Ezra Klein wonders how exactly Newt Gingrich came to read 1984 as “proof of Hayek’s principle that centralized planning inherently leads to dictatorship.” As others have noted, Gingrich obviously didn’t get around to the essays, like “Why I Write,” where the author said flat-out, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”