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1. US policy has shifted far to the right? Really? Has he heard of Obergefell? Do you see theocracy on the horizon? Nope. Lets just say I want the drugs he is taking. The right existed long before the rise of money power and the arch-revolutionary Voltaire even recognized capitalism as a progressive force that superseded, as he perceived it, religious animosity. Sorry private power is on the left almost all the early French Enlightenment thinkers thought so.

   We need the state to restrain capitalism? What is Chomsky then? Nothing other than an orthodox marxist. The state will magically wither away when the market is tamed or destroyed.

   Iraq war was a crime, I agree, but when will Chosmky say that the CNT’s murder of priests and the petite bourgeoisie was more than a mistake or that the NVA’s murder of political enemies was more than a mistake?

   Lest we also forget this is coming from the man who was one of the lone defenders of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, one of the least justified invasions in history.

   Democracy without money power? Try an impossibility.

   Plato’s Republic Book VIII

   “Glorious indeed, he said. But what is the next step?
   The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy –the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government. “

   As Plato elaborates proletariat lust for money leads to them robbing the oligarchs, which in turn sets the precedent for the demagogue to rob the people of their possessions. Chomsky really is delusional there is no example in history of a democratic system of government that did not descend into anarchy (at this site pardon the term), vote buying, gerrymandering and ultimately tyranny. Rome and Athens are prime examples of this, but there are many others as Aristotle points out in his Politics. In short democracy is oligarchy taken to its logical conclusion.

   Chomsky just needs to retire gracefully, his model of society has never worked in history and his spotty record with left wing dictators should have discredited him long ago.

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   • I actually gave an interview to Press TV this morning about Chomsky’s interview with Abby Martin.

     I agree with Chomsky that by the standards of modern liberal industrial democracies, the Democrats are a centrist neoliberal party, although one that trends towards the cultural far left. I would also agree that the Republicans are “extremists” with regards to the neocons’ foreign policy. But I don’t think that makes them “conservatives” or even “right-wingers” in any conventional sense. I actually think Paul Gottfried may be right when he says that the Republicans are arguably to the Left of the Democrats, at least when it comes to their “wars for democracy” and all that. It’s true that the Republicans since the 1970s have brought a lot of cultural elements into their party that were previously on the margins, i.e. John Bircher types, the Moral Majoritarians, the “right-wing populist” types, unreconstructed segregationists, etc. But these sectors are on the bottom layer of the GOP in terms of their influence. The real power is the neocons, plutocrats, and military industrial complex.

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