The Joe Walker Podcast - Recollections Of A Wild Man In The Wings — Noam Chomsky

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Noam Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics and one of the most cited scholars in modern history. He is also one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world, having written more than 150 books.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/chomskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by my weekend email. Every weekend, I send out a few interesting links, articles, and sources that I've been reading. Last weekend, for example, I shared five links, including Harry Frankfurt's classic essay-cum-book on bullshit, and John Keats' poem on first looking into Chapman's Homer. I'm going to read out the poem now because I love it so much, and if you don't want to hear it, you can just skip ahead. First, here's some context. Keats is my favourite of the romantic poets. Unlike many of the others, he came from modest means. He died at the age of 25 and wasn't hugely celebrated in his day, and yet in his short life, he achieved a mastery of words that could

rival Shakespeare. So who knows what else he could have achieved if tuberculosis hadn't taken him so young. So being of humble background, Keats didn't speak Greek. So he had never read Homer, that is, he'd never read Homer until his friend Charles Cowden-Clark gave Keats the 1616 translation by Chapman. They spent all night reading it, and it is said that Keats was shouting with joy as particular passages struck his imagination. He got home at 6am, and the poem was written by 10am. It describes the elation of epiphany. So here it goes. Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen. Round many western islands have I been, which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, that deep-browed Homer ruled

as his domain. Yet did I never breathe its pure serene, till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then I felt like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken. Or like stout Cortes, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific and with all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. How good. But I digress. To join my mailing list and get access to my weekend emails,

head to thejspod.com. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you back and what a thrilling conversation we have in store. In January 1967, with napalm raining over Vietnam, an orchestrator of the US strategy surveyed his handiwork. McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, asserted that the tactics of the war could be debated, but its strategy and justness were essentially settled. There are wild men in the wings, he said, but on the main stage, the argument on Vietnam turns on

tactics, not fundamentals. My guest was one of those wild men. A month later, in the New York Review of Books, he penned an essay titled On the Responsibility of Intellectuals, in which he argued that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. It was a declaration which may have at first seemed banal and truistic, but which is disturbingly one that is scarcely lived up to in practice. My admiration for our guest has only grown over the years. I admire him because he is a serious person. By serious, I don't mean mirthless. I mean someone who seeks to win arguments not by the intensity of their passions, but by the quality of their reasons. My guest is a serious person, an adult. He speaks truth to power. He roams the plains of the world, and he cares about other people.

At this moment, we need more serious people like Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics. He is one of the most cited scholars in modern history. In fact, his citations between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period, and the eighth most cited of all behind Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud, beating out Hegel and Cicero. Noam is also one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world, having written more than 150 books. I should say this was a tough conversation for me. Due to my non-podcasting day job, I wasn't able to prepare as much as I would like, and I had a call with a crucial US client at 4am on the Saturday morning. After a big week, I was so fearful that I would sleep through my alarm that I worked through the night,

taking the call at 4am and then speaking to Noam at 8am. Somewhat like Keats, but with less poem and more Noam. So, you'll hear me sleepless and slightly underprepared. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this conversation and I will forever cherish the hour I had with Noam. I'm thrilled that I get to share it with you. We wander from linguistics to his theory on manufacturing consent, from the principle of the responsibility to protect, to the roots of partisanship in the US. Without much further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, welcome to the podcast. Very pleased to be with you.

Noam, Aristotle defined language as sound with meaning. How does that definition hold up nearly two and a half millennia later? Well, that was Aristotle 2,500 years ago. By now it looks different, meaning with sometimes sound, sometimes something else, sometimes nothing. Most of the time it's just internal.

