Chomsky: By Focusing on Russia, We Ignore Trump's Existential Threat to
Climate
We should be focused on dealing with the environmental crisis while we still
have time to do so, says Chomsky.
We should be focused on dealing with the environmental crisis while we still
have time to do so, says Noam Chomsky.
Jared Rodriguez / Truthout
By David Barsamian, Truthout Published August 21, 2019
In this continuation of an extensive interview, world-renowned public
intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses the growing extremism of the Republican
Party, Trump's ongoing trade war with China, Democrats' abandonment of the
working class and impending threat of the climate crisis. Read Part 1 of
this interview here, and Part 2 here.
David Barsamian: Talk about the present occupant of the White House. In some
ways, his boorish and grotesque behavior is a pretty easy target. People can
feel very virtuous about denouncing Trump. But Public Citizen warns, "Every
day we witness a further slide toward authoritarianism under Trump." Are you
concerned about that?
Noam Chomsky: I'm less concerned than they are. I think the system is
resilient enough to withstand a figure who is defying subpoenas, defying
congressional orders and so on. I think Trump is in many ways
underestimated. He's a highly skilled politician who is very successful in
what he's doing.
He's got two major constituencies. One is the actual, standard constituency,
the Republican Party - both parties, but much more the Republicans - private
wealth, corporate power. You've got to keep them satisfied. Then there is
the voting base. Here, what's happened to the Republicans over the years is
pretty interesting.
During the neoliberal period, both parties have shifted to the right. By the
1970s, the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class. The last
gesture of support for the working class was the Humphrey-Hawkins bill in
1978, a full employment bill that former President Jimmy Carter watered down
so it didn't really mean anything. But since then, the Democrats have simply
handed the working class over to their main class enemy: the Republicans.
Some little changes here and there, but it's pretty substantial. The
Democrats have become what used to be called moderate Republicans.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have just gone off the edge.. They've just
become "a radical insurgency." You see it almost daily. Recently, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that if Republicans have a chance to
appoint someone else to the Supreme Court in an election year, "Fine, we'll
do it." When it was Obama, he said, "No, in an election year you can't do
it." They have simply abandoned any pretense of being a parliamentary party,
and upped it to the jugular. But meanwhile, we're going to support private
wealth, corporate power with utter dedication. You can't get votes that way.
There are not enough people that are going to say, "Fine, let's do that."
Campaign funding by the wealthy and the corporate sector utterly overwhelms
the effect of any imaginable foreign interference.
What the Republicans have had to do since the 1970s is to try to kind of
cobble together a voting constituency on some grounds other than their
actual policies. It's been very interesting to watch it. It started with
former President Richard Nixon and his Southern strategy. The civil rights
movement alienated Southern racists. The Nixon team pretty openly said, "We
can pick up votes by being racist." They didn't use the word, but
essentially did by catering to the racist elements of the South that are
opposed to the civil rights movement.
It was then picked up by one of the chief Republican strategists, Paul
Weyrich. He noticed in the mid-1970s that Republicans could get lots of
votes if they pretended - stress pretended - to be opposed to abortion. The
Republican Party had been almost completely pro-choice. Ronald Reagan,
George Bush, Barry Goldwater, all of them, their position in the 1960s was
that the state has nothing to say about things like abortion. It's a matter
between a woman and her doctor. Weyrich recognized that Republicans can get
the votes of Northern Catholics, workers and Evangelical Christians, who are
a huge population in the U.S., if they pretend to be opposed to abortion.
Instantly, they all became passionately opposed to abortion. That's now one
of the leading planks of the Republican Party.
Guns is another one. "We have to be pro-guns. We can pick up people this
way." A good part of the population, especially the working class, has
indeed suffered under the neoliberal programs instituted since the Reagan
years. We can't tell people, "Look, we're screwing you, so we have to find
some scapegoat who is responsible for it." In the case of Reagan, it was
outright racist: It was the Black "welfare queens," the Black woman driving
up in a limousine to the welfare office to steal your hard-earned money, all
that stuff. Now it's immigrants. "The immigrants are coming to steal your
jobs," or "China is going to take your jobs." It's kind of amazing to watch
it work.
For example, forget immigrants - that's so transparent we don't have to talk
about it. There's almost 100 percent agreement that China is taking our
jobs. But how is China taking our jobs? Does China have a gun to the heads
of the CEOs of Apple and GM and Microsoft, and says, "You've got to send
jobs here?" It's the corporate managers who are deciding to do it. So if you
don't want the jobs to go to China, you should be saying, "Well, the
corporate managers shouldn't have the right to make that decision." So, who
should have the right? If you believe in democracy, it should be the people
who work in the enterprise. But where are we now? Back to the gentleman
named Karl Marx in the mid-19th century. We should have worker control of
enterprises. So the logical argument about China stealing our jobs goes
straight to workers' control of enterprises, the main theme of the American
working class in the early Industrial Revolution. Somehow you don't read
about that.
