Politics & Power Quote by George Orwell

Orwell is performing a neat little verbal ambush: he treats "democracy" not as a system of government but as a compliment people fight to possess. The bite comes from his framing of the word as political perfume, something regimes spray on themselves to smell legitimate. Once "democratic" becomes synonymous with "good", the term stops describing reality and starts laundering it.

The intent is less to police a definition than to expose a linguistic arms race. If everyone needs the label to survive, then the label will stretch to fit anything: one-party states, empires, managed elections, even outright police rule with a few ceremonial ballots. Orwell's cynicism isn't abstract; it's diagnostic. He is showing how moral language gets nationalized by power: rulers borrow the prestige of a value they may actively suppress, and the public, wanting the comfort of praise, often lets them.

The subtext is a warning about political vocabulary as contested territory. "Tied down to any one meaning" reads like a threat precisely because it would force accountability. A fixed definition would turn "democracy" from a badge into a test: Who votes? Who counts? Who can speak without fear? Orwell is pointing to the moment when words become too socially valuable to remain precise, and that imprecision becomes useful to the powerful.

Context matters: writing in the mid-20th century, Orwell had watched fascists, communists, and liberal democracies all claim moral superiority while practicing propaganda. For him, the corruption of language isn't a side effect of politics; it's one of its main tools.