If I had never learned a language, if I'd grown up alone on an island, what would my thoughts be like? How would I think my thoughts? Probably wouldn't have any. There's a critical period for at least no thoughts in the sense in which we understand the term thought. I mean, the notion thought is so vague that there's nothing to say about it. You may recall in his famous article that founded the field of artificial intelligence,

Alan Turing, this is 1950, wrote a famous article called Can Machines Think? He started by saying that the question whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion. The reason is we have no conception of what thinking is. I think he went too far. We have a conception of what thinking and language is. That we have some idea about, we can say a good deal about. But right now there's two dogs at my feet. Something going on in their minds, whether that's thinking, there's no way to say. As for acquisition of language, there's pretty good evidence. We can't do tests, of course, just because it's not ethical. But it looks from the evidence around that if a child isn't exposed to some kind of language

within certain critical period, early years of life, it might not develop language at all, might lose the capacity. That's the case with other capacities like vision, walking. There's a critical period in which they have to be initiated. If it's not done, the system deteriorates. We don't know that for sure in the case of language because you can't do the tests. So we infer it from other faculties? There's some evidence, but it's very thin. For example, there's studies of a limited number of studies of people of the Helen Keller variety, people who lost sound and hearing, speech and hearing,

but who were able to pick up language by touch. It's a system called the DOMA, which the deafblind person, deafblind, sorry, put their hand on your face like this, and the thumb can determine whether the vocal cords are moving, and the fingers can pick up some of the gestures, facial gestures. And they can acquire a fair amount of language that way, sometimes very effective. Helen Keller was quite fluent.

But the experiments are limited, and the limited data that they have showed that they seemed to be successful only if the person had lost sight and hearing after about 18 or 20 months old, which suggests that in the earlier period they had already picked up a lot of language. And there is now pretty good evidence that two- and three-year-old children, although they can't produce much, have actually internally mastered most of the language. You can tell that by sophisticated experimentation. So that's the kind of evidence there is.

Noam, you believe that language is more likely to have evolved as a system for the expression of thought rather than for communication and i'm curious what you think is the best argument for the opposing view well the argument for the opposing view is that it's basically an argument from assumptions about Darwinian evolution, namely that other animals have communication systems, other apes have auditory systems that aren't very different from ours. They of course have the capacity to gesture. Many animals have a capacity to vocalize. And all of these systems are communication systems. So the general assumption is, well, somehow maybe human language evolved from these.

But there's no argument for it. It's just this assumption. When we look at the nature of language, when we study its character, it seems to turn out that the basic properties of language are structured so as to give a formulation of thought and the externalization into sensory motor another, into sensory motor systems, usually sound but it doesn't have to be, could be sign, could be touch, but the normal one is sound, it's more useful in all kinds of situations. Turns out that the externalization into this doesn't seem to affect the inner workings of the language. This is a controversial position. It's not widely held. It's my view, a few other people,

but I think now there's mounting evidence for it. If language is more likely to have evolved as a system for the expression of thought, I suppose that implies that Homo sapiens are the only creatures in the history of the planet to have thought thoughts? Yeah, it would. Incidentally, let me qualify the phrase expression of thought. It's a system for the formulation of thought. Expression is an externalization process, which seems to be added on so it looks like a system for the formation of thought and as far as we know it's unique in the history of life on earth and as far as we know it might be unique in the universe we don't know no i apologize for my next question because i'm asking you to outline something you've

probably outlined a thousand times before but just so that everyone's on the same page i was hoping you could give a brief outline of universal grammar universal grammar is the term is misunderstood. There is a traditional notion of universal grammar which goes back centuries. That's referring to properties that are common to all languages. It's kind of a descriptive system. But universal grammar in the modern sense, last 70 years or so, just means the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty. It's obvious that the language faculty is genetically structured. It's part of us

but not part of my dogs. So it's part of my, somehow it's coded in my genome. And universal grammar is just a name for the theory of this system. Doesn't the claim that language has a genetic component miss the bigger story about how we're fundamentally different to other animals? If it was just language that set us apart, then why are pointing and pantomiming both unique to humans and also found across all human cultures? Well, human culture grows out of many things. Language is at the core of it. If you don't think in language, you don't go beyond to develop a cultural system. Of course, it's a little bit misleading.

