I mentioned this podcast in an email the other day when I talked about being
an anarchist. Here's the text of the podcast, the interview with Noam
Chomsky, to which I was referring
Miriam
Noam Chomsky: I Would Vote for Bernie
By Mehdi Hasan and Noam Chomsky, The Intercept
02 November 19
Legendary linguist, activist, and political theorist Noam Chomsky has been
speaking out against U.S. interventionism from Vietnam to Latin America to
the Middle East since the 1960s. He's the most cited author alive, but you
won't see him on the nightly news or in the pages of most major newspapers.
On this week's Deconstructed, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss
the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, the 2020 Democratic
field, and why he opposed Trump's Syria troop withdrawal.
Deconstructed is coming to the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in Toronto on
November 8. Buy tickets here.
Link To Audio
Noam Chomsky: The current moment is the most grim moment in human history
and the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn't give a damn. He's
having fun. He's serving his rich constituency. So what the hell, let's
destroy the world.
[Music interlude.]
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I'm Mehdi Hasan.
This week who better to speak with about a combination of domestic and
international crises, from violence in Syria to the Democratic presidential
race in the U.S., than the legendary writer, activist, and political
theorist, Noam Chomsky. Wanna know what he makes of impeachment too?
NC: I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. He's a major crook. Is it
politically wise? I frankly doubt it.
MH: Today, in a special episode of Deconstructed, I speak to the one, the
only, Noam Chomsky.
My guest today has been a scathing critic of U.S. presidents, and especially
U.S. foreign policy, for more than 50 years. He rose to prominence as an
outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war and was even included on Richard
Nixon's Enemies List. An academic, activist and best-selling author, he's
been described as "the founding father of linguistic philosophy," but he's
best known today as the intellectual hero to anti-capitalists,
anti-imperialists, socialists and anarchists.
I'm talking of course about Noam Chomsky, who is often referred to as one of
the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities, along with Shakespeare and the
Bible, and yet you rarely if ever, see him quoted, published or invited onto
the mainstream media, whether it's the New York Times op-ed page or CNN
primetime.
Chomsky, the arch-anti-interventionist surprised a lot of people last year
on my colleague Jeremy Scahill's Intercepted podcast, when he said that the
U.S. should maintain a troop presence in Syria in order to deter Turkish
aggression against the Kurds. Does he still feel that way today, in the wake
of President Trump's controversial withdrawal of U.S. troops? And what's his
view on impeaching Trump and on the presidential prospects of his old friend
Senator Bernie Sanders?
Recently - and I should add shortly before Donald Trump announced the death
of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi - Noam Chomsky joined me for an
interview from his new academic base at the University of Arizona, where,
aged 90, he's now laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics and
chair of an environment and social justice program.
[Music interlude.]
MH: Professor Chomsky, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you.
MH: In recent weeks, we've seen some pretty gruesome images coming out of
northeastern Syria, rebel groups backed by Turkey on the offensive killing
and mutilating, not just Kurdish fighters from the SDF, the U.S.-backed
Syrian Democratic Forces, but women and children too.
Announcer [translated from Arabic]: This house you see here, there were
children playing. A motor fell and killed a boy. The girl she lost her leg.
MH: Am I right in saying that you didn't support President Trump's decision
to withdraw U.S. troops from the front lines in Syria?
NC: That's correct. For a long time, I've been trying to organize support
for opposition to the withdrawal.
MH: And why is that?
NC: Because the, from the left at least, the call for withdrawal was based
on anti-imperialist principles. But principles have to be understood in
connection with the human reality of the existing circumstances. A small,
U.S. contingent with the sole mission of deterring a planned Turkish
invasion, which was obvious, is not imperialism. It's protecting the Kurds
from an expansion of the atrocities and massacres that Erdogan has been
carrying out both within Turkey itself and in the areas of Syria that he's
already conquered.
MH: And a lot of people listening especially on the left might be surprised
to hear you say this. They might say Noam Chomsky, we associate him with
anti-interventionism, with opposition to U.S. foreign policy, and U.S.
military interventions abroad. Why are the Kurds the exception to that, you
know, life-long, career-long opposition to U.S. military interventions,
especially in the Middle East?
