Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Also, the Reagan military budget had to level off by 1985. It did spurt, pretty much along the lines of Carter administration projections, but then it leveled off at about what it would have been if Carter had stayed in.6 Well, why did that happen? Partly it happened because of fiscal problems arising after four years of catastrophic Reaganite deficit spending, but partly it was just because there was a lot of domestic dissidence. And by now that dissidence is kind of irrepressible, actually. The fact that it doesn’t have a center, and doesn’t have a source, and doesn’t have an organizational structure, that has both strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses are that people get the sense that they’re alone—because you don’t see things happening down the street. And it’s possible to maintain the illusion that there’s no activism going on, because there’s nothing dramatically visible, like huge demonstrations or something; occasionally there are, but not most of the time. And there’s very little in the way of inter-communication, so all sorts of organizing can be happening in parallel, but it doesn’t feed into itself and move on from there. Those are all weaknesses. On the other hand, the strength is, it’s very hard to crush—because there’s nothing to cut off: if one thing gets eliminated, something else just comes up to take its place.