Noam Chomsky on the responsibility to act against fascism
Noam Chomsky on the responsibility to act against fascism
An excerpt from Noam Chomsky's new book, and an interview with editor and coauthor Nathan J. Robinson on countering the threat of Trumpism and the way forward for the left
Tomorrow is Election Day, the close of the most consequential election of our lifetimes. Get out and vote, if you haven’t already, and if you’re looking to help others do the same, there are still plenty of canvassing and phone-banking opportunities. And if you’re still in doubt for any reason, Noam Chomsky has some advice for you.
As we’ve been discussing in the newsletter since earlier this year, significant groups of Arab and Muslim American voters (and voters on the left in general) in key states have withheld support for the Democratic ticket over continuing U.S. funding and military support for the Israeli government in the expanding war in Gaza and Lebanon — a position they see as differing little from what Republicans have to offer. Kamala Harris has been speaking forcefully about her desire to end the conflict, and key left and Arab American leaders have made the case that the most important electoral task is to stop Trump — something a vote for a third-party candidate offers no hope of accomplishing. With the stakes so high, a protest vote runs contrary to the very right to protest in the first place.
Chomsky — the leading analyst and critic of power and likely the most visible left public intellectual of the late 20th and early 21st centuries — has been, throughout his long career, both a key articulator of the notion that U.S. elites have long been in dangerous consensus on foreign policy and one of the loudest voices arguing against electoral inaction based on that analysis. He’s made the case in this newsletter and elsewhere that voting against fascism at home is a precondition for any progress on foreign policy. There’s nothing to be gained from letting a fascist regime take power, no matter what kind of message one might want to send to the Democratic Party, so vote for your right to protest (and in this election, that means voting for Kamala Harris, the only candidate who continues to argue for your right to disagree).
Chomsky has a new book out, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World. Written with Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson. Following a 2023 stroke that left him unable to work, Chomsky has withdrawn from public life, so this is likely to be his final original work. Drawn from collaborations with Robinson completed in 2022, along with notes and a postscript by Robinson, the volume stands as a time capsule, but a timely one. Its chapters update long-running Chomskyan arguments for the present day and for a new generation of readers.
We offer an excerpt below, along with a conversation with Robinson about the purpose of the book, why Chomsky’s message still resonates, and why his work remains a call for action — and for voting against fascism in America.
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What’s the story behind the book and how it came to be? This is likely to be Chomsky’s final book, but what do you hope for it to accomplish?
I had proposed the project to Professor Chomsky in part because I wanted a really definitive and clear statement of the message that he's had for over 50 years, which is so important. The subtitle is “How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.” He has been warning for decades that unless we in this country start to understand how others see us and we learn to perceive our conduct differently and see through the self-justifying myths that we tell ourselves, we pose a danger.
He goes through all of these instances in which the United States was convinced that it was on the side of good, but in fact, brought about what he argues — and I think proves — was an immense amount of evil and wrong and harm. And I think that's quite an urgent message.
On the one hand, you have well-intentioned public servants who do horrible things. And then you find people who actually have terrible goals, though they may pretend otherwise. And those are both at work in American foreign and domestic policy. And I'm wondering how you think about that tension.
I'm more interested in this puzzle than Chomsky has been. One of the things that I think is so provocative and interesting about his work and that makes this book more a statement of his own viewpoint than necessarily a book I might write is that he's always argued — and I think this is so worth grappling with — that he's not terribly interested in finding out what people's real motivations are. He’s interested in consequences and he says that we should evaluate actions morally by what their predictable consequences are. Even the worst criminals in human history always have a story about virtue, and it is impossible to know whether they are sincere and well-intentioned.
A question he’ll often ask is, was Mao was trying to starve millions of Chinese people? Does it matter? Do we really see it as mitigating his crimes if he didn't want that to come about? Is Putin sincerely convinced that he is fighting Nazis in Ukraine? And if he is sincerely convinced of that, does it affect our moral evaluation of his actions?
And the answer is probably not. We don't really conduct these evaluations when we are analyzing those we see as committing terrible crimes. It's only in the case of our own policymakers where we say, "Well… they had good intentions.”
There's an exchange reproduced in the book, between Marco Rubio and Samantha Power. It's an interesting one because Rubio's questions are in bad faith but Powers’s answers are also in bad faith.
So what happens in that exchange — this is during Power’s confirmation hearing in 2013 — is that she had written that the United States had committed crimes. And Marco Rubio is trying to get her to say what crimes she believes the United States has committed. And she ducks the question. She won't explain what crimes she says the United States committed. Instead, she retreats to a kind of, "Well, we make mistakes. We're not perfect. I think we're the greatest country in the world, but we're not perfect."