NC: If you take a look at what's happening, it's not intervention. Syria was
already invaded by Turkey. The troops that are there were essentially doing
nothing except deterring an expansion of a further invasion. You have to not
deal with slogans as if it's a religious catechism. You have to ask how they
apply in particular to complex human circumstances.
MH: I take your point. But I do want to explore this a bit more broadly
because I've agreed with a lot of what you've written over the years in
terms of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Latin America. And
as you know, and you've written so eloquently on, a lot of these
interventions, invasions, bombing campaigns, regime changes, are justified
on humanitarian grounds, with leaders saying what you're saying that we
should protect civilians. A liberal interventionist listening to you
speaking now might say, "Well, why didn't Noam Chomsky support the Kosovo
intervention to protect Albanians? Why didn't he support a no fly zone for
Syrian Arabs in Idlib or Aleppo who were being bombed by Assad? Why only the
Kurds?"
NC: Let's take your first example, Kosovo. I opposed the NATO bombing
because it was known both to the Clinton administration and to the press,
which refused to report it, that the bombing would radically increase the
level of crimes and atrocities against the people in Kosovo. General Wesley
Clark informed the Clinton administration weeks earlier that that's exactly
what would happen. He informed the press when the invasion began that that's
what was gonna happen. The reason I opposed it was because there were
diplomatic options available. And instead, NATO, meaning the U.S., chose to
undertake a major military attack consciously knowing that it would greatly
increase atrocities as the Serbs couldn't react by bombing Washington. So
they'd react on the ground.
You have to ask yourself, in each circumstance, what are the consequences of
your decisions? If you don't do that, you're not a moral human being. Now
you're perfectly right that every monster you can think of in history has
declared that whatever acts they're going to carry out are for humanitarian
reasons. Now, if you have a brain functioning, what you do is ask is this
correct? Or isn't it correct? You don't say, because Hitler said it was a
humanitarian intervention in the Sudetenland therefore, there are no
humanitarian interventions.
MH: No, of course, but in Syria, for example, as you know, very complicated
conflict with people, you know, people of good faith and bad faith on many
sides. There are a lot of Syrian Arabs who would say, why didn't Noam
Chomsky ask for U.S. troops to protect us when we were being butchered by
Assad? Why only for the Kurds when they're being butchered by Erdogan?
NC: Because there was no way for a small contingent of U.S. troops to deter
Assad. What in fact was done was that under Obama when they were still
planning to overthrow the regime, the CIA was providing heavy weapons to the
rebels who were by then mostly jihadi rebels.
Newscaster: There's word tonight that the CIA has been delivering weapons to
rebels in Syria over the last two weeks. According to the Washington Post,
the Obama administration is sending vehicles and other equipment to boost
the muscle of rebel fighters in Syria's two-year civil war.
NC: They in fact, slowed down Assad's advance, but quite predictably, they
brought the Russians in to escalate the conflict.
Newscaster: There's growing concern among top officials in the Defense
Department over Russia's growing involvement in Syria's civil war. It's
escalating by the day and so are the risks of a confrontation with the U.S.
NC: So yes, you have to ask yourself, what are the likely predictable
consequences in every situation? You can't find formulas in human affairs
that will determine the action in every particular case.
MH: And just on Iran, because as you well know, a lot of U.S. politicians,
especially on the right, they want American troops in Syria, partly to
"deter Iran."
Mitt Romney: At a time when we're applying maximum pressure on Iran by
giving them a stronger hand in Syria, we've actually weakened that pressure.
Lindsey Graham: President Trump, if you remove all of our forces from Syria,
you're throwing the Kurds over. ISIS will come back on your watch and Iran
will take over.
MH: How worried are you about a U.S. attack on Iran next year? Because it's
election year and with Trump behind in the polls, I for one can see the
appeal for Trump of launching a new war in the Middle East in the run up to
November?
NC: Well, first of all, let's separate those two issues. A small contingent
of troops to deter Turkish aggression would have nothing to do with Iran. So
we put that aside, what are the prospects for a war against Iran? It's hard
to say. I don't think the Trump administration could answer. I don't think
they want a war. A war could have extremely harsh effects not only out of
Iran, but much more generally. So for example, Saudi Arabia's major oil
production, almost all the oil production is in the northeast corner right
in the Shiite areas, very close to Iran. They have missile capacities. They
could devastate one of the main oil producers in the world.
