the idea that, according to Walsh, “we’re all a lot more aligned than we realize.” In 2020, Sheen observed in an interview that writer “Aaron Sorkin never trashed the opposition,” choosing instead to depict “people with differences of opinion trying to serve.”

In 2019, The New York Times observed that the “The West Wing” presented “opposition Republicans, for the most part, as equally honorable,” and noted that the show earned fan mail from viewers across the political spectrum.

At its height of popularity, episodes of “The West Wing” garnered 25 million viewers. Such numbers are reserved today only for live, mass culture events like Sunday night football.

Of course, “The West Wing” aired in a radically different television environment from today.

Despite competition from cable, that era’s free, over-the-airwaves broadcasters like NBC accounted for roughly half of all television viewing in the 2001-02 season. Currently, they account for only about 20%.

Gone are the days of television’s ability to create the “big tents” of diverse audiences. Instead, since “The West Wing’s” original airing, television gathers smaller segments of viewers based on political ideology and ultraspecific demographic markers.

Darker, more polarized media environment

The fracturing of the television audience parallels the schisms in America’s political culture, with viewers and voters increasingly sheltering in partisan echo chambers. Taylor Sheridan has replaced Sorkin as this decade’s showrunner, pumping out conservatively aligned hits such as “Yellowstone” and “Landman.”

Liberals, conversely, now see “West Wing” alumni recast in dystopian critiques of contemporary conservatism. Bradley Whitford morphed from President Bartlet’s political strategist to a calculating racist in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” and a commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale’s” misogynist army.

Allison Janney, who played “The West Wing’s” earnest and scrupulous press secretary, is now a duplicitous and potentially treasonous U.S. president in “The Diplomat,” whose creator in fact got her start on “The West Wing.”

Even Sheen has been demoted from serving as America’s favorite fictional president to playing J. Edgar Hoover in the film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” whom Sheen described as “a wretched man” and “one of the worst villains imaginable.”

Television as equipment for living

Philosopher Kenneth Burke argued that stories function as “equipment for living.” Novels, films, songs, video games and television series are important because they not only reveal our cultural predilections, they shape them, providing us with strategies for navigating the world around us.

Films and series like “Get Out,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Diplomat” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” urge audiences to confront the racism and sexism ever-present in media and politics. That includes, as some scholars and viewers have noted, the often casual misogyny and second-string roles for some women and Black men in “The West Wing.”

As U.S. citizens protest authoritarianism in the streets from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, a comfort binge of a series in which the White House press secretary, as Vanity Fair said, “dorkily performs ‘The Jackal’ and doesn’t dream of restricting West Wing access – even on the administration’s worst press days” is appealing.

But indulging an appetite for what one critic has called “junk-food nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed” may leave audience members less equipped to build the healthy democracy for which the characters on “The West Wing” always strived. Or it may invigorate them.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University and Nick Marx, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans often viewed their country as an heir to the great civilizations of the past. The tales of ancient Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels became a source of fascination to Americans, though in different ways.

In the slaveholding South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African Americans, biblical Egypt served as a symbol of bondage and liberation.

As a historian, I study how 19th-century Americans – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used ancient Egypt to debate questions of race, civilization and national identity. My research traces how a distorted image of ancient Egypt shaped competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided nation.

Egypt inspires the pro-slavery South

In 1819, when lawyer John Overton, military officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson founded a city in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the ancient Egyptian capital.

While promoting the new city, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran alongside it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”

“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.

In the region’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, saw the promise of an agricultural empire built on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”

There was a reason pro-slavery businessmen and thinkers were energized by the prospect of an American Egypt: Many Southern planters imagined themselves as guardians of a hierarchical and aristocratic system, one grounded in landownership, tradition and honor. As Alabama newspaper editor William Falconer put it, he and his fellow white Southerners belonged to a race that “had established law, order and government over the earth.”

To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a great hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a special legitimacy. And just like the pharaohs, the white elites of the South saw themselves as the stewards of a prosperous society sustained by enslaved labor.

Leading pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina lawyer and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia lawyer and politician Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt as an example to follow.

“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”

A distorted view of history

But their view of history didn’t exactly square with reality. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt, but most slaves had been originally captured as prisoners of war.

The country never developed a system of slavery comparable to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude was neither race-based nor tied to a plantation economy. The mistaken notion that Egypt’s great monuments were built by slaves largely stems from ancient authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, popular culture – especially Hollywood epics – would continue to advance this misconception.

Nonetheless, 19th-century Southern intellectuals drew on this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an ancient and divinely sanctioned institution.

