Chomsky's Bagels
Benjamin Kerstein's
article in Front Page Mag points to a
Noam Chomsky recap of the election that reveals just how out of it the cunning linguist is.
The outcome was a disappointment, but there have been disappointments before. Take 1984, when essentially the same gang of thugs—a little less tilted to the extreme reactionary statist side—won by a 2-1 margin, with about the same percentage of the electoral vote as today. And they were engaged in horrendous atrocities abroad and very harsh and destructive programs for most of the population at home. The world didn’t come to an end. In fact, activism proved quite effective.
Hmmm, first of all, Reagan did not win by a 2-1 margin; he won by about 1.45-1. And Reagan's electoral vote win was far larger. Ronaldus Maximus got almost 98% of the electoral vote as compared to President Bush's 53%. I assume that the distinguished professor meant to say about the same turnout percentage as today, which would be reasonably true (56.1% of the voting age population turned out this year, as compared to 53.1% in 1984).
Later, Chomsky claims:
The progressive left is very substantial in scale, and could be far larger, including the large majority of the population, judging by highly credible public opinion studies that the press scarcely mentions, presumably because they understand that it is much too dangerous to allow people to understand that they are not alone in their views.
This is, of course, the "lost tribe of leftists" theory that is so popular in the "reality-based community". In this theory, there exists a huge, untapped base of support for far left positions that fails to show up at the polls every four years because no presidential candidate, even the Democratic nominee, is really speaking to them. If only the Democrats would nominate a true leftist candidate rather than these semi-Republicans like Al Gore and John Kerry, they would sweep to an easy victory. Chomsky makes this clear:
I don’t think that the Kerry campaign even tried to include the opinions of most of the population, including those who voted for Kerry. People will vote their class interests when they see some credible political force that might represent those interests. That’s not Kerry or the DLC.
Of course, Kerry is not affiliated with the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council). Indeed, one suspects that if the DLC had a candidate in the 2004 race, it was the much-maligned (among Democrats) Joe Lieberman.