There could be many other consequences. So I don't think the United States
wants a war with Iran. What they want to do is torture Iranians as much as
possible in the hope that destruction of the economy will lead to some
breakdown inside Iran. But that can easily get out of hand. Any accidental
incidents in the Gulf, could blow up suddenly and could lead to an attack.
Newscaster: Tensions on the rise in the Persian Gulf once again. The United
States says Iran is behind attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf. Now,
lawmakers say the Trump administration says it already has the legal
authority to begin a war with Iran.
NC: It wouldn't really be an invasion. The U.S. is not going to invade Iran.
That's much too costly. It would be an attack from a safe distance.
MH: And of course, as you say, that could escalate as well. No one knows
what the unintended consequences of such dangerous action could be. I want
to talk about the Donald Trump presidency especially with impeachment on the
cards. But before I do, does the seemingly global rise of the far right, of
authoritarianism, and nativism from Putin to Orban to Duterte to Narendra
Modi in India, how much does that worry you? And what do you think is
driving it at this moment in human history?
NC: Of course, it's worrisome. It's very hard to detect geo-strategic
planning in the chaos of the Trump administration, which is highly
personalized, and so, yeah, megalomaniac, and so on. But you can kind of
detect something.
MH: Yeah.
NC: The effort which is overt in Steve Bannon's case to construct a kind of
a reactionary international which will consist in the Middle East of the
most reactionary states in the region, Saudi Arabia.
Donald J. Trump: The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine. You've
done really spectacular job.
NC: United Arab Emirates, Egypt under the Sisi dictatorship.
DJT: Egypt has a great leader. He's highly respected. He's brought order.
NC: Israel, which is now far to the right.
DJT: Netanyahu, a very special man. He's done a great job.
NC: To be kind of a base for U.S. power in the region. And that extends
beyond to try to bring Modi's India into it.
DJT: Prime Minister Modi is doing a truly exceptional job for India.
NC: Orban is another case. Salvini in Italy, Farage if he emerges in the
post-Brexit period. Bolsonaro in Brazil.
MH: But is there a particular social or economic or political driver of all
this that links all this together?
NC: Sure, yeah, it's very simple and straightforward. Forty years of the
neoliberal assault on the general population which has been extremely
harmful almost everywhere. It's led to anger, resentment, contempt for
institutions. And when you have a period of unfocused anger, resentment and
so on, it's fertile territory for demagogues to arise, and try to mobilize
it, and blame it, not on its sources. So, like not on the international
financial institutions that are lying behind it to a substantial extent. But
to focus it on scapegoats. Typically, people even more vulnerable than you
are, immigrants, Muslims, Afro-Americans. This goes way back to Ronald
Reagan's "Welfare queens" and so on and many other demagogues in the past.
So yes, that's rising. There are also counter-forces that are rising. Now
they're very significant. It's pretty common these days to quote Gramsci's
famous -
MH: Interregnum.
NC: Yeah, Interregnum with morbid symptoms, but there are morbid symptoms
and there are positive symptoms. And it's a real question which will
prevail.
MH: Let's talk about Donald Trump specifically. You have witnessed, I think
16 presidents over the course of your lifetime. Donald Trump being the 16th.
How does Trump stack up against the rest of them? Is he sui generis in your
view?
NC: Yeah, he's off the spectrum. But the fact is that that's true of the
Republican Party generally. Two well-known commentators from the American
Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein years ago, described
the Republican Party since Newt Gingrich as a radical insurgency that has
abandoned parliamentary politics, and is now often a different dimension.
What's actually happened is that during the neoliberal period both of the
political parties have shifted to the right. So the mainstream Democrats,
the ones who are now meeting with their billionaire friends to try to figure
out how to get rid of Sanders and Warren, they're basically what used to be
called moderate Republicans. The Democrats abandoned the working class by
the late '70s. The last bit of a show of interest was the Humphrey Hawkins
1978 Full Employment Bill which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth.
And after that, they kind of gave up. They handed the working class over to
their class enemy, the Republicans who try to mobilize them on what are
called cultural issues. They're shafting them at every turn, including
Trump, but you can try to mobilize them on the basis of abortion,
immigrants, guns, anything but the real issues.
