Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

I do feel this period is kind of a turning point. I mean, you can see very clearly where policy is driving people, and you know exactly what its goals are. The only question you can’t answer is how the population is going to react as they get slammed in the face—and they are getting slammed in the face. One way it could go would be like the building of the C.I.O. [an integrated mass union formed in 1935], or the Civil Rights and feminist movements, or the Freedom Rides [whites and blacks rode buses together into the American South in 1961 to challenge segregation laws]. Other ways it could go would be Nazism, Khomeini’s Iran, Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria—those are all ways people could go too. But the country is very disturbed. You can see it in polls, and you can certainly see it traveling around—and I travel around a lot. There’s complete disaffection about everything. People don’t trust anyone, they think everyone’s lying to them, everyone’s working for somebody else. The whole civil society has completely broken down. And when you talk about the mood of people—well, whether it’s on right-wing talk radio, or among students, or just among the general population, you get a very good reception these days for the kinds of things I talk about. But it’s scary—because if you came and told people, “Clinton’s organizing a U.N. army with aliens to come and carry out genocide, you’d better go to the hills,” you’d get the same favorable response. That’s the problem—you’d get t...