You can say that other animals have a culture too, their own culture. Insects have a certain framework of social behavior in which they functioned call that their culture if you want but anything remotely like human culture would require language and require thinking planning reflection and so on should we think of language as like a tangled up part of a unified cognition or is it like a snap-in module these are pretty vague notions i mean language is one of our cognitive systems okay that means it it certainly draws from roots which hold in other cognitive systems in fact it, it's based on cells. At some point, it's part of the general organism. But it seems to have quite unique properties that are not shared

by other cognitive systems. And in fact, there's pretty extensive work since the pioneering work of Eric Lenneberg back in the 1960s, published the famous book that founded the modern biology of language. It's called Biology of Language, 1968, I think. His work showed dissociations between language capacity and other cognitive capacities, meaning people who've had a full or at least well-functioning language faculty, but very limited or almost non-existent other cognitive faculties and the other way around rich cognitive faculties with no linguistic faculties well since his time the last almost 50 years there's been a lot of research into this and it turns out that there are very sharp associations between language competence and other cognitive faculties, both directions.

That is one reason to regard, to think that language is unique in its properties. The other is just by looking at the nature of the system, and looking at the nature of other cognitive faculties, and they seem to be very different in structure. One of the reasons it's difficult to study the neuro… first of all, other cognitive capacities are often pretty much shared among others in the animal kingdom, not entirely but substantially. Language, on the other hand, seems to be without any analogy. You can't find any of its properties in systems of other animals at just about every level. That's one of the reasons why it's hard to study the neurophysiology of vision, but that's by experimentation with cats and monkeys. Whether rightly or not, we have allowed ourselves to do invasive experiments with cats, monkeys, macaques, apes, and so on. And humans have about the same visual system. So

we learn about the human visual system by studying other animals. You can't do that with language. There's nowhere to look. No other organism has any similar system. So it seems to be dissociated and when we look at its internal nature, it has properties that we don't find elsewhere in the organic world. The phenomenon of shared intentionality, Mike Tomasello's notion that we engage in collaborative activities in which we share psychological states, so we kind of cooperate together. How do you think about that and its implications for universal grammar? There are many cooperative activities. It doesn't tell us anything about universal grammar. Remember, universal grammar is, by definition,

the theory of the genetic component for the language faculty. Other human activities don't affect that theory. It's something about our internal computational systems, how they work. Language is at its root a computational system. You have in your head a system of computation that tells you for an infinite number of structures what their interpretation is, what thought they express, and how they can possibly be externalized. That's a computational system, a system of what's called discrete infinity, like the number system. There's a six-word sentence, a seven-word sentence. There's no six-and-a-half-word sentence.

That's a computational system for discrete infinity. These kinds of systems are understood pretty well since the 1940s or 1930s. There was a lot of very important mathematical work, Turing and others, which laid the basis for the theory of computation, including computational systems like language. So it is such a system. Now, there are vaguely similar systems elsewhere, even with, say, insects. Like an ant can count the number of steps it's taking. So it has something like a counter in its head. If it took 35 steps away from the

nest, it can take 35 steps back and knows where it is. But that's nothing like the computational system for language. We have no real analog to that. It's just not an evolutionary problem. The approach to language as a system of communication is based on a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, which traces back to Darwin. Darwin made a famous comment in Origin of Species, saying that every capacity that's developed in every organism has to be by slow incremental steps.

And if that's ever shown to be wrong, he said, my whole theory will collapse. Well, it's now known that it's wildly wrong. There are many saltational steps in evolutionary theory. Small mutation, small mutation, minor mutation can lead to substantial phenomenological phenotypic effects. In fact, accidents that happen in evolution can have huge effects. Complex cells. Why aren't we all bacteria? For a long part of life, all there was was bacteria, single-celled organisms.

By accident, one of these bacteria swallowed another microorganism, just accident. That led to the structure of complex cells. It wasn't step-by-step, small increments. Big changes take place from small events. So the appearance of a system of computation over discrete infinity, even if it didn't appear anywhere else, is not an evolutionary miracle. You have to figure out just what's the neurophysics involved in it, but that's all. Evolutionary biologists see no problem with this can mention Nobel laureates who said sure that's probably the way it is so if language is a computational system of a discrete infinity what are

its basic units its basic units yeah the. The minimal meaning-bearing units, they're sort of like words, but they're not words. So if you take a word like, say, John ran home, the word ran actually is a composite of a number of meaning-bearing elements. One is the substantive element of running, the other is past tense, the other is you don't hear it but either singular or plural and so on. All of that is part of our, are the meaning bearing units. Sometimes they show up phonetically, sometimes they don't. So they're sort of like words, kind of word-like, but not really. There are languages in which a word is a whole sentence. Noam, I was hoping to ask you some questions about your life and career,