MH: And I agree with you that the Republican party as you said, you call
them the biggest threat to mankind in terms of their views on climate
change. As you say, the radical insurgency, but having said that, even a Ted
Cruz or a Mike Pence, as radical as they may be, they still fit within some
sort of understandable political prism. Trump, as you say, is off the
spectrum. Have you ever seen a western Democratic leader like him in your
lifetime? Who behaves like him, talks like him?
NC: No. But it's worth looking back a little bit. So for the last, I
suppose, 15 years, take a look at the Republican primaries. Every Republican
primary, a candidate who arose from the base was so outrageous that the
Republican establishment tried and succeeded in suppressing them. Michele
Bachmann -
Michele Bachmann: Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas. It is a harmless gas.
NC: Rick Santorum -
Rick Santorum: I don't want to make Black people's lives better by giving
them somebody else's money.
NC: Herman Cain -
Herman Cain: Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
NC: All madmen, and they managed to suppress them. What was different in
2016 is that they failed. And the guy who came into office over their
opposition was a megalomaniac, narcissist, kind of like a three-year-old
who's enjoying the opportunity to smash everything in sight and knows he can
get away with it and a very good politician. He has his finger on the pulse
of his voting constituency. It's a kind of an adoring constituency that will
support him no matter what he does, and he's playing to that gallery. The
only policy that you can discern clearly in the Trump administration is a
very simple one: me. Anything that benefits me I'll do no matter what the
consequences. If it destroys the world, okay.
MH: While acknowledging that point and you're hundred percent right to talk
about his kind of narcissism and egomania, but is it also fair now to
describe the president as a white nationalist or white supremacist? Because
when I spoke to you in 2016, shortly after his election, you made the point
that every far-right, nationalist, neo-Nazi has been encouraged and excited
by his victory, you said. But then you said we don't know what direction
he'll go in. We don't know if he'll go in that direction. Given the last
three years, the Charlottesville, the, you know, what's been going on
recently, the attacks on synagogues and mosques, his far-right rallies where
they chant "send them back," it's pretty clear that he has now gone in a
full on white nationalist white supremacist direction, isn't it?
NC: But that's part of the problem of the Republican party. Its primary
constituency is extreme wealth and corporate power. Those are the ones they
serve. So you take the one legislative achievement of the Trump
administration, the tax scam. That was for the rich and the very rich and
the corporate sector. Take deregulation, does it help working people to
eliminate eliminate health and safety conditions in the workplace? Does it
increase profits? Okay, we know the answer. Same across the board.
So you run across the legislative programs, the ones that are carried out by
the really evil characters, Mitch McConnell. Before him, Ryan and so on.
Those, those policies are dedicated to the traditional Republican
constituency. But you can't get votes on those policies. So you have to
mobilize some kind of a voting base. And the way they did it is, as I
described it, as you know.
MH: Mobilize the racists.
NC: So if it turns out that white nationalists are the voting base that you
can mobilize, Trump will become a white nationalist. I think it does him too
much credit to attribute to him beliefs like support for white nationalism,
or fascism or anything else. His motive is himself. And he's a good enough
politician to understand that the only way he's going to get support is by
appealing to those sectors of those sectors of the population. One should
bear in mind the utter cynicism of the Republican Party since Reagan.
Take their actual planks. One unbreakable commitment of the Republican party
is anti-abortion. What's called pro-life. Where'd that come from? You go
back to the 1960s. The leading republican figures, Ronald Reagan, George HW
Bush, all the rest of them were what we call pro-choice. What changed? Well,
in the 1970s, Republican strategist, Paul Weyrich, had the brilliant idea
that if the Republicans pretended, I stress pretended, to be anti-abortion,
they could pick up the evangelical vote and the northern working class
Catholic vote. So they turned on a dime. They all became passionately
anti-abortion. Take climate change. That's an interesting one. You go just
10 years, 2008 John McCain when he ran for president had a global warming
plank, not very strong but something.
