Chomsky vs. Himself on "Lesser Evilism"

Noam Chomsky has long stated that the judgment as to which of two candidates represents the lesser evil is a virtual no brainer, requiring no more than a few minutes time to make. So how come he himself can't make it? To wit:

 

In a July interview he declared that there “was a big difference” between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential elections, a difference “you could count in several million corpses in Indochina.” But, Chomsky added, “a lot of the young people on the left said, “I’m not going to vote for Humphrey. He’s a corporate Democrat. I can’t sully my hands on that. So I won’t vote.” In effect, said Chomsky, this meant that they “help[ed] Nixon win,” and more specifically, they “help[ed] kill a couple million people in Indochina, plus a lot of other (bad) things.”
 

In other words, Humphrey was the lesser evil in 1968.

 
Twenty years ago, speaking with David Barsamian of Alternative Radio about the very same elections, Chomsky said the opposite:
 
“I could not bring myself to vote for Humphrey. I did not vote for Nixon. But my feeling at the time, and in retrospect I think it’s probably correct, was that a Nixon victory was probably marginally beneficial in winding down the Indochina wars, probably faster than the Democrats would have. It was horrendous, but maybe less horrible than it would have been.”
 
In short, Nixon was the lesser evil in 1968.

 

So Chomsky disagrees with himself on this topic. The question is why.

 

Unless he's lying, which is extremely unlikely, the answer has to be that determining the lesser evil between two appalling choices is not so easy, and certainly not the no-brainer Chomsky claims it is.  

 

A further contradiction involves what Chomsky calls an "organizing space," which he claims it is very important to have. Under Biden, he alleges, organizers will at least have some room to present their case and agitate for it to be adopted, whereas under Trump he claims this space does not exist.

 

But for years he has said that organizing is a function of popular will, not of what already exists to be taken advantage of.  He's pointed out that "people have gotten themselves organized" in far more difficult circumstances than those that prevail in the United States, mentioning El Salvador in the 1980s as an example. There, a largely peasant society was subjected to near-genocide, but got itself organized and became part of the power structure, though the basic class conflict is far from resolved even today. Still, Chomsky is right to point to it as a success of popular organizing.

 

But today, he says, organizing is an impossibility in the U.S. because Donald Trump. 

 

Tell it to the ghost of Archbishop Romero.