Even after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, nostalgia for these myths of ancient Egypt endured. In the 1870s, former Confederate officer Edward Fontaine noted how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”

Turning Egypt white

But to claim their place among the world’s great civilizations, Southerners had to reconcile a troubling fact: Egypt was located in Africa, the ancestral land of those enslaved in the U.S.

In response, an intellectual movement called the American School of Ethnology – which promoted the idea that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – set out to “whiten” Egypt.

In a series of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization dominated by whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as proof of the greatness that a slave society could achieve. And they also promoted a scientifically discredited theory called “polygenesis,” which argued that Black people did not descend from the Bible’s Adam, but from some other source.

Richard Colfax, the author of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Most mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German study of Egyptian skulls, to reinforce this view. Writing in the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, he explained how the German study had concluded that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton’s “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1844 study of Egyptian skulls, reinforced this view. He argued that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, noted the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, Morton established “the Negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Physician Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and physician and propagandist John H. Van Evrie formed an effective triumvirate: Through press releases and public lectures featuring the skulls of mummies, they turned Egyptology into a tool of pro-slavery propaganda.

“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, adding that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”

Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to both “prove” Black inferiority and advance the idea that their beloved African civilization was populated by a white Egyptian elite.

“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”

Denouncing America’s pharaohs

This distorted vision of Egypt, however, wasn’t the only one to take hold in the U.S., and abolitionists saw this history through a decidedly different lens.

In the Bible, Egypt occupies a central place, mentioned repeatedly as a land of refuge – notably for Joseph – but also as a nation of idolatry and as the cradle of slavery.

The episode of the Exodus is perhaps the most famous reference. The Hebrews, enslaved under an oppressive pharaoh, are freed by Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical image of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply shaped 19th-century moral and political debates: For many abolitionists, it represented the ultimate symbol of tyranny and human oppression.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Black people could be heard singing in front of the White House, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”

Black Americans seized upon this biblical parallel. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a contemporary pharaoh, with Moses still the prophet of liberation.

African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth also invoked Egypt as a tool of emancipation.

“In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that the same principle lives in us.”

Yet the South’s infatuation with Egypt shows how antiquity can always be recast to serve the powerful. And it’s a reminder that the past is far from neutral terrain – that there is rarely, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over history and memory.

This article has been updated to correctly attribute Samuel George Morton as the author of “Crania Aegyptiaca,” not as the author of the Charleston Medical Journal article. Quoted texts from Phillis Wheatley and William Falconer have also been slightly amended for accuracy.

Charles Vanthournout, Ph.D. Student in Ancient History, Université de Lorraine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Jan. 8, 2026, the day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross killed Minneapolis resident Renée Good on Portland Avenue, an anonymous post appeared on Reddit that featured an uncredited text clearly adapted from the lyrics of a Depression-era protest song from Appalachia, “Which Side Are You On?” The Reddit text criticized the recent federal presence in Minnesota and implored Minnesotans to take a stand.

In our town of Minneapolis,
There’s no neutrals here at home.
You’re either marching in the streets
or you kill for Kristi Noem
Which side are you on,
Oh which side are you on?
Which side are you on,
Oh which side are you on?
ICE is a bunch of killers
who hide behind a mask.
How do they get away with this?
That’s what you have to ask.
Which side are you on …

For centuries, songs have served as vehicles for expressing community responses to sociopolitical crises, whether government repression or corporate exploitation. “Which Side Are You On?” resonated with Minnesotans, in part because it has been recorded by numerous artists over the decades.

The song dates back to another societal struggle that occurred in another part of the United States during another crisis moment in American history. “Which Side Are You On?” has consoled and empowered countless people for generations during struggles in red as well as blue states. It has also inspired people to write new protest songs in the face of new crises.

Birth of a protest anthem

“Which Side Are You On?” was composed in 1931, a woman’s spontaneous response to a coal company’s effort to prevent miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, from joining the United Mine Workers of America. Those miners hoped the labor union would improve their working conditions and overturn imposed reductions to their wages.

In support of the coal company, sheriff J. H. Blair and armed deputies broke into the house of union organizer Sam Reece to apprehend him and locate evidence of union activity. Reece was in hiding elsewhere, but his wife, Florence, and their children were present. After ransacking the house, the sheriff and deputies left.

Florence tore a page out of a calendar and jotted down lyrics for an impromptu song, which she recalled setting to the melody of a Baptist hymn “I’m gonna land on the shore.” Others have observed that the melody in Florence’s song was similar to that of the traditional British ballad “Jack Monroe,” which features the haunting refrain “Lay the Lily Low.”