John McCain: There are vital measures we can take in the short-term even as
we focus on long-term policies to mitigate the effects of global warming.
NC: The Republicans were in fact toying with cap and trade. What happened to
it? Very simple. David Koch, died recently. The Koch brothers launched a
huge campaign, major juggernaut, bribing congressmen, threatening them,
intimidating them. Huge lobbying organization, fake popular organizations to
you know, knock on doors and so on. They switched. Now, part of the
catechism is you have to be against climate change.
MH: Let's talk impeachment. The Democrats have launched an impeachment
inquiry into President Trump specifically around this suggestion that he was
pressuring a foreign country Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political
opponent and even withholding military aid until they agreed to do so. Do
you support the House Democrats' decision to finally start an impeachment
inquiry into Donald Trump?
NC: First notice something, they're going after Trump not on his major
crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that remind you of
anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn't go after Nixon on his major crimes.
They were off the record. It was because he had attacked the Democratic
party.
MH: Good point.
NC: So yes, they'll protect themselves. Is it the right thing to do? I mean,
Trump is impeachable 100 times over. You know, he's a major crook. There's
no doubt about it. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it'll
turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also
a political mistake. What'll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes
to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They're terrified
of Trump's voting base. So they'll vote to turn down the impeachment
request. Trump will come along, say I'm vindicated. Say it was the Deep
State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for
me.
MH: I had the filmmaker Michael Moore on the show last week, and he thinks
that eventually this evidence is going to pile up against Trump that's so
damning - and we've already seen some of the testimony from the acting U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine and others - that actually he thinks Republican
senators, some of them who you know, who need to save their skins will join
Senate Democrats to vote to remove Trump from office. You don't seem to buy
that?
NC: I think you may find a handful who will find a way to evade taking a
position But if you just look at the record of the party - I gave you a
couple of examples, but we could go on - it's very hard to imagine any bit
of principle emerging. It's true that if some of them thought they were
really going to suffer for it politically or in other ways, maybe they'd
change, but that doesn't seem too likely. I mean, just take a look at
Trump's voting base, you know, there are pretty regular polls and studies.
They haven't changed. They buy his line. Here's our hero. The one man in the
world who's willing to stand up for us.
MH: Although whether it works or not in the Senate, it doesn't mean the
House Democrats shouldn't take a stand regardless of whether Republican
Senators convict. Can Trump be beaten at the ballot box next November? Is
there a Democratic candidate who you think can beat him or more than one
candidate?
NC: Well, here it's very interesting to see what's being done. You may have
seen a day or two ago in the New York Times was a big article about a
meeting of the Democratic centrists, the establishment, the billionaires,
the donors, you know, the mainstream political figures. And it was about,
their concern about just what you asked, is there a Democrat who can defeat
Trump? And they went through the possible Democratic candidates and
discussed their flaws, and then asked, can we bring in someone else like
Bloomberg or Michelle Obama? Take a look at the leading candidates they
listed: Warren, Biden and Mayor Pete. Do you notice somebody missing?
MH: Senator Sanders doesn't make the cut of these lists.
NC: There's a very good reason for it. He has absolutely infuriated the
liberal establishment by committing a major crime. It's not his policies.
His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn't just
show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working.
That's no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home. Their job is to watch
not to participate.
MH: To be fair to Elizabeth Warren, who you mentioned a moment ago, she has
upset a lot of big democratic donors.
Newscaster: Some Democratic donors on Wall Street are reportedly threatening
to vote for President Trump or sit out of the 2020 election cycle if the
party nominates Elizabeth Warren.
MH: Is she someone you're not impressed with, are impressed with? What's
your take on Senator Elizabeth Warren?
NC: I think she's seems to me quite honest. I think many of her plans are
perfectly reasonable. She's working with quite serious economists, some of
them friends. But she doesn't pretend to be to try, to hoping to institute
radical institutional changes. Sanders does. Furthermore, she has not
organized a mass political movement which Sanders did. And it's had a lot of
effect. That's how you get people in Congress like Ocasio-Cortez and others
because of this movement.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of
Bernie Sanders that I began to assert and recognize my inherent value.