So, China is taking our jobs, immigrants are taking our jobs, welfare
mothers are stealing from you, you have to have guns, you can't have
abortions, etc. Republicans had to cobble together a voting constituency
including these sectors and also the relatively affluent. Trump voters are
mostly pretty affluent. They, of course, are going to vote Republican for
their own reasons.
What's happened in the past roughly 15 years, when you take a look at every
Republican primary, when somebody came up from the popular base, they are so
"crazy" that the Republican establishment wasn't able to tolerate them and
was able to beat them down - people like Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and
others. The difference in 2016 is they couldn't beat them down. Trump is a
skillful politician, and he managed not only to win the nomination, but to
put the entire party in his pocket to a remarkable extent. Amazingly, he's
been able to maintain the support of people that he is shafting at every
turn with his pretense of being the guy who is standing up for you. It's
very interesting to watch it.
There was an interesting article in The New York Times, a long study of
Midwest farmers. These are not poor farmers with a garden in their backyard;
these are pretty affluent farmers. But they're suffering from the trade war.
They're losing their market for soybeans. But they're still supporting
Trump. And the reason is, "We've got to stop the Chinese practices. It's
unfair to us. And Trump says he supports us." In fact, the main person they
quote in the article says, "Trump says, 'farmers are marvelous people, I
love you,' and I'm going to vote for him." So, a little sweet-talk.
And also, a little bit of cash doesn't hurt. So there's now $16 billion sent
to farmers in the Midwest to try to compensate for their trade losses. Where
does that $16 billion come from? It comes from the trade war. Tariffs are
simply a tax on consumers. That's what a tariff is: A tariff, the way it
spells itself out, it ends up with higher prices for consumers. And it's not
small. The New York Fed just estimated the annual tax bite as about $800 per
family. That's a big tax increase under Trump, which helps pay off his
constituency.
It's a pretty nice scam, when you look at it, and they're carrying it off
very effectively. Trump and Steve Bannon and the rest are pretending to be
the tribunes of the people, defending the American worker from all these
attacks. By now, there are a few Democrats who are starting to talk about
it, but as a party, the Democrats have pretty much abandoned the working
class.
If you want to overturn Trump on the basis of his actual crimes, the thing
to look at is not Congress, it's the New York State Attorney General's
office.
In fact, many working people voted for Obama believing his nice rhetoric
about hope and change. But within about two years that was shattered. By the
2010 midterm elections, it was gone. Trump comes along and says, "I'm your
defender. I'm going to protect you from not only foreign enemies but the
people who are stealing your jobs." He's carrying it off, and the Democrats
are helping him.
Take this laser-like focus on the Robert Mueller report, Russiagate. It was
obvious from the beginning that they were not going to find very much.
They'll find that Trump's a crook. OK, we knew that already - but they're
not going to find any real collusion with the Russians, and they didn't.
They're not going to find any real significant Russian impact on the
election. There couldn't be.
You want to talk about interference with the election? Campaign funding by
the wealthy and the corporate sector utterly overwhelms the effect of any
imaginable foreign interference. That's the real interference with
elections. Whatever the Russians might have tried to do, it's a piece of
straw in a haystack. And, of course, it's nothing compared with U.S.
interference with Russian elections, let alone other countries, where we
just overthrow the government. But the Democrats focused all their hopes on
somehow "Mueller is going to save us," and "Let's not look at Trump's
policies."
But these policies are murderous. Trump's climate policy may literally be a
virtual death knell for the species. It's not a small thing. There's almost
no talk about it. The Nuclear Strategy Review, which escalates the threat of
nuclear war significantly, that's not under discussion. The tax scam, which
was just a gift to the rich and the corporations, a double gift. For one
thing, it poured a lot of money into their pockets. Secondly, it created a
huge deficit which can be used as a justification for cutting social
spending. We can go on and on.
None of this is being discussed. Let's instead talk about the fact that
maybe somebody in the Trump campaign talked to a Russian oligarch who placed
an ad somewhere. It's as if the Democrats are working for him, like paid
agents of the Trump campaign.
Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times, writes, "My head hurts,
puzzling over whether Trump is just a big blowhard who's flailing around, or
a sinister genius laying traps to get himself impeached to animate the base
ahead of the election."