“Which Side Are You On?” channeled Florence’s reaction to that traumatic experience. Throughout the 1930s, she and others sang the song during labor strikes in the Appalachian coalfields, and the lyrics were included in union songbooks. Then, in 1941, the Almanac Singers, a folk supergroup featuring Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, recorded the song, and it reached many people beyond Appalachia.

Since then, a range of musicians – including Charlie Byrd; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Dropkick Murphys; Natalie Merchant; Ani DiFranco; and the Kronos Quartet – performed “Which Side Are You On?” in concert settings and for recordings. A solo live performance with a concert audience joining the chorus was a focal point of Seeger’s “Greatest Hits” album in 1967.

The Academy Award-winning documentary film “Harlan County U.S.A.” (1976) included a clip of Florence Reece singing her song during a 1973 strike. “Which Side Are You On?” was translated into other languages – a testament to its universal theme of encouraging solidarity to people confronting authoritarian power.

Protest songs of the modern era

While the American protest song tradition can be traced back to the origins of the nation, “Which Side Are You On?” served as a prototype for the modern-era protest song because of its lyrical directness. Many memorable, risk-taking protest songs were composed in the wake of, and in the spirit of, “Which Side Are You On?”

Noteworthy are numerous protest classics in the folk vein, epitomized by a sizable part of Guthrie’s repertoire, by early Bob Dylan songs like “Masters of War” (1963), “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964) and “Only A Pawn in Their Game” (1964), and by Phil Ochs’ mid-1960s songs of political critique, such as “Here’s to the State of Mississippi” (1965).

But protest songs have hailed from all music genres. Rock and rhythm and blues, for instance, have spawned many iconic recordings of protest music: Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (1964), Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (1966), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (1969), Edwin Starr’s “War” (1970) and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio” (1970) among many others.

Blues, country, reggae and hip-hop have spawned broadly inspirational protest songs, and jazz too has yielded classic protest recordings, such as Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” (1939), popularized by Billie Holiday, and Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 recording of the jazz-poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Indeed, there are so many enduring contributions to the American protest song canon that a list like Rolling Stone’s recent “100 Best Protest Songs of All Time” is only the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of the genre, effective protest songs retain their power to move and motivate people today despite having been composed in response to past situations or circumstances. And protest songs from the past are often adapted to help people more effectively respond to the crisis of the moment.

Songs for this moment

“Which Side Are You On?” was sung – and its theme invoked – in Minnesota throughout January 2026. On Jan. 24, shortly after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey referred to the song’s title during a public address to his constituents: “Stand up for America. Recognize that your children will ask you what side you were on.” That same day, the grassroots organization 50501: Minnesota posted online an appeal to those in power: “[E]very politician and person in uniform must ask themselves one question – which side are you on?”

The next day, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz acknowledged divisions in the U.S. during a televised briefing, urging citizens in his state and across the nation to consider the choice before them: “I’ve got a question for all of you. What side do you want to be on?”

People protesting ICE and Customs and Border Protection actions in Minnesota and elsewhere have been singing “Which Side Are You On?” and other well-known protest songs, but musicians have also been writing new protest songs about the crisis. On Jan. 8, the Dropkick Murphys posted on social media a clip of “Citizen I.C.E.,” a revamped version of the group’s 2005 song “Citizen C.I.A.,” augmented by video of the Jan. 7 fatal shooting of Renée Good. On Jan. 27, British musician Billy Bragg released “City of Heroes,” which he composed in tribute to the Minneapolis protesters.

Following suit was Bruce Springsteen, a longtime champion of the protest song legacy. On Jan. 28, Springsteen released online his newly composed and recorded “Streets of Minneapolis.” Millions of people around the world heard the song and saw its accompanying video.

On Jan. 30, Springsteen made a surprise appearance at the Minneapolis club First Avenue, performing his new song at the “Defend Minnesota” benefit concert, organized by musician Tom Morello to raise funds for the families of Good and Pretti.

Making a difference

On the day Pretti was shot dead, hundreds of Minneapolis protesters attended a special service at Minneapolis’ Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. Pastor Elizabeth MacAuley, in a televised interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, reflected on the role of song in helping people cope: “It’s been a time when it is pretty tempting to feel so disempowered. … [T]he singing resistance movement … brought out the hope and the grief and the rage and the beauty.”

Cooper asked: “Do you think song makes a difference?” MacAuley replied: “I know song makes a difference.”

Ted Olson, Professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Studies, East Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They cautioned that strange foreigners – the Spaniards – had invaded the land and posed a grave threat. The emissaries requested an audience with the Tarascan ruler, known as the Cazonci, King Zuanga. But Zuanga had recently died, most likely from smallpox brought by the Spaniards.