NC: That's scary. Nobody in the political mainstream wants that.
MH: Some argue, as you know, Bernie Sanders is a deeply controversial figure
for good reasons and bad. You know, he's a divisive figure, again, for good
reasons or bad depending on your perspective. Some would say with Elizabeth
Warren, you get the best of both worlds, you get left wing policies, but you
get a candidate who can reach out across the Democratic party. Why not go
with her instead of Bernie Sanders?
NC: Well, you can make that calculation. I think it's up to individuals to
decide.
MH: But Bernie's got your vote, it's fair to say?
NC: If I were voting in the primary, I would vote for him. But I think
Warren would be a reasonable candidate, almost anybody you can think of, you
know, the next guy you meet in the street would be better than Trump.
MH: Of course, of course, even Joe Biden, what's your view of Joe Biden?
NC: (laughs) You know, he's a kind of a mild Obama. Nothing very special. I
suspect in a debate with Trump, I think he'd probably be overwhelmed just by
the showmanship and the deceit and the lies, but he'd certainly be better
candidate than Trump.
MH: I suspect you're right about him being overwhelmed. One of the things
that a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters point to, they say, "Look, Elizabeth
Warren says she's a capitalist to her bones. Bernie says he's a socialist."
Do you think it's accurate to describe Bernie Sanders, number one, do you
think is accurate to describe him as a socialist? And number two, how would
you define your own politics, your own ideology?
MC: Well, I don't think the word socialism should even be used in this
context. Bernie Sanders is a decent person. I like what he's doing. To be
quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President
Eisenhower very much. He's a progressive, New Deal Democrat. Politics has
shifted so far to the right during the neoliberal period that things that
were sort of conventional and mainstream 50-60 years ago now sound radical.
MH: So why do you think he calls himself a socialist given it's not going to
help him with the electorate? Why do you think he describes himself as a
socialist then?
NC: Well, you know, what does socialism mean these days? Socialism means the
New Deal. In the United States, you don't call it socialism because
socialism is a curse word. We're a very business-run society.
MH: That's my point. He uses the word to self-define in that way when it
doesn't really help him. And you're saying he's not one.
NC: He is if you want to use the term that way. Most terms of political
discourse have almost totally lost their meaning. So, Reagan is called a
free-market Republican. His administration intervened radically in the
market over and over for the benefit of the rich.
MH: So on that point then, dare I ask, how would you define your own
politics, your own ideology? Is there a label we could give you?
NC: By now I don't even like labels, but I've been more or less, I hate to
use the word because it's so misunderstood, but one or another form of
anarchist all my life and never saw any reason to change. Actually, I think
most people are anarchists in the traditional sense.
MH: How would you define that to someone listening at home saying, "Well,
what does that mean if Noam Chomsky is an anarchist?"
NC: Well, what does anarchism mean? And it's the whole long tradition
actually going back to classical liberalism. It fundamentally means
opposition to structures of authority and domination unless they can justify
themselves. Illegitimate structures of domination and hierarchy ranging from
paternalistic family to business which is a tyranny in which people rent
themselves as slaves, to international affairs. Anywhere across this domain
if you find illegitimate authority, it should be eliminated. I suspect most
people believe that. Of course, that means lots of consequences. It means
they should be opposed to private tyrannies. People who are called
libertarians in the United States, strange notion, very anti-libertarian,
are fundamentally calling for rule by unaccountable private tyrannies. I
don't see anything libertarian about that.
Mh: That's a very good point and I kind of know where you stand on the
economy and on foreign policy. What I'm wondering is where do you stand on
issues of political reform? Do you think it's time for the Democrats to take
action to fix the ridiculously undemocratic and archaic U.S. political
system, would you, for example, support abolishing the Electoral College and
the Senate filibuster? Would you back packing the Supreme Court to undo
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? Would you support statehood for DC and Puerto Rico?
NC: Well, you have to take each case on its own. Take the Electoral College,
that's bad enough, take the Senate. The Senate is one of the most
undemocratic institutions in the western world. Take a look at the number of
voters that each senator represents. If a country tried to enter the
European Union with the U.S. political system, they'd be turned down by the
European Court of Justice. I mean, there's a whole history here that has to
be thought of. The Constitution in the 18th century, though it was a pretty
conservative doctrine nevertheless, by the standards of the eighteenth
century was pretty novel and even progressive in some respects.