And one of the arguments that Chomsky has made for a long time is that within mainstream discourse if you look closely, you'll notice that there's a consensus that the United States is incapable of committing a crime because a crime requires a bad motive, and we don't have a bad motive. Therefore, we are only capable of errors and noble mistakes.
After the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the U.S. — it was a deeply negligent mistake; it wasn't intentional — George H.W. Bush said, "I will never apologize for America." And that's official doctrine. That there's something bad about apologizing. Which suggests that there's something bad about understanding.
How does the Chomskyan critique of political discourse, of media discourse about politics, work in this new world?
Well, I think this book is trying to answer that question or at least to propose that question for a lot of new readers in a new era. We talk about the discourse around China and the way that China is constructed as a threat that we need to prepare for the potential for war for, by Democrats, by Republicans, by major news organizations.
It was easier to see this when Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent, when there were three major news networks, and there was The New York Times. And if you wanted to do a media analysis, you could look at what's being said in the Times, what's being said on the news networks, and then you could say, "Well, this is what the media says." It’s a little harder to come to those conclusions about what the media says because there's been such a fracturing of media.
A lot of the same mechanisms that drive us towards wars have been consistent from World War II to the present day. One problem with a lot of this is it gets people who are on the left, especially, to check out of democracy domestically. It's very problematic for people who perceive a “uniparty” because there is a consensus on these important foreign policy questions.
You have to be able to find a way to square your view of foreign policy with what's going on domestically somehow, or else you're writing yourself out of the system and your ability to influence anything.
On the one hand, Chomsky has been one of the main proponents of the idea that both parties have underlying foundational consensus on a lot of stuff. And the differences between them are often kind of at the margins.
On the other, he was one of the people arguing most strongly with leftists who didn't want to vote for Biden over Trump because he has described Donald Trump as the worst criminal in human history. And yes, he's aware of the existence of Adolf Hitler. He says, "Because the climate consequences of the climate catastrophe will be so severe, in fact, the ultimate destruction wrought by Trump could be worse." So the way he manages to square that is to say, yes, there are strong commonalities in foreign policy, but the marginal differences can actually be quite big in terms of their impact on human beings.
And those impacts are far from marginal. Since Dobbs, women have already become second-class citizens in the United States. There's a deeply fascistic racial basis in all of the policy suggestions that we’ve heard from the Republican side. From a Chomskyan perspective, what is the way forward, for someone who wants to make a political difference, who is concerned that the foreign policy consensus between the parties remains?
You have to build a different vision of how things could be, one that isn't based on scapegoating and hatred, but that responds to people's genuine concerns and fears over the fact that you know their house could get washed away in a hurricane, or they could lose their job, won't have healthcare.
You've got to have something that really takes people's concerns seriously instead of pointing at the Haitians and saying, "This is all their fault.” And that means building a movement. A fundamental building block of what you might call a Chomskyan position is that protests can move governments, or at least can move people who can act within governments. And there had been a lot of moves to limit the ability to protest during the Trump years.
So yes, you can look at the limitations which are real and which are dangerous. On the other hand, one of the points of the concluding chapter of this book is that we do stand on the shoulders of people who worked very hard under incredibly difficult conditions to make the country better.
You know Chomsky is often accused of anti-Americanism. And one of the things he says in response to this is, "But actually, I admire a lot of the things that Americans have built. They have fought for their free speech. They have fought for their civil rights and civil liberties. And so there's this section in the book we’ve titled “The responsibility to act.” And it goes through some of the victories that activist movements have won. I would discourage people from feeling hopeless and despairing because there's actually an inspiring history to look to.
The entire point is that it's your job to criticize your own country. That's the First Amendment, right? And you're not even criticizing your country. It's literally the state. All of these things that we're talking about are actions by state and sometimes corporate power. It really is just a mistake to even say that it's a criticism of the country.
How Mythologies Are Manufactured
In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell made astute observations about how censorship of “unpopular ideas” can occur even where there is broad freedom of speech. Orwell is today famous for his critique of the way thought is controlled by force in totalitarian dystopias. His useful discussion of free societies is less known. In such societies, he says, censorship is not coerced by the state. Yet it nevertheless exists, and is effective at silencing those who dissent from “prevailing orthodoxy.” Explaining how it works, Orwell cited the internalization of the values of subordination and conformity, and the control of the press by “wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.”
