Obama, not Trump, a more apt comparison to Big Brother

I find it highly amusing that Adam Gopnik and other dandies of the Left are comparing the incoming Trump Administration to George Orwell's book 1984. The obvious comparison, and the one likely intended by Orwell, is rather between 1984 and the post-WWII Labour government of Clement Attlee. Even Gopnik himself admits as much:

As the British author Anthony Burgess pointed out a long time ago, Orwell’s modern hell was basically a reproduction of British misery in the postwar rationing years [in other words, the years of the Attlee Labour regime], with the malice of Stalin’s police-state style added on.

It was the British Labour regime that replaced Winston Churchill's Conservative government. It was the British Labour regime that the anti-Keynesian economist Friedrich Hayek condemned in his book The Road to Serfdom. It was the British Labour regime that Daniel Yergin critiqued in his book and TV series The Commanding Heights. It was the British Labour regime that Margaret Thatcher, the disciple of Churchill and Hayek, began to dismantle (to the great benefit of England) as soon as she became Prime Minister in 1979, leading the Conservative Party back to power. And the obvious political heir of the British Labour regime is the Progressive, Leftist Obama administration, not the incoming Trump administration.

Instead of spewing out purple prose that is somehow supposed to have some connection to Donald Trump ("Caligula, the mad Roman emperor, infamously appointed his horse Incitatus to the Roman Senate, and that has been for millennia a byword for cracked authoritarian action." Huh?), it would be good if Mr Gopnik actually familiarized himself with the history of intellectual and political developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.