and this is going to be very discursive, so I apologize for jumping around so much. What does it mean to be an intellectual? as somebody stress regarded, as somebody who's in a position where they have the right and authority to speak about general issues of human interest. If you take away the word regarded, then you see that the term intellectual doesn't mean much. You can have a, I mean, I've met people, known people, big influences in my life, who never graduated elementary school and qualified as very articulate,

insightful intellectuals. It's not a, it's kind of a social category it doesn't mean very much you can have people who are called intellectuals are totally empty-headed just repeat what they're told who's an example of one of those people who was an influence who didn't have the usual pedigree? Well, just personal experience. When I was growing up as a child, the family was first-generation immigrants. One uncle who never got past fourth grade

was one of the most literate, thoughtful people I ever met. In fact, he ended up being a rather distinguished lay psychoanalyst in New York with a considerable practice, very widely read, lots of experience. When I was a child, a major influence in my life, but literally never went past fourth grade. And I've met other people since. In fact, if you look at history, you see plenty of it. So if you look at, say, labor history,

there's a rich documentary record of the labor press in the 19th century. The writing is very sophisticated, thinking is sophisticated. There were people who were trying to develop a conceptual framework to explain why wage labor is basically no different from slavery. That was the leading thesis. And these are people who never went to school, barely literate, but were able to read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, think about the labor theory of value, ask how it could be reshaped and reinterpreted into a basis for their struggle against the attack on their rights and human dignity by being forced into the industrial system. And it's very sophisticated. But these were people who never had formal education. The other day, I reread Keats' poem on first looking into Chapman's Homer, where he describes the experience of discovering the works of Homer for the first time. And I was wondering if there were any books or texts or sources that gave you a similar experience as a young man.

Too many. Too many to mention. Do any come to mind? Well, as a young kid maybe 10 or 11 years old when I was old enough to start to go to the library by myself I'd come home with a stack of

books on all sorts of topics Russian and English novels, books on history philosophy, all sorts of things and it all had a major influence, I can't point to particular things. Actually, as a student, graduate student, my main education was having a desk in Widener Library, a great library at Harvard University, but just a desk in the library and the ability to kind of wander around through the stacks

and pick books up and read them and follow them. That's a tremendous education. I don't want to suggest, incidentally, that a formal education is not worthwhile. It is, but the point is there's plenty of examples of people who became highly educated, very productive and creative without much of a formal education. How much of a formal education did Homer have, for example? Well, we don't know, I guess. Maybe he had a very good one. Or maybe they had a very good one.

Manufacturing Consent is dedicated to an Australian man, Alex Carey. Who was Alex Carey? And why is the book dedicated to him? Well, in the first place, he was a very close friend. Secondly, he did very important work. He's an Australian social scientist who broke open the field of corporate propaganda that had never really been studied seriously before. He did some very important work on it, including a book called Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, which is a study of business propaganda and the way it works, which is an innovative breakthrough in the field. He also did other things.

He was with the Australian contingent in Vietnam, and he wrote about atrocities being carried out by the Australian forces as part of the general system of massive atrocities carried out by the American invasion, which was also pretty much of an eye-opener in Australia. So much of an eye-opener that I doubt that anybody even reads it. You might look. And he went on to do other work of considerable interest in many areas. But the main topic was what I mentioned, his innovative really breakthrough on the nature of corporate propaganda. And that book is a classic, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.

I met him, I forget how, but we became close friends and invited him to MIT. He visited a number of times, stayed there. We just became personal friends and also colleagues in work. Ed Herman also knew him. Who was your co-author for Manufacturing Consent? Well, Manufacturing Consent is, in a a way an expansion of his work which is why we dedicated to him right yeah he he wrote the first four chapters is that right um the book begins by just setting out the framework which is incidentally mostly ed Herman's work. Herman was a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

His main scholarly work was on corporate power. In fact, he has a major book in the field called On Corporate Power. The institutional analysis at the beginning is an outgrowth of his kind of work. After that, the book is mainly a set of case studies in which we look into particular cases which illustrate, we try to pick cases which are very prominent, first of all, so not arcane, and which are presented as cases where the media really performed very effectively and with great merit. And we tried to show that in each of these cases, the work presented was framed in such a way as to support and sustain a doctoral system that reflects the needs and interests of the systems of power.