But to adhere to the 18th century constitution in the 21st century is a
pretty strange phenomenon. I mean, take the people who are called
originalists, you know the right-wing originalist Gorsuch and so on who say
we have to interpret the Constitution the way the founders and the framers
in the 18th century understood it. I mean, does that even approach
rationality? To discuss the modern world the way somebody in 1780 perceived
it?
MH: So you would like to see the Democrats take a much stronger line on some
of these issues, on changing some of this stuff?
NC: Well, you're living in the real world, not in some ideal world. We're
actually facing a constitutional crisis. The way the demography and the
political structure are organized, it's increasingly becoming the case that
a very small sector of voters, maybe 20% or so, who are white, often white
nationalist, Christian, often Evangelical, traditional, older, less
educated, rural, can actually run the country. And that can't be changed by
amendment, because there's enough votes in the small states to prevent it.
How do you deal with this? Well, you have to deal with it piecemeal in some
fashion. Maybe you'd like to say this very reactionary system should be
overturned. But that's like saying I'd like to have peace on earth.
MH: But you could do stuff like pack the Supreme Court which doesn't require
any constitutional amendments?
NC: That's a possible tactic, but even that wouldn't get you very far and it
could avert some of the extreme reactionary decisions of the Roberts Court,
which is the most reactionary in living memory. You'd have to go far back to
find anything like it. But the serious issues, like for example, the
un-amendable commitment to a radically undemocratic Senate, that's going to
be hard to change.
MH: Before we finish, you've lived through and documented, analyzed the
Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Reagan
era, the Iraq War, the financial crisis. Given that, how unique, how toxic
even, is this current political moment that we're living through right now?
NC: The current moment, not just political, is the most grim moment in human
history. We are now in a situation where this generation, in fact, in the
next few years, is going to have to make a decision of cosmic significance
which has never arisen before: Will organized human society survive? And
there are two enormous threats. The threat of environmental catastrophe,
which at least is getting some attention, not enough. The other is the
threat of nuclear war, which is increasing sharply by the Trump
administration, in fact. These have to be dealt with quickly. Otherwise,
there's nothing to talk about.
And notice that the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn't give a
damn. He's having fun. He's serving his rich constituency. So what the hell,
let's destroy the world. And it's not that they don't know it. Some months
ago, maybe a year ago by now, one of the Trump bureaucracies the National
Transportation Administration came out with what I think is the most
astonishing document in the entire history of the human species. It got
almost no attention. It was a long 500-page environmental assessment in
which they tried to determine what the environment would be like at the end
of the century. And they concluded, by the end of the century, temperatures
will have risen seven degrees Fahrenheit, that's about twice the level that
scientists regard as feasible for organized human life. The World Bank
describes it as cataclysmic. So what's their conclusion? Conclusion is we
should have no more constraints on automotive emissions. The reasoning is
very solid. We're going off the cliff anyway. So why not have fun? Has
anything like that ever appeared in human history? There's nothing like it.
MH: There's nothing like this administration in particular. One last
question before I let you go, you're about to turn 91 years old. You're
still going strong doing interviews like this one, teaching at the
University of Arizona. What keeps you going? What motivates you? I'm sure a
lot of people listening would like to know.
NC: What's the alternative? It's fine. It's easy, personal life. You know,
the political scene, the issues that have to be addressed, professional work
which is exciting, all the things in life that make life worth living.
MH: Do you ever get exhausted having to campaign and argue and debate and
push for these things decade after decade?
NC: Not really, just more incentive as time goes on.
MH: Professor Noam Chomsky, thank you so much for joining me on
Deconstructed.
NC: Very pleased to be with you.
MH: That was Noam Chomsky and that's our show! Deconstructed is a production
of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show
was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy
Reed is The Intercept's editor in chief.
And I'm Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you
haven't already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every
week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast
platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you're subscribed already,
please do leave us a rating or review - it helps new people find the show.
And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Thanks so much! See you next week.
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page