Copies of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are flying off the shelves as people peer fearfully into the world of the Donald Trump administration.

But this is the wrong book to scour for an understanding of America’s immediate future. The United States is not entering Orwell’s 1984 world of high-technology totalitarianism.

It’s going back to 1953 — perhaps 1692 — in a particularly American context. The book that should be flying off the shelves is the script of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegorical condemnation of ‘McCarthyism,’ a political movement which throughout 1950s drove a hysterical purge of anyone in American public life accused of being disloyal or a communist sympathizer. Many thousands of people — including some of the most famous names in the entertainment industry and public life — lost their jobs or were hounded into exile. Victims included not only thousands of civil servants, but, at the height of the hysteria, also seamen, dockworkers and homosexuals.

Miller used the story of the Salem witch hunts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692 and 1693 to frame his condemnation of McCarthyism. But what makes his play far more appropriate than Orwell’s book as a guide to the modern American political scene is that The Crucible is threaded throughout with the Christian religious fanaticism that is so deeply imbedded in the faction of the Republican Party that now controls Congress and the White House.

Almost all Republican members of Congress identify as followers of conservative evangelical Christian sects, either Protestant or Catholic. Among voters, according to the Pew Research Center, a clear majority of members of all evangelical Christian sects vote Republican.

American politics has been taken over by the Christian Taliban. They seem just as intent on imposing what they see as Christian religious law on the country as the Afghan Taliban — or, indeed, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq — are on establishing Shariah Muslim law in those countries.

Just look at Vice-President Mike Pence, who has been the Republican Party’s high priest of evangelical Christianity for over a decade. One of his first public engagements in his first week in office was to attend the annual anti-abortion March for Life in Washington on Friday. From this, several of the first edicts of the Trump administration, and Pence’ actions as Governor of Indiana, it is evident that his attitudes on women’s reproductive rights and the sexual rights of Americans in general are framed by a narrow and fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.

Trump’s public expressions of religious conviction ring hollow and appear to be inspired by little more than political expediency. The only altar at which Trump appears to genuflect with genuine conviction is in the church of narcissism.

The mindless Christian vitriol that infects this administration was made most evident by the brutal and bungled order to close U.S. borders to refugees and even properly documented visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The blatant racism and cruelty of this move has knocked the breath out of even those who want to give Trump a chance.

One of the questions that inevitably will course through the investigation into Sunday’s shootings at that mosque in Quebec City is whether the atmosphere generated by the Trump administration gives implicit permission for such terrorist atrocities.

During the course of the farcical political process that brought Trump to the White House, it became commonplace to portray him as a proto-fascist. The favourite comparison is with Italy’s pompous, braggart dictator, Benito Mussolini.

But that comparison only goes so far. The forces driving the inhumanity, stupidity and gross paranoia of Trump and the Christian evangelists of the Republican Party have, as Miller set out in The Crucible, deep roots in America’s cultural and social DNA.

In a depressing point of similarity with the contemporary fixations of large numbers of Trump supporters, many believed that the Reds were plotting to destroy the U.S. through the fluoridation of water supplies, vaccination campaigns and the destruction of Christianity. In a depressing point of similarity with the contemporary fixations of large numbers of Trump supporters, many believed that the Reds were plotting to destroy the U.S. through the fluoridation of water supplies, vaccination campaigns and the destruction of Christianity.

The events that led to the Salem witch hunts of 1692 and 1693 are eerily familiar. The advent of secular democracy in Britain with the coming to the throne of William and Mary and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, was a threat to the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts. They were trying to create societies based on their understanding of Biblical law, and the British authorities disapproved.

On top of that, war with France in Quebec, Nova Scotia and the northern reaches of the American colonies drove unwelcome refugees down into Massachusetts. Salem, with its deeply embedded puritanical Christian intolerance, was especially affronted by the arrival of destitute refugees.

And then, in the midst of this social upheaval, there was an outbreak of hysteria among several of the young girls of Salem, most of them in their early teens. There are many recorded examples of children, especially young girls, having collective “fits.” It is a strange phenomenon and happens most often in small, close-knit village societies.

In Salem, in January 1692, the hysteria outbreak was immediately blamed on witchcraft, and the hunt was immediately on for those who had put curses on the young girls. As is happening in the U.S. now, the finger of blame fixed immediately on the outcasts of society. A black slave was tortured into confessing and eventually driven mad. Also interrogated were a homeless beggar woman and an poor elderly woman with a reputation for promiscuity.

But this was only the beginning. Over the following months, as paranoia and hysteria took hold, nearly 200 people were accused of witchcraft and dragged before magistrates and special courts. For months the courts allowed “spectral evidence” — the recounting of dreams and visions — as grounds for conviction.

In all, 20 people were condemned to death for witchcraft in the Salem trials. Nineteen men and women were hanged. One 71-year-old man was crushed to death with rocks.

A bitter irony is that it was not until 1957, when the McCarthyist purges of the 1950s were finally exhausted, that Massachusetts formally apologised for the judicial murders of the 20 Salem people two-and-a-half centuries before.

It’s a bit unfair to pin the anti-communist hysteria that took hold of the U.S. in the 1950s entirely on Senator Joseph McCarthy. For sure, his February 1950 declaration that he had a list of 205 employees of the State Department that were members of the Communist Party and his chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee kangaroo court put him in the spotlight.

But — as with the Salem witch hunts — once set loose, the fear of the Red Menace coursed through much of U.S. society.

If anyone deserves to be pilloried as the “Witchfinder General” it’s head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. He used his overt and covert powers to mount a campaign of terror against anyone he suspected of left wing beliefs or un-American lifestyles, such as homosexuals. (This became ironic when Hoover’s own complex, unconventional sexuality eventually became public knowledge.)

As in Salem, a complex set of issues set off the McCarthyist purges. The morphing of the end of the Second World War and the alliance with the Soviet Union into the Cold War and confrontation with Moscow was the over-arching cause. Within that were events such as Moscow’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, its occupation of Eastern Europe, and the communists’ victory in the Chinese civil war. Then there was a seemingly endless string of spy scandals both in the U.S. and Europe, especially Britain.

In a depressing point of similarity with the contemporary fixations of large numbers of Americans, many of them Trump supporters, many believed that the Reds were plotting to destroy the U.S. through the fluoridation of water supplies, vaccination campaigns and the destruction of Christianity.

Public disquiet became so intense that Democratic President Harry Truman in 1947 felt forced to issue an Executive Order requiring all federal civil servants to be screened for “loyalty.” It became a wildfire that engulfed not only the public service, but also Hollywood and much of American public life.

Looking now at the list of people blacklisted as suspected left-wingers or communists is a timely reminder of the bigotry and ignorant intolerance that lurks near the surface in American civic culture.

Among those blacklisted and persecuted were Lucille Ball, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, Lena Horn, Danny Kaye, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson and Orson Welles.

Much credit for bringing American back to its senses is rightly given to the great journalist Edward R. Murrow. In March, 1954, Murrow wrote:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and the process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”

The U.S. is going to need more Edward R. Murrows speaking loud and clear to bring this era of Trump madness to a close.

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