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Some Are More Equal Than Others: The Pigs Have Taken Over

Pig farm in Finland. Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0

Why has there been no sustained, system-wide protest movement against President Trump? In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs do not just seize power—they slowly remake the farm in their own image through two rebellions. The first is dramatic and visible: all the animals unite to overthrow the human farmer. They establish a new order based on equality and shared labor. The second rebellion is more subtle. The pigs, led by Napoleon, gradually consolidate power until they rule over the other animals. Eventually, what was meant to be an animal paradise of equality becomes something very different, captured in the phrase: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

Is the description of the second rebellion relevant to the United States today? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die that similar gradual erosion of norms can undermine contemporary political systems.

Power in Animal Farm unfolds gradually with little resistance. Small changes accumulate over time: the pigs move into the farmhouse, sleep in beds with sheets, and claim privileges justified by their supposed intellectual superiority. Initially, some of the other animals challenge these changes, but objections fade. The pigs revise the commandments to justify their actions. Democratic meetings disappear. Decisions are made by a small leadership circle and presented to the rest as necessary for the good of all. The language of the revolution and equality remains, but its meaning quietly shifts.

It would be wrong to claim that the United States ever fully resembled the idealistic vision of the animals’ first rebellion. The animals’ overthrow of Farmer Jones is not directly comparable to the United States’ War of Independence. From the beginning, the American republic excluded large portions of its population from the promise of equality. Enslaved people were denied freedom, women lacked political rights, and Indigenous peoples were largely outside the constitutional framework. The ideal of equality existed, but it was and remains an ideal.

Still, the language of equality and democratic governance has been central to the American political imagination. But that imagination is increasingly in dissonance with contemporary reality. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now hold roughly 30 percent of the country’s total wealth, a share that has steadily increased over the past several decades. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only about 2.5 percent of total wealth, highlighting a striking imbalance in the distribution of assets. And the wealth of the richest Americans has grown significantly in recent years.

In principle, economic inequality does not automatically translate into political control. Yet wealth often carries influence. Campaign financing, lobbying networks, and the revolving door between government and private industry create channels through which economic power can shape political outcomes. Democratic institutions remain in place, but policy decisions increasingly reflect the priorities of those with the greatest financial resources and access.

“Billionaires flood U.S. campaigns with cash,” headlines the New York Times. “[T]he country is on the verge of becoming a place where wealthy people are able to spend millions of dollars to essentially direct how the government runs without breaking any law,” the Times article quotes a former Montana governor.

None of this makes the United States identical to Orwell’s allegorical farm. Yet Orwell’s story does offer one helpful explanation for the second rebellion. The pigs do not abolish the first revolution outright. Instead, they reinterpret it. The slogans remain, but their meaning gradually changes. The animals are told that sacrifices are necessary for the stability of the farm. Statistics are produced showing increased productivity. Narratives of external threats reinforce the authority of those in charge. Over time, memory itself begins to blur. Few animals can clearly recall the original commandments or the early days of the rebellion.

Why do the animals never revolt again when the pigs take over?

Orwell portrays the animals as fundamentally decent and hardworking, but also increasingly exhausted and uncertain. Each individual change seems small enough to tolerate. The pigs’ explanations, delivered by the persuasive Squealer, provide just enough reassurance to quiet doubts. Moreover, the animals lack the tools to organize effectively against the leadership. Their memory is short, their access to information limited, and their daily labor consuming.

If inequalities deepen or democratic ideals erode, why do citizens not respond with collective revolt? While dissatisfaction is widespread in the United States today, it rarely unites into a single, coordinated movement. Protests over foreign policy, climate change, and legal controversies each compete for public attention, making collective action against the broader system difficult. Protesting the war in Iran is not the same as marching for the environment or challenging Trump. There are protests, but there is an absence of coordinated system-wide protest.

The pace of change makes it difficult to keep up. At the same time, control over information turns the search for truth into a full-time task, while AI-driven personalization increasingly filters what people see, narrowing shared reality.

Orwell’s story endures because it warns of subtle dangers. Revolutions rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment; more often, they erode gradually, through reinterpretation, compromise, and fatigue. As Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote:  “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.”

At the end of Animal Farm, the animals peer through the farmhouse window and watch the pigs dining with the humans they once overthrew. As the faces blur together, the animals realize they can no longer tell which is which. The question Orwell leaves us with is not how the pigs took over, but when the other animals (us) stopped noticing.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

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