Now that there's a good bit of distortion, omission, and so on in doing so, we went through case after case we've done the same thing elsewhere in other books this book happens to be particularly specifically dedicated to that correct me if i'm wrong but i think the last time you were in australia was 2011 sounds about right for the um collecting the sydney peace prize do you have a sense of australians and australian culture like what do you think of when you think of australia i think mostly of my friends and associations. Yeah.

I spent, that was an interesting trip. I was invited. I mean, I've been in Australia a number of times, but if the trip that I think you're thinking about, I was invited by Jose Ramos Horta, the Association of East Timor Refugees. And I basically was giving talks for them in Sydney, Melbourne town halls, Canberra, meeting with press and so on.

But essentially trying to present their issues and concerns and open up ways for them to reach a general Australian audience with their message, their cultural messages, the account of what the horrible atrocities that were being conducted in East Timor with the support, unfortunately, of the Australian government and decisively the United States. That was a very meaningful trip. What do you think of the principle of the responsibility to protect the intellectual architect of which was former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans.

That's what's believed, but the truth is a little bit different. There are two versions of responsibility to protect, R2P as it's called. One version of R2P is the official one, which was established by the UN General Assembly in a General Assembly resolution on responsibility to protect. That's the official version. It could explain what it says. There's a second version by the Gareth Evans Commission, separate. That one is pretty much like the official one, but with one crucial difference. qualifies in any way the UN Charter and its provisions about military intervention. They stand unchanged, okay?

And they explicitly bar any form of military information intervention except under authorization by the Security Council, or famous article 51, if you're under direct armed attack and don't have time to respond to reach the Security Council and everything, you can defend yourself. That's it. The Evans proposal is the same as the universal one with one exception. It says, the wording is something like this, that regional organizations have a right to intervene militarily in their regional area with subsequent approval of the Security Council. Well, ask yourself, which regional organization is capable of doing this? One, NATO.

What's its regional area? The world. So what Evans was saying is NATO has the right to use military force at will anywhere in the world, calling it humanitarian, hoping for subsequent authorization by the Security Council. Now, if you look at the way R2P is dealt with in the major literature, scholarly media and so on, it's very much what you said. It's considered the Evans version, which gives the West the right to use military force at will. Okay.

That's the version that's regarded publicly and even in scholarship as R2P, but it's not, it has no authority whatsoever, no status whatsoever, except what's granted to it by power. And if you look at the ways it's used, it's used in ways that have absolutely no justification and have often been highly destructive. So yes, there is a real responsibility to protect, but it's what in the General Assembly resolution, I think 2005, roughly then. This incidentally is a very nice example

of manufacturer of consent. The facts which are very explicit and clear are reshaped and reformulated in order to grant the powerful states of the West the right to do whatever they feel like. What are some other more recent examples of manufacturing consent? Plenty of examples right on the front pages. Any particularly egregious ones? Well, take, for example, one of the major issues on the front pages is Iran's nuclear weapons programs and how to deal with them. There was a joint agreement reached, the JCPOA,

an agreement with Iran. It's P5 plus one, the five Security Council veto-wielding countries plus Germany, along with Iran, reached an agreement. This was 2016. The agreement has the force of international law. It was authorized by the UN Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution saying that no country may violate the JCPOA. That's international law. The Trump administration decided to pull out in radical violation of the Security Council resolution.

