Animal Farm: How George Orwell’s Allegory Persists as a Mirror for American Decay

By Gemma Hayes

Art by Julian Riccobon

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Art by Julian Riccobon

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George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a novel that, like the very best allegories, never quite finishes what it started. It grows, mutates, and ends up doubling back on itself. First published in 1945 as a satirical attack on Soviet totalitarianism, Animal Farm has since transcended its historical moment. It is no longer just a parable about Stalinism; it is a book about power itself. Today, Orwell’s commentary seems less like a reflection on distant regimes and more like an X-ray of America today.

From the very first lines, Orwell’s world seems deceptively simple: the Manor Farm, the drunken Mr. Jones, the idealistic animals who rise up to defeat their oppressors and claim their freedom. But Orwell’s prose is so lean and stripped of artifice that it is easy to miss how methodically he orchestrates the animals’ descent. The pigs, Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer, don’t just consolidate power, they warp and redefine reality in the process. “All animals are equal,” is the phrase the animals are taught to carry in their hearts. Yet with the subtlest sleight of hand, the phrase quietly becomes, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This slow and almost casual degradation of language feels gutting to read now, in an America where the distortion of truth has become something resembling ambient background noise. Orwell reveals to us how words are weaponized, softened, and rephrased until they are indistinguishable from lies. Squealer’s justification of every atrocity with increasingly absurd rhetoric echoes the way political figures today hide cruelty with euphemism and declare victory in the face of blatant failure. In Orwell’s world, and in ours, propaganda is not a side effect of power, but the operating system.

The real genius of Animal Farm is that it sheds light on oppression not as a dramatic event, but as an erosion. Boxer, the loyal, hardworking, and tragically naïve horse, is one of Orwell’s most devastating creations. His blind faith in slogans that idealize the subjugation of the “less equal” animals ultimately leads him to his death, sold for slaughter when he is no longer useful. Boxer’s story reads today like a grim fable for the American working class, trapped in cycles of labor and loyalty even as the systems they serve cannibalize them. Orwell understood how power preys on those who believe they are needed—the illusion of agency, the weaponization of hope.

But Orwell’s cynicism is not random. His depiction of betrayal is meticulously political. In today’s America, the parallels are uncomfortably abundant: the rise of populist movements that promise liberation but entrench inequality; the manipulation of media to sustain illusions of justice while consolidating authority; the disintegration of faith in democratic institutions being replaced by cults of personality.

Orwell’s portrayal of the animals’ psychological transformation is equally as harrowing. They don’t just accept oppression, but they internalize it, reframe it as natural and even necessary. After the purges and executions, after the corruption of the Seven Commandments, the animals blame themselves, not their leaders. This, too, resonates in America’s current moment: the dangerous ease with which collective memory is manipulated and the rewriting of public narratives to favor those already in power.

The final image of Animal Farm—the pigs dining with the human farmers, the animals peering through the window and finding it “impossible to say which was which”—is perhaps one of the most brutal in modern literature. It is not just a betrayal, rather an obliteration of distinction between oppressor and oppressed. Today, as political figures who once claimed outsider status entrench themselves in systems of violence and control, as idealistic movements fracture into factions battling over scraps of power, Orwell’s warning feels devastatingly fresh. Corruption is not a deviation from the revolution; it is too often its final form.

And yet, despite its bleakness, Animal Farm remains a necessary reading. Orwell does not offer comfort. He offers recognition. And in a time when the very ideas of truth, equality, and justice feel precarious, sometimes recognition is a radical act. To name the cycle is the first step in breaking it.

It is too easy to read Animal Farm as a relic, a Cold War artifact. But it is harder, and more important, to read it as a prophecy. Orwell forces us to ask not "How could they let this happen?" but "How are we letting this happen now?" The animals’ fate was not sealed by brutality alone; it was sealed by hope without vigilance, by loyalty without critical thought. If America today feels increasingly like a place where some citizens are “more equal than others,” then Orwell’s novel remains not just relevant, but urgently alive.

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About the Author

Gemma Hayes loves writing poetry. Her work has been featured in The Blue Marble Review and multiple other literary magazines. She lives with her three cats in Manhattan, New York..

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