by DJ Pangburn
Noam Chomsky stated recently in a Democracy Now! interview that what is currently happening—indeed, what has been happening for years—in the Republican party has “no analogue in American history” and is “just off the international spectrum of sane behavior.”
I agree.
While I’ve been a vocal critic of President Barack Obama generally, as well as in his compromising with the extreme right of the Republican party, I do agree with Chomsky that Obama is grounded in reality, unlike most of the Republican field of candidates.
As Chomsky states in the interview, “I must say that politics in this country now is in a state that I think has no analogue in American history and maybe nowhere in any parliamentary system. It’s astonishing.” Chomsky continued, “I mean, I’m not a great enthusiast for Obama, as you know, from way back, but at least he’s somewhere in the real world. Perry, who’s very likely—very likely to get the—to win the primary and win the nomination, and maybe to win the election, he’s often in outer space. I mean, his views are unbelievable. Bachmann is the same.”
Chomsky noted that he’d just returned from Europe “where people just can’t believe what they’re seeing here, what people are saying.”
He pointed to environmental catastrophe and global warming denial as a prime example of this European disbelief and horror at what’s occurring in American politics.
“[T]ake one of the really crucial issues for the human species: doing something about environmental catastrophe. Well, you know, every single one of the Republican candidates—maybe not Huntsman, but every major one—is a climate change denier. It’s kind of ironic in the case of Perry. He says there’s no global warming, while Texas
He gives Bachmann some credit for admitting that there might be such a thing as global warming, but was shocked that Bachmann would equate this with the Christian god’s punishment for homosexuality.
Chomsky, of course, shouldn’t be so shocked about Bachmann’s point of view—America, more than perhaps any other country on Earth, has a sizable percentage of the population that holds the exact same point of view, and will enthusiastically endorse such candidates; putting men and women like Perry, Bachmann and Palin front and center. These candidates could never have become demagogues if vast numbers of the American citizenry weren’t willing to follow them to such extremes of human thinking.
Democrats may be spineless, contradictory, hypocritical and not a little complicit in the strengthening of the coporocratic American reality; but, the Republicans are quite openly psychotic. And by psychotic, I mean, of course, that they are removed from the fabric of reality.
Walter Sobzchak in The Big Lebowski, said in response to nihilism, “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.”
Indeed, Republican politics in the form of the current crop of candidates also has an ethos—the ethos of psychosis.
As Chomsky notes, “it’s just off the international spectrum of sane behavior.”
Watch the Noam Chomsky/Democracy Now! video interview below.
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