Iran didn't respond at first. It then began to respond. And also, Trump imposed very harsh sanctions on Iran designed to destroy the economy. Europe didn't like it. They didn't like it at all. When the United States imposes sanctions, they are what are called secondary sanctions. Everyone has to adhere to them, not just the sanctioned country. The reason is called power. The United States controls the international financial system. If European countries violate US sanctions, they're thrown

out of the international financial system. Actually, you can read an article about it in the front pages of today's New York Times. Europe's trying to get out of this somehow can't. So there are secondary sanctions imposed on Iran illegally, no justification. But that's considered the framework for discussion. So when Joe Biden came in, if the US were a law-abiding state, which of course it's not, if the United States were a law-abiding state, Biden would just come in and say, we're returning to the joint agreement, we're withdrawing the sanctions. Not even thought about, not even discussed, not even considered an option.

The only options that are discussed is what Iran can do to make moves which will convince the United States to relax the sanctions somehow. That's manufacture of consent. In fact, it goes well beyond. Ask yourself a simple question. What is the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons? Why this whole fuss? What are we talking about?

It's considered one of the gravest threats to world peace. Well, there's an answer to that that comes from US intelligence. What are we talking about? It's considered one of the gravest threats to world peace. Well, there's an answer to that that comes from U.S. intelligence. They say, if Iran is developing, this is years ago, before the JCPOA, saying, if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which we don't know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Right? It would be part of their deterrent strategy. Why does Iran need a deterrent strategy? Because it's surrounded by enemies which are vastly more powerful in military terms. The Gulf states vastly outweigh Iran in military capacity. Israel, of course, far greater than any of them with a huge nuclear capacity. United States behind them.

So, of course, surrounded by enemies. So they have a deterrent strategy. What countries are worried about a deterrent strategy? Countries that don't want to be deterred. Which countries don't want to be deterred? The countries that want to rampage freely in the region. Who are they? The United States and Israel.

So the problem of Iranian nuclear weapons, if they existed, which they don't, it would be that they might deter the United States and Israel from their aggressive and violent actions. How often do you read that in the newspapers? Well, that's manufacturer of consent. And it goes beyond. Let's imagine for a moment that Iranian nuclear programs are a danger. Is there a way to deal with it? A peaceful way without sanctions, without the threat of war? Yeah, very straightforward. Establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East with extensive inspections, which are very successful. We know that from the JCPOA. No problem, no technical problem. So establish a nuclear weapons-free zone.

Is Iran opposed? Iran has been advocating it strongly for years. Arab states strongly in favor of it. The Global South, G77, strongly advocates it. Europe doesn't raise any objection. I don't know what Australia's attitude is. When it comes up in international fora, the United States vetoes it.

The last one was Obama. Why? Because it does not want Israel's nuclear weapons to be inspected. In fact, the United States does not even recognize officially that Israel has nuclear weapons, because if it did recognize it, U.S. law comes into play. Countries that develop nuclear weapons outside the framework of international agreements, the United States is barred by U.S. law from providing military and economic aid to them. Neither political party wants to open that door. There's no international commentary on it

in the West or in the United States. It's under a ban. Perfectly straightforward way for the United States to adhere to international law, return to the JCPOA, and go well beyond to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone, which would end any conceivable threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. That sounds pretty straightforward. Have you read a word about it? That's manufacture of consent right in front of our eyes. Plenty of it all the time. I want to ask a few questions about America's current political moment. Why did the left substitute identity for labor? Why did they do it? Partly for good reasons, partly for bad reasons. The identity issues are very real.

Racism, misogyny, all of these things are very real. In the 1960s, it was a major breakthrough on recognition for the first time of the hideous history of Afro-Americans, the destruction, the genocide of the indigenous population, the repression of women. All of these things came to the fore. That's very positive, very positive. And it extended in later years. But then comes the second half of your question. The repression of labor and class issues in general. That's wrong.

Not only wrong in principle, but completely wrong if you want to improve the world. The labor movement has been at the forefront of positive, constructive developments over a wide range of areas back to the origins of industrial society. And that's why, exactly why, Reagan, Thatcher, others want to crush the labor movement. They don't want working people to have any way of defending themselves against the neoliberal assault that was launched 40 years ago. So the Democrats abandoned any commitment to labor back in the 1970s.

