I’ve been referring to admins from Reagan to the present. I think the pushback was caused by realpolitik.
For example, here’s what Chomsky says about them, at least until 2003.
And given what happened in Libya and elsewhere, he’d would have said the same things about Obama. And yet he said he’d vote for Clinton over Trump:
and even challenged Zizek’s claim about Trump:
Keep in mind that that’s the same Clinton who laughed at what happened in Libya:
which was part of the Obama doctrine:
In short, like most Chomsky can only vote for what he argues is the lesser of two evils. That’s realpolitik, especially in light of what one former President considers is the most warlike country in at least modern history:
and part of Chomsky’s list of war criminals.
And then there’s neoliberalism:
where the same dollar used as a reserve currency has been propped up for the past seven decades through military intervention and onerous foreign policies in order to maintain heavy borrowing and spending.
I’ve read Chomsky. I don’t listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos, but I did read Manufacturing Consent. The whole book, cover to cover.
His theories were relevant at the time and Manufacturing Consent makes some great points about how the media sets the parameters of societal conversation.
But it hasn’t been relevant for awhile, not since the Republican Party became a criminal organization.
This is a debate that would’ve been interesting 20 years ago, but it’s very dated now.
I share links to podcasts and videos because I don’t want to share links to scanned copies of books.
About your conclusion, on the contrary, I think Chomsky has become increasingly relevant in time, more so given the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, a two-decade war that cost trillions in dollars and probably another million people dead.
I don’t think the Republican Party became a criminal organization recently. I think it’s been one for a long time, together with the Democratic Party. As Chomsky, Johnson, and others have been explaining, the U.S. has been engaged in empire-building for several decades, and at the expense of many worldwide.
Just as important is the possibility that most Americans don’t know about this and probably even don’t care, which is why for them not only is this issue dated but at best only interesting. What’s more important for them are domestic issues, and preferably those that carefully avoid what they don’t want to hear, which is what I just shared.
Sane conservative want to paint the room red. Democrats want to paint the room blue. Today’s Republicans question deny that the room needs painting. In fact, they question the existence of paint.
The USA is our house. We need to pick a decorator, one that will make our house reflect our values and visions.
Decorator Blue, has lots of ideas for your house, Many people like Decorator Blue’s ideas, he’s very popular, but it’s a big house with a lot of people living in it. Some of those people really hate Decorator Blue’s color schemes. Some of those people really don’t want Decorator Blue anywhere near their house.
But we have Decorator Red competing for the job as well. He doesn’t know much about decorating but he knows that some people hate Decorator Blue’s idea. So Decorator Red has an idea of his own. Just one. That idea is “Burn the house to the ground so Decorator Blue will NEVER be able to decorate it”. It’s an easy idea, one that requires no planning or vision, and Decorator Red will always change the subject back to how horrible Decorator Blue is when you ask him if he’s going to build a new house after he burns down the old one.
But he has no competing ideas of his own, he used to but not enough people liked them so he got angry and bitter and came up with a plan to trick the stupid people living in the house into burning it down.
Unfortunately, there are enough stupid people in the house to make it work.
Certainly the US has come closer to the imperial threshold the last 20 years, exercising both direct and indirect administrative control over Iraq and Afghanistan. In the years between 1945 and 2001, however, I’m more inclined to label the US a hegemon, as opposed to an empire. It’s also worth playing devil’s advocate and mentioning that the American hegemony was a counterweight to the hegemony established by the Soviets.
Beyond this, power vacuums never go unfilled. As the US continues its decline, the void the US leaves will be filled by someone, and they will use whatever means they have at their disposal to impose their will on anyone the consider to be opposition. I worry about a world in which authoritarian China and Russia exert unchallenged influence over weaker democratic nations. It’s also disappointing that one half of the political establishment in this country seems ideologically aligned in undermining a regime in which competitive elections determine who governs.
No, the Democratic and Republican parties indeed have important distinctions, and we need to go beyond mere cynicism if we want to improve our political and economic systems.
From 1945 onward, the U.S. took advantage of the Bretton Woods system throughs structural adjustment and other means, and continued after it replaced that with petrodollar recycling.
Meanwhile, it allowed the military complex to grow to a point that it ended up with over 800 military bases and installations worldwide, and something half of those encircling Russia and China. It did so under the pretext of a domino theory, where the “freedoms” of the world are being threatened by the Iron Curtain, and met with what would later be seen as a grand chessboard strategy. The cost of that and those military installations is a military cost that’s larger than those of the next 11 military powers combined, and part of a long history of warfare: one writer argues almost all of its two centuries of existence.
Those policies of neoconservatism and neoliberalism involved both parties:
and should not be surprising in a country where much of the economy is controlled by a few which also controls government and gets what it wants:
In its most recent adventure, Afghanistan, one study estimates that trillions were lost and probably up to a million dead, especially non-combatants.