Relations between the two empires had long been tense. They had clashed on the western frontier since 1476, fighting major battles and fortifying their borders. The Tarascans viewed the Aztecs as deceitful and dangerous – a threat to their very existence.

So, when the emissaries arrived to speak with a king who was already dead, they were sacrificed and granted audience with him in the afterlife. In that moment, the fate of the Aztecs was sealed in blood.

The Aztec empire did not fall because it lacked capability. It collapsed because it accumulated too many adversaries who resented its dominance. This is a historical episode the US president, Donald Trump, should take notice of as his rift with traditional US allies deepens.

Carl von Clausewitz and other philosophers of war have distinguished the concepts of force and power in relation to statecraft. In the broadest sense, power is ideological capital, predicated on military strength and influence in the global political sphere. In contrast, force is the exertion of military might to coerce other nations to your political will.

While power can be sustained through a strong economy, alliances and moral influence, force is expended. It drains resources and can erode internal political capital as well as global influence if it is used in a way that is perceived as arrogant or imperialistic.

The Aztec empire formed in 1428 as a triple alliance between the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan eventually dominating the political structure. The empire exerted force through seasonal military campaigns and balanced this with a power dynamic of sacrificial display, threat, tribute and a culture of racial superiority.

In both its use of force and power, the Aztec empire was coercive and depended on fear to rule. Those subjugated by the empire, and those engaged in what seemed perpetual war, held great animosity and distrust of the Aztecs. The empire was thus built on conquered people and enemies waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow their overlords.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who ultimately brought large parts of what is now Mexico under the rule of Spain, exploited this hostility. He forged alliances with Tlaxcala and other former Aztec subjects, augmenting his small Spanish force with thousands of indigenous warriors.

Cortés led this Spanish-indigenous force against the Aztecs and besieged them in Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs had only one hope: to persuade the other great power in Mexico, the Tarascan empire to the west, to join forces with them. Their first emissaries met an ill fate. So, they tried again.

In 1521, Aztec envoys arrived once more in Tzintzuntzan and this time met with the new lord, Tangáxuan II. They brought captured steel weapons, a crossbow and armour to demonstrate the military threat they faced.

The Tarascan king paid attention. He sent an exploratory mission to the frontier to determine whether this was Aztec trickery or truth. As they arrived at the frontier, they met a group of Chichimecs – semi-nomadic warrior people who often worked for empires to patrol borders.

When told the mission was heading to Tenochtitlan to scout the situation, the Chichimecs replied that they were too late. It was only a city of death now, and they were on their way to the Tarascan king to offer their services. Tangáxuan submitted to the Spanish as a tributary kingdom the following year before being burned to death in 1530 by Spaniards trying to find where he had hidden gold.

Had the Tarascans maintained normal political relations with the Aztecs, they might have investigated the report of the first emissaries. One can imagine how history would be different if, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 40,000 Tarascan warriors – renowned archers – had descended from the mountains to the west. It is unlikely that Cortés and his army could have prevailed.

American foreign policy

The failings of the Aztec empire were not due to a lack of courage or military prowess. During their battles with the Spanish, the Aztecs repeatedly demonstrated adaptability, learning how to fight against horses and cannon-laden ships.

The failing was a fundamental flaw in the political strategy of the empire – it was built on coercion and fear, leaving a ready force to challenge its authority when it was most vulnerable.

The foreign policy of the US since 2025, when Trump entered office for his second term, has emulated this model. Recently, the Trump administration has been projecting coercive power to support its ambitions for wealth, notoriety and to project American exceptionalism and manifest superiority.

This has manifested in threats or the exercise of limited force, such as tariffs or military attacks in Iran, Syria, Nigeria and Venezuela. Increasingly, other nations are challenging the effectiveness of this power. Colombia, Panama, Mexico and Canada, for example, have largely ignored the threat of coercive power.

As Trump uses American power to demand Greenland, his threats are becoming more feeble. Nato nations are abiding by their longstanding pact with economic and military resolve, with their leaders saying they will not give in to Trump’s pressure. The US is being pushed towards a position where it will have to switch from coercive power to coercive force.

If this course persists, military engagements, animosity from neighbours and vulnerabilities arising from the strength of other militaries, economic disruptions and environmental catastrophes may well leave the world’s most powerful nation exposed with no allies.

Jay Silverstein, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Forensics, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today, however, a different feature – which as recently as 2019, some critics dismissed as “obsolete” – is getting more attention: its vision of a world divided into three spheres, controlled by autocratic governments that constantly form and then break alliances.