Now they're a party of affluent professionals oriented towards Wall Street and the donor class. Republicans are just off the spectrum. They just became a radical insurgency, which is slavishly working for the super rich in the corporate sector. And the only way it can mobilize a voting base is by exploiting racism, xenophobia, and so on. That's pretty much the political system. Now, talking about the left, a bad mistake in principle and in tactics was in pursuing identity politics at the cost of abandoning class issues. Shouldn't have done that. They all interrelate. They should be

part and parcel of the same message. Plenty of people on the left are doing that, incidentally. They're not the ones who make the headlines. What happened to US foreign policy and why did it turn inwards? For example, why did the US abandon Hong Kong? Under Trump? Well, you have to understand something about Trump. Trump has a very simple ideology. You can spell it out in two letters, M-E. His ideology is me, okay?

Now, he's a clever politician he knows that if he wants to keep himself in the headlines make himself the center of attention so on first of all he has to satisfy his

major constituency which is extreme wealth and corporate power. They're willing to tolerate his antics as long as he lines their pockets. So he has to make sure that all of his legislative programs are designed to enrich the very rich and empower the corporate sector. And if you look, that's exactly what it is. Right down the line, all the legislative programs have this property. and empower the corporate sector. And if you look, that's exactly what it is. Right down the line.

All the legislative programs have this property. He has another problem. He has to have a voting base. You can't go to the voters and say, look, vote for me because I want to screw you. I want to steal from you. I want to take everything you have and give it to the rich and powerful, so vote for me. Somehow that doesn't work. So you have to keep quiet in the background

what you're doing to the people. And you have to come front and say, make America great again. Let's get rid of these immigrants who are wrecking our society. Let's get rid of these minorities who are destroying our traditional life. Let's get rid of these foreigners who are stealing from us. If you have no ideas in your head and you want to make a splash, there's only one thing you can do, wreck. So wreck everything around. Destroy the arms control regime. Destroy the Paris Agreement. Destroy the World Health Organization.

Anything that's around, just smash it up with your wrecking ball. Then you're at the center of attention. Meanwhile, keep your primary constituency satisfied and somehow mobilize a voting base on the basis of extracting all of the poisons that run under the surface in the society and bring them forward. He's done it very well. It's very effective. It worked almost perfectly until January 6th this year. And then something very striking happened. On January 6th, the people who own the society and run the party and who he works for told him, too much, get lost. Just like that, almost unanimously. Chamber of Commerce, CEOs of major corporations, said straight out January 6th, you've gone too far.

We don't want you destroying the stability of the government. So they kicked him out. He left. It was striking to see what happened in the Senate, the Senate, which is highly dependent on corporate contributions. Mitch McConnell, the major Republican figure who runs the Senate, which is highly dependent on corporate contributions, Mitch McConnell, the major Republican figure who runs the Senate, started running for the exits, immediately started condemning Trump. But they didn't run too far, because when they got to the exits, they ran into this raging mob who worshiped Trump. He pretty much owns the voting base.

So they're stuck. And it's a very interesting crisis for the Republican Party. Which way do they want to go? Are they going to let Trump take it over and turn themselves into a raging mob of angry people who incidentally have some reason for their rage. They've been, many of them, badly harmed by the neoliberal programs, including Trump's program, so they're enraged.

Or are we going to go with the people who own the world and tell us what to do and are our masters? And they're caught in the middle. You can see it playing out right now. Democrats have their own problems. But Trump had a major effect on the world. He had to be taken seriously because U.S. powers are enormous. So when he imposes sanctions on Iran, Europe may complain.

They don't like it at all. But they comply because of U.S. power. When Trump proposed his greatest deal of the century for the Middle East, if any other country had proposed that, say China or Germany or anyone, if people had paid any attention at all, they would have just left, forgotten, and moved on. When the United States proposes it,

that becomes the basis for further discussion. That's hegemonic power. We have to recognize that international affairs are pretty much like the mafia. When the godfather makes a pronouncement, people don't object or else they're in trouble. Now, U.S. power is declining in the world, has been given further blows by Trump, but it's still overwhelming. You can see it in things like this. who had enough understanding to know that he could mobilize a voting base by extracting every poisonous current in the society.

Racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, name it. And attacks on Christianity. A lot of it's Christian right, remember. A large part of it is Christian nationalist. A secretary of state is an evangelical Christian. Vice president, evangelical Christian. Pompeo, the secretary of state, is so extreme that he actually said that God sent Trump to Earth to defend Israel against Iran. And people didn't laugh.