Trump . understands nothing about the economy; he doesn't care about the
world. But he is extremely skillful in carrying off the primary tasks that a
"narcissistic megalomaniac" has to achieve. One is maintaining the support
of wealth and corporate power, which he is doing. That's handed over to
McConnell and the rest. They make sure that that works. And it's working
brilliantly. Corporate profits are going through the roof. It's fantastic.
Wages are pretty much stagnating. What more can he ask? But the other thing
is: He has to keep his voting base energized, and he's doing it, very well.
Impeachment is another case. If the Democrats move to impeachment, I think
they're going to shoot themselves in the foot. You can see exactly what's
going to happen. Suppose the House impeaches Trump. It goes to the Senate.
The Senate is in Trump's pocket. They'll exonerate him. Then what happens?
Trump starts making speeches about how, "I'm exonerated, the Deep State and
the treacherous Democrats are trying to destroy the guy who is standing up
for you against your enemies." Just like what happened with the Mueller
report. They were just walking into a trap.
Trump's climate policy may literally be a virtual death knell for the
species.
If you want to be concerned, you want to overturn Trump on the basis of his
actual crimes, the thing to look at is not Congress, it's the New York State
Attorney General's office, which is carrying out, apparently, careful
investigations of Trump's fraudulent dealings over decades, which I'm sure
are going to pile up crime after crime, maybe enough to send him to prison
after he's out of office. That's probably where it's all going to come out.
But in general terms, that's a minor issue. He's not my favorite person, as
you can see, but as compared with the crimes he may have committed, the
fraud in New York with his hotels and so on, that's very minor as compared
with the fact that he's escalating the race to disaster. This is the most
important decision in human history. We've got a couple of years to try to
deal somehow with the environmental crisis. It can be controlled. It's not
easy, but it can be done. If you waste a couple of years by trying to
escalate the crisis, you might just push us over the edge.
I don't know if you've looked at this, one of the most amazing documents in
human history that came out of the Trump administration, from a part of the
bureaucracy, naturally. It was a 500-page environmental assessment study
done by the Transportation Administration, the point of which was to argue
that we should not impose new emissions controls on cars and trucks. And
they had a very sound argument. The argument is, "Look, we're going off the
cliff anyway, and car emissions don't make that much of a difference. So who
cares?"
Their estimate was that by the end of this century, global temperatures will
have risen 4 degrees Centigrade. That's way beyond what the scientific
consensus says will make life unlivable. So, what they're saying is, "We're
finished, it's all done anyhow, by the end of the century, everything will
be destroyed. So why stop driving?" Can you think of anything like this in
human history, ever? Hitler wasn't saying. "Let's destroy the world."
Of course, they're assuming that . nobody is going to do anything about it.
But all of this passes without anybody paying attention. Let's worry about
whether Russia had some minor influence on the election.
Talk about the young people in Congress like Representatives Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and others, and
teen activist students like Greta Thunberg of Sweden, Haven Coleman of
Denver, and other young people involved in Extinction Rebellion and the
Sunrise Movement.
That's very exciting. That's really the hope for the future. These are very
impressive people. Extinction Rebellion are great people. The Sunrise
Movement - which is, after all, a small group of young people - succeeded
partly just through their activism, like sitting-in in congressional
offices, got some support from especially Representative Ocasio-Cortez, who
is doing a wonderful job.
They managed to put on the agenda the Green New Deal. Now, of course, it
immediately got denounced as a "crazy" this, that, and the other thing. But
it's a great achievement. There has to be some kind of Green New Deal if
we're going to survive. And they managed to move it from obscurity to the
legislative agenda, along with Ed Markey, the senator from Massachusetts.
That's a real achievement. And there are very solid, substantive proposals
as to how you could implement these proposals. One of the most detailed and
persuasive I know of is by Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst. It can be done. These groups have broken through the
silence and apathy on it. That's a remarkable achievement.
In fact, it's the hope for survival of any kind of civilized life. This is
not a small thing. The human species is facing questions that have never
arisen before: Is organized human life going to survive in any recognizable
form? We're approaching the level of global warming of roughly 125,000 years
ago, when sea levels were about 25 feet higher than they are now. You don't
have to have much of an imagination to know what that means.
Shall we race toward it the way the Trump administration and the Republican
Party wants us to do? Or shall we do something about it, the way Sunrise
Movement and Extinction Rebellion and Ocasio-Cortez want to do? That's the
decision that has to be made. It's good that you bring that up, because
that's of extraordinary importance.
This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview that first aired on
Alternative Radio.
We're Furious