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At the age of 77, after decades as one of the world’s most widely recognized and controversial critics of American government, Noam Chomsky is still occasionally taken aback by the politics of his country. For more than 30 years, he has tracked the steady and dramatic shift to the right in the attitudes and actions of America’s leadership, a trend that, as he recently told the Georgia Straight in an extended interview, began as a predictable reaction in the early ’70s to the preceding decade’s wave of activism. Still, he admits, “I didn’t think it would go this far.”
Six presidents have come and gone since the renowned dissident and MIT linguistics pioneer published his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, in 1969. Yet the administration now governing surely counts as the most brazenly autocratic in that period. During their two terms, George W. Bush and his cohorts have taken virtually every step open to them to confine the powers of government to the Oval Office and its small coterie of appointed advisors. The result has undermined fundamental civil and human rights through such groundbreaking concepts as the USA PATRIOT Act and the suspension of habeas corpus. And all of it has served as scaffolding for a grimly innovative doctrine of unilateral military action that, as Chomsky argues in his latest book, Failed States, has radically weakened the fabric of international relations.
And yet, at the same time, Chomsky senses a growing openness in public political discussions that runs directly counter to this strong rightward current.
“I can see it in my own personal experience,” he says on the line from his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Last night I gave a talk, and the topics that I now discuss I could barely mention 10 or 20 years ago. It happened that this talk was on the Middle East, and I’d given another one a couple of days earlier. There were huge crowds. I was saying things that I couldn’t say in the past. When I talked about these topics even a few years ago, even in a place like Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Athens of America’, there had to be police protection, literally, because the meetings were being broken up and there were threats of terror. But now it’s just totally gone—I talk freely and engage people. And the same is true all over the country.”
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