That's, well, sorry, but that's a fact. And a large part of the anti-science mentality comes out of the extremist religious sector of the society that's been raised to prominence by the Republican Party because they needed a voting base. And in an extreme form by Trump, he gets almost all the evangelical vote and the white supremacist vote. So it's a very successful demagogue. He's not alone in the world. There are others, but this is an unusually successful case. And what's going to happen now, you can kind of predict. The Republicans understand very well that they cannot win a democratic election. They lose the popular vote just about every election way back but they maintain power by other means there are structural problems in American society which are radically

undemocratic so the Senate for example the state of Wyoming with 600,000 people has the same number of representatives as California with 47 million people. If you look at the particular states, you'll notice the Republicans win most of the counties, but lose the vote. They win the counties because they're scattered, rural, traditional counties, traditional white, Christian, conservative, and so on. That gives them inordinate control. What they're trying to do now, there are actually about 250 bills that have been instituted in state legislatures since January to try to curtail voting rights to prevent the wrong people from voting. Minorities, Afro-Americans, the poor, try to work things out so that they can't vote. Then maybe they can maintain power.

Meanwhile, the Senate, McConnell, is following a policy which he was kind enough to announce when Obama was elected in 2009. McConnell said, our duty is to make the country ungovernable, to make sure that the country cannot be governed. That's our duty. So we'll block everything in every way possible. And then maybe we can come back to power, because the country will be a wreck and they'll blame the administration. Same thing they're doing now.

Take what just happened on the stimulus bill. Almost all the Republicans favor the provisions in the bill. The country desperately needs them. Their constituents want them, But they all voted against them Without one exception Just like the old communist party You get the orders from the Kremlin That's the way you vote

That's what we're going to see And Trump will cooperate He has the voting base in his pocket He will of course want the country to be ungovernable. McConnell wants it for his own reasons. They can hope to come roaring back in the midterm elections in 2004 if the country really collapses. McConnell was destructive politically for exactly the reasons he said. He wanted to make sure that the republicans come back into power and the way to do it is to prevent obama from carrying out anything constructive

so for example after the uh the financial crash the housing crash and financial crash country very much needed an economic stimulus. The Republicans wouldn't permit it. They put a barrier on it. They managed to control Congress by 2010. They just prevented any adequate stimulus. When they're in power, like under Trump, they were willing to pour money into the economy, no matter what the debt is. It's a very characteristic position of the Republicans since 50 years.

If the Democrats are in power, we can't spend money because of the danger of the debt growing. If we're in power, we throw money away without any concern. It doesn't matter about the debt or anything else. That's been characteristic for 50 years. Trump was just continuing it. What's the cure for America's political polarization? Political polarization is a little bit of a misleading notion. The Democrats are moderately to the right of where they traditionally were. The Republicans are out in outer space. That's the polarization.

If you take a look at international comparisons, there are some. The Democrats are ranked roughly with the centrist parties in Europe. The Republicans are ranked with the extreme parties of neo-fascist origin. Just take a look at the comparisons. It's not polarization. It's polarization in one direction. I guess I just want to know, you've been on this amazing intellectual journey over the last nine decades and it's continuing. What has this felt like for you?

Just like it does now. There are major problems to deal with. There are things we can do. We have to grasp the opportunities and do them. It's a constant struggle. There's a major struggle going on constantly. It's basically a basic class war, if you want to look at it that way in general terms.

And if you let the rich, powerful win, it'll be highly destructive. So therefore, you have to struggle against it. And you can. And there are successes. There's prospects for the future. So grasp them and go ahead. Noam Chomsky, thank you so much for joining me. Pleased to be with you.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Two things before you go. One, if you want to read the transcript or the show notes for this episode, you'll find them on my website, thejspod.com. Number two, please subscribe to the show. It means that you won't miss new episodes like this one, and it also makes it easier for other people to find us, and I would appreciate your help. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our dehydrated video editor is Al Fetty. I'm Joe Walker. Until next week, thank you for listening.

Ciao.