On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

by Noam Chomsky

The U.S. is a society which is very heavily polled. The reason is that business wants to better understand what the popular mood is, so we have a great deal of information about popular attitudes divided by sectors of the population and so on. Every year the Gallup Poll, a major poll, asks people: Do you think the Vietnam war was a “mistake” or do you think it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral”? Among the general population, over 70 percent say that it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Among the groups that they call “opinion leaders,” which include people like clergymen, it is about 40 percent who think that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Among the intellectual elite, other studies show that the overwhelming majority regarded it as a mistake only, always, even at the height of the war. That is not unusual.