Orwell was perceptive about how a democratic society could nevertheless produce intellectual conformity and stifle unpopular views. The press can be free in the sense that the government does not interfere with it. But if those who own the press choose not to elevate certain viewpoints, those viewpoints stand little chance of reaching the public. Those kinds of choices are made every day, and we can rationally expect information to reflect the biases and interests of those who own the media. Philosopher John Dewey identified a similar mechanism. Speaking of “our un-free press,” he observed the “necessary effect of the present economic system upon the whole system of publicity; upon the judgment of what news is, upon the selection and elimination of matter that is published, upon the treatment of news in both editorial and news columns.” We should ask “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.” (Not far, he thought.)
The United States is a remarkably free country when it comes to what it is legally permissible to say. Nevertheless, the mechanisms described by Orwell still operate, and shape what is actually heard and read. The major media corporations are not uniform in the views they present, nor do they reflexively endorse all state policies, but they do reliably reflect the assumptions and viewpoints of U.S. elites. They contain spirited criticism and debate, but only in line with a system of presuppositions and principles. These constitute a powerful elite consensus, which the individual actors have internalized mostly without conscious awareness.
One such unstated assumption, ubiquitous in U.S. political discourse, is the view that the United States has an inherent right to dominate the rest of the world. In fact, leading liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias calls this an “uncontroversial premise,” and says that outside of a few fringe “left-wing intellectuals,” the U.S. right to rule is considered axiomatic. “The United States has been the number one power in the world throughout my entire lifetime,” he says, and “the notion that this state of affairs is desirable and ought to persist is one of the least controversial things you could say in American politics today.” Yglesias himself accepts the premise, seeing no need to argue for it because it is so uncontroversial. He might have added that not only does no “elected official” challenge the view, but it is hardly ever challenged in the U.S. media. Even when there are debates over the wisdom of U.S. uses of force, rarely is any question raised of whether the U.S. has the right to use force.
Take Iraq. Once the invasion of Iraq began to produce an out-of-control bloodbath, there was plenty of criticism of the war in the U.S. media. But as Anthony DiMaggio documents in a useful study of media coverage of the “war on terror,” criticisms from mainstream liberal commentators focused on whether the war was being waged effectively, not whether the war was legitimate in the first place. Bob Herbert of The New York Times described the war as “mismanaged,” “not sustainable,” and “unwinnable,” with “no coherent strategy.” The editors of the Los Angeles Times criticized a “terribly botched occupation,” the botching rather than the occupation being the problem. Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said Bush “didn’t have enough troops” in the country. DiMaggio observes that these seemingly “anti-war” criticisms are in fact pro-war criticisms, because they highlight “military errors that, if corrected, might contribute to a more smoothly functioning occupation and war effort.” But, DiMaggio asks, “if the war is imperial and immoral, designed to secure control over oil rather than promote democracy, then why attack the administration for not effectively fighting it? Why complain that the war is ‘unwinnable’ or ‘mismanaged’ when Americans should not be trying to ‘win’ or ‘manage’ a repressive imperial war in the first place?”
It is permissible to suggest that the United States has made mistakes in attempting to achieve its goals, but there is no debate about the goals. So, for example, The New York Times, in an editorial assessing the Vietnam War after its conclusion, defined the scope of the debate. “There are those Americans,” the Times wrote, “who believe the war . . . could have been waged differently,” while others believe that “a viable non-Communist south Vietnam was always a myth.” The “ongoing quarrel,” they say, has not been resolved. The hawks said we could have won. The doves said we couldn’t. A debate on these grounds can be had.5 The words “misguided,” “tragic,” and “error” recur in commentary.
But what of another possible position: one that asserts that the United States had no legal or moral right to intervene in Vietnam to begin with. The U.S. did not “hope that the people of South Vietnam would be able to decide on their own form of government,” but prevented democracy from breaking out. It had no right to support France’s attempt to reconquer the country, or to violate the 1954 Geneva Accord and oppose the reunification of Vietnam through elections. The question “Could we have won?” is debated in the press, while the correct ones — “Did we have the right to try?” “Were we engaged in criminal aggression?” and “When will there be war crimes trials for those who waged an illegal war of aggression?” — are not. These questions are excluded from the debate, for which the Times sets the ground rules.
Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Prince- ton University, gives expression to the dominant view in Foreign Policy, writing that the “one constant” in our history is that “presidents frequently make oversights, miscalculations, and even egregious mistakes in handling national security.” Oversights. Miscalculations. Mistakes. The ends are not questioned. Only the means of achieving them, which might be reckless. One can go through the history of U.S. wars and see similarly narrow disputes over tactics that presume the legitimacy of U.S. global power. The spectrum runs from those who argue the war is being waged successfully to those who regard it as mismanaged. (This is the same spectrum of debate that exists in Russia around the war in Ukraine. There is harsh criticism of Putin for not prosecuting the war effectively, but not for waging it in the first place.) It is wrong to think that debates over whether a war is winnable or a blunder are actually debates about the war itself. After all, even Hitler’s generals could have criticized his war for its mistakes; that is, its failure to achieve the desired objectives. They could have done so with no less fanatical a commitment to Nazism than the Führer himself. In the German case, we recognize that strategic criticisms are not criticisms of the underlying objective; in fact, they are premised upon support of it. Yet in the United States, much passes for criticism of our foreign policy that is in fact mere strategic criticism, accepting the bipartisan consensus that the United States is constitutionally incapable of committing crimes.
The kind of liberal “dovishness” — questioning tactics but not goals — could be found in the press as the U.S.-backed Contras were terrorizing Nicaragua in the 1980s. The Washington Post, for example, criticized support for the Contras on tactical grounds. The fact that Nicaragua was a Soviet-style menace requiring confrontation was “a given.” Echoing the Reagan administration, the paper’s editorial board considered the Sandinistas “a serious menace—to civil peace and democracy in Nicaragua and to the stability and security of the region,” and agreed that we must “contain . . . the Sandinistas’ aggressive thrust.” But they felt that the “contra force is not a useful instrument to bring to bear.” It was not the “best available way” to undermine the Nicaraguan government. The legitimacy of our use of force was simply not up for discussion.
The Afghanistan war gave rise to the same kinds of concerns among liberal critics. MSNBC is considered a liberal network, supportive of the Democratic Party. Rachel Maddow, for a long time its leading host (and a self-described “national security liberal”), was plenty critical of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. But on tactical grounds. Maddow concluded that “if you believe that our actions, our American actions in 2010 cannot make it more likely . . . that there’s a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan is wrong.” In other words, the moral considerations center on the likelihood of our success, not the rights of Afghans.
When U.S. wars are over, there is virtually no national self-examination, except over whether the wars were blunders. As we have seen, popular narratives about the Vietnam War are exemplified by Ken Burns’s description that it was “begun in good faith by decent peo- ple out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.” As the carnage escalated in Iraq, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote that “Iraqis are paying a horrendous price for the good intentions of well-meaning conservatives who wanted to liberate them.”
As U.S. media critics Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi observe, the media’s retrospective characterization of the United States’ uses of force is that they were “unpleasant, imperfect, mistaken, but ultimately incidental by-products of a noble and righteous empire that, above all, meant well.” They show that once our wars become unpopular, “a cottage industry of punditry and pseudo-history emerges,” pushing the ideas that “it was an accident, they were mistaken, they had bad intelligence, they were driven by concerns for freedom and democracy.” Johnson and Shirazi liken the situation to a lawyer trying to get a client convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder, which is necessary because in U.S. mythology, enemy states are “Bond villains” who do evil things, while we are innocent do-gooders.
Many crucial issues and questions are simply not raised. Afghanistan and Iraq have all but disappeared from view. When we read that the United States has conducted a drone strike in Iraq, we are not told that the Iraqi government vigorously objected to the violation of its sovereignty, and there is no debate on the matter. Countries suffering from the long-term effects of our “interventions,” from Haiti to Laos, are covered superficially or not at all. The “unpeople” of the world might as well not exist.
Noam Chomsky’s latest book (written with Nathan J. Robinson) is The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.
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NOAM CHOMSKY is my heroe!!! What a beautiful brilliant mind.
I'm 72 years old and a long-time Star Trek fan. Although the original series can only be watched now by diehards (overacting and silly special effects by today's standards) the stories are worth revisiting. The Prime Directive was a compelling plot line. The Prime Directive prohibited Starfleet members from interfering with the natural development of alien civilizations. Captain Kirk, and other Starfleet captains over the years, violated the Prime Directive and there were interesting discussions about how and why. But in the end, the decisions to violate the Directive were based on a presumptive moral imperative as seen by the captain. I don't believe that violence solves any core problems. It may save innocent lives, but it doesn't solve the problems at the core of the violence. There are too many men that see violence as a way to achieve their goals, and their right to do so. The US is a young country and is still very immature; we need to grow up. I was very pleased to see President Biden apologize for Federal Indigenous Boarding Schools and how Indigenous Peoples were treated. We also need to apologize for the genocide of those same people that the US military engaged in.