"IF THERE IS HOPE, it lies in the proles," confided Winston Smith to his diary in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This turned out to be an optimistic illusion. The low-class proles, the most intelligent or charismatic of them marked down for elimination by the Thought Police, stood no chance against the smart managerial elites of the Inner Party. Easily bamboozled and whipped into a war frenzy, their coarse senses sated by pornographic entertainments, the proles of Orwell's fictional Oceania had no prospect of anything but, as an Inner Party member explains to Winston, "a boot stamping on a human face--forever." Present-day Oceania--or, as we say, "the West"--isn't nearly as brutish as Orwell's dark vision. We have open meritocracies in which intelligent prole youngsters, far from being liquidated, are welcomed into the upper classes. Nor are those upper classes a tightly organized Inner Party ruthlessly dedicated to self-preservation. They are only a loose--though increasingly endogamous--stratum, a sort of free-range Inner Party. They do have a common ideology, to be sure, but it is comparatively rational and humane, as state ideologies go, rooted in Enlightenment universalism and disgust at the excesses of industrial-age nationalism, colonialism, and racism.