In 2022, Vladimir Putin initiated Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine. This year began with the US mounting a raid on Venezuela and snatching its president, while Donald Trump speculated about US actions against various other countries in Latin America and Greenland. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping regularly repeats China’s intention to “reunify” with Taiwan – by force if necessary.

“Orwell-as-prophet” commentators began showing more interest in the superstate idea early in the decade, often leading with references to Putin’s imperial ambitions. This trend became more pronounced when Trump’s second term began.

Last year, American historian Alfred McCoy led with a tripolar reference in his Foreign Policy essay: “Is 2025 the New 1984?” A Bloomberg report on the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska last August was headlined: “It Looks Like a Trump-Putin-Xi World, But It’s Really Orwell’s”. The article described Nineteen Eighty-Four’s fictional model of global affairs as “prophetic”.

Many observers now see Big Brother-like leaders wielding power in Washington, as well as in Moscow and Beijing. In her first essay of 2026, Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic that: “Orwell’s world is fiction, but some want it to become reality.”

The American journalist and historian noted a dangerous desire of some for “an Asia dominated by China, a Europe dominated by Russia, and a Western Hemisphere dominated by the United States”. Social media is awash with comments and maps in the same vein.

Orwell’s influences

Analysts have claimed that elements of Orwell’s portrayal of politics inside Oceania paralleled various parts of dystopian novels written before Nineteen Eighty-Four. They cite, in particular, the potential influence of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) – works Orwell discussed in a 1940 essay.

Then there’s Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921), which Orwell wrote about in 1946, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), which he wrote about in 1941. Both inspired him with their criticism of the real Soviet Union.

Could these or other utopian and dystopian texts – such as Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), and Noël Coward’s play Peace in Our Time (1946) – have given him ideas about future geopolitics?

In fact, most of the works mentioned downplay or ignore international issues. Koestler focuses on one unnamed totalitarian country, Zamyatin and Huxley on a single world-state, London and Lewis on an America transformed by a domestic tyrannical movement, and Coward a Britain conquered by Hitler.

Two other novels provide partial precedents. The first is The War in the Air (1908) by H.G. Wells, an author Orwell read throughout his life. It has a tripolar side, depicting a war between Germany, the US and Britain, and a Chinese and Japanese force. The second is Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine).

Orwell never referred to Swastika Night in any publication, and his most prominent biographer, D.J. Taylor, has claimed there is no definitive evidence that he read it. However, as it was a Left Book Club selection and he was a Left Book Club author, Orwell would at least have known about it. The novel describes a world divided into two rival camps, not three, but portrays allies becoming rivals. The competing superstates are Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, who were on the same side when the book was written.

In his own words

The most satisfying place to look for inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s geopolitical vision, though, is in Orwell’s own experiences and non-fiction reading. Before the 1940s, Orwell spent a lot of time learning and writing critically about three oppressive systems: capitalism, fascism and Soviet communism.

In terms of capitalism, working as a colonial police officer in Burma in the 1920s left him disgusted with what he called the “dirty work of empire”. Living in England later led him to write works on class injustices such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

In terms of fascism, he wrote scathingly about Hitler and Franco. Orwell was also appalled by accounts of repression under Stalin. His time fighting in Spain reinforced his dark view of Moscow and he saw erstwhile allies become arch-enemies as the anti-Franco coalition broke down, and the Soviets began treating groups that had been part of it as villains.

Second world war news stories had an impact as well. In 1939 and 1941 respectively, newspapers were full of reports of Moscow and Berlin signing a non-aggression pact, and then of Moscow switching sides to join the Allies.

And in a 1945 essay, Orwell mocked news of many people on the left embracing the fervently anti-Communist Chinese Nationalist Party leader, Chiang Kai-shek, once he was with the Allies – seemingly having forgetten their earlier disdain for Chiang’s brutal effort to exterminate the Chinese Communist Party.

But perhaps the most notable 1940s news story of all relating to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s geopolitics has been flagged by Taylor as one that broke in 1943. He notes that Orwell sometimes claimed a key inspiration for his final novel were the reports of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill talking at the 1943 Tehran conference about carving up the post-war world into three spheres.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has had extraordinary longevity as a go-to text for political commentary. There are many explanations for its staying power, but right now a key feature of it may be its relevance to thinking about both repression of dissent and Newspeak-style propaganda in many individual countries – and the unsettling geopolitical tensions in the world at large.

Emrah Atasoy, Associate Fellow of English and Comparative Literary Studies & Honorary Research Fellow of IAS, the University of Warwick and Upcoming IASH Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the University of Edinburgh, University of Warwick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of Chinese and World History, University of California, Irvine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.