This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
And, yes, our guest for the hour is Noam Chomsky,
the world-renowned political dissident, linguist
and author.
His latest book is Requiem for the American
Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration
of Wealth & Power.
Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to
ask you—those on the left are accustomed
to looking at the American government basically
as in the service of the capitalist class,
the politicians.
Occasionally, you had a Rockefeller or an
actual member of the capitalist class who
went into government.
But now, with this Trump administration, it’s
an extraordinary number of extremely wealthy
people have actually moved directly into government.
And yet you’re seeing this narrative that
they are attracting support from the white
working class of the country.
Could you talk about this, the capitalists
directly taking over the running of government?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, as you say, they’ve
run it all the time.
The simple measures, like campaign funding
alone, simple measure like that, is a very
close predictor, not only of electoral victory,
but even of policies.
That’s been true for a century.
And if you take a look at the analysis of
public attitude—a major topic in academic
political science is comparing popular attitudes
with public policy.
It’s pretty straightforward.
Public policy, you can see.
Popular attitudes, we know a lot about from
extensive polling.
And the results are pretty startling.
Turns out that about 70 percent of voters,
which is maybe half the electorate—about
70 percent of voters are literally disenfranchised,
the lower 70 percent on the income scale,
meaning that their own representatives pay
no attention to their—to their attitudes
and preferences.
If you move up the income scale, you get a
little more correlation, more—a little more
influence.
The very top, which is probably a fraction
of 1 percent, if you could get the data, it’s
where policy is set.
Now, the Trump administration is kind of a
caricature of this.
It’s always pretty much true.
But here they’re—it’s as if they’re
kind of purposely trying to flaunt the fact
that this country is run by Goldman Sachs
and billionaires, and nobody else counts.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Right, all of them.
I mean, it’s almost like a shocking parody,
as if they’re trying to show, "Yeah, what
we all know is true is dramatically true,
and we’re going to show it to you."
The interesting—an interesting question,
the one you raise, is: How are they maintaining
support among the people they’re kicking
in the face?
That’s not uninteresting.
And if you look into it, there’s a number
of factors.
One—first of all, many of the Trump voters,
white working-class voters, quite a few of
them voted for Obama in 2008.
You go back to the Obama campaign, the exciting
words were "hope" and "change."
I don’t usually agree with Sarah Palin,
but when she asked, "Where’s this hopey-changey
stuff?" she wasn’t talking nonsense.
It quickly became clear there’s no hope
and there’s no change.
And the working people were significantly
disillusioned.
You could see it right in Massachusetts, where—when
Kennedy died, you know, the "liberal lion."
There was going to be a vote for—to replace
him, 2010.
Amazingly, a Republican won, in Democratic
Massachusetts, Kennedy’s seat.
And union voters didn’t vote for the Democrats.
They were very upset by the fact that they
had been cheated, they felt, rightly, by the
Obama campaign of promises.
And they turned to their bitter class enemy,
who at least talks the words.
The Republicans have mastered the technique
of talking words as if you’re sort of an
ordinary guy, you know, kind of guy you’d
meet in a bar, that sort of thing.
It goes back to Reagan and his jellybeans,
and Bush, you know, mispronouncing words,
and so on and so forth.
It’s a game that’s played.
And it’s a con game.
But in the absence of any opposition, it works.
And what happens when there is an opposition?
That’s very striking.
The most astonishing fact about the last election,
which is the Sanders achievements, that’s
a break from a century of American political
history.
As I said, you can pretty well predict electoral
outcomes simply by campaign funding alone.
There’s other factors that intensify it.
Here comes Sanders, somebody nobody ever heard
of.
No support from the wealthy, no support from
corporations.
The media ignored or disparaged him.
He even used a scare word, "socialist."
Came from nowhere.
He would have won the Democratic Party nomination
if it hadn’t been for the shenanigans of
the Obama-Clinton party managers who kept
him out.
Might have been president.
From nothing.
That’s an incredible break.
It shows what can happen when policies are
proposed that do meet the general, just concerns
of much of the population.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he could still win
if he ran again?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there was a Fox News poll,
couple of days ago—Fox News—asking who’s
the—trying to ask who’s your favorite
political figure.
Sanders was way ahead, far ahead of anybody
else, with no vocal, articulate support among
the concentrations of power—media, corporations,
elsewhere.
In fact, if you look at policy preferences,
you see something similar.
We already mentioned the health issue.
That’s—and on issue after issue, much
of the public that is actually voting for
their bitter class enemy, if you look at the
policies, actually favor social democratic
policies, even environmental policies.
