[Peace-discuss] Chomsky: Americans are Outraged and Misguided

[C. G. Estabrook]

"The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment 
in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are 
in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic 
and political situation. More than half [of the US population] view the Tea 
Party movement favorably - a reflection of the spirit of disenchantment."

Americans are Outraged and Misguided
November 5, 2010
by Noam Chomsky
In These Times

The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment 
in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are 
in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic 
and political situation.

More than half the “mainstream Americans” in a Rasmussen poll last month said 
they view the Tea Party movement favorably—a reflection of the spirit of 
disenchantment.

The grievances are legitimate. For more than 30 years, real incomes for the 
majority of the population have stagnated or declined while work hours and 
insecurity have increased, along with debt. Wealth has accumulated, but in very 
few pockets, leading to unprecedented inequality.

These consequences mainly spring from the financialization of the economy since 
the 1970s and the corresponding hollowing-out of domestic production. Spurring 
the process is the deregulation mania favored by Wall Street and supported by 
economists mesmerized by efficient-market myths.

People see that the bankers who were largely responsible for the financial 
crisis and who were saved from bankruptcy by the public are now reveling in 
record profits and huge bonuses. Meanwhile official unemployment stays at about 
10 percent. Manufacturing is at Depression levels: one in six out of work, with 
good jobs unlikely to return.

People rightly want answers, and they are not getting them except from voices 
that tell tales that have some internal coherence—if you suspend disbelief and 
enter into their world of irrationality and deceit.

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more 
appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to 
ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right 
and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, 
like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Now Tea Party sympathizers are hearing that every institution—government, 
corporations and the professions—is rotten, and that nothing works.

Amid the joblessness and foreclosures, the Democrats can’t complain about the 
policies that led to the disaster. President Ronald Reagan and his Republican 
successors may have been the worst culprits, but the policies began with 
President Jimmy Carter and accelerated under President Bill Clinton. During the 
presidential election, Barack Obama’s primary constituency was financial 
institutions, which have gained remarkable dominance over the economy in the 
past generation.

That incorrigible 18th-century radical Adam Smith, speaking of England, observed 
that the principal architects of power were the owners of the society—in his day 
the merchants and manufacturers—and they made sure that government policy would 
attend scrupulously to their interests, however “grievous” the impact on the 
people of England; and worse, on the victims of “the savage injustice of the 
Europeans” abroad.

A modern and more sophisticated version of Smith’s maxim is political economist 
Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” which sees elections as 
occasions when groups of investors coalesce in order to control the state by 
selecting the architects of policies who will serve their interests.

Ferguson’s theory turns out to be a very good predictor of policy over long 
periods. That should hardly be surprising. Concentrations of economic power will 
naturally seek to extend their sway over any political process. The dynamic 
happens to be extreme in the U.S.

Yet it can be said that the corporate high rollers have a valid defense against 
charges of “greed” and disregard for the health of the society. Their task is to 
maximize profit and market share; in fact, that’s their legal obligation. If 
they don’t fulfill that mandate, they’ll be replaced by someone who will. They 
also ignore systemic risk: the likelihood that their transactions will harm the 
economy generally. Such “externalities” are not their concern—not because they 
are bad people, but for institutional reasons.

When the bubble bursts, the risk-takers can flee to the shelter of the nanny 
state. Bailouts—a kind of government insurance policy—are among many perverse 
incentives that magnify market inefficiencies.

“There is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday 
cycle,” economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson wrote in the Financial Times in 
January. “Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it 
out. This response teaches the financial sector: Take large gambles to get paid 
handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” 
through bailouts and other devices, and the financial system “is thus 
resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.”

The doomsday metaphor also applies outside the financial world. The American 
Petroleum Institute, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and the other business 
lobbies, has intensified its efforts to persuade the public to dismiss concerns 
about anthropogenic global warming—with considerable success, as polls indicate. 
Among Republican congressional candidates in the 2010 election, virtually all 
reject global warming.

The executives behind the propaganda know that global warming is real, and our 
prospects grim. But the fate of the species is an externality that the 
executives must ignore, to the extent that market systems prevail. And the 
public won’t be able to ride to the rescue when the worst-case scenario unfolds.

I am just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s 
descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, to borrow the words of Fritz Stern, the 
distinguished scholar of German history. In a 2005 article, Stern indicates that 
he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews “a historic 
process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found 
deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.”

The world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless 
lessons to keep in mind as we register the consequences of another election 
cycle. No shortage of tasks waits for those who seek to present an alternative 
to misguided rage and indignation, helping to organize the countless disaffected 
and to lead the way to a better future.

***

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. 
foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News 
Service/Syndicate.