Trump supporters are not necessarily very poor—some of them
are moderately well-off, they have jobs, but then, the image that’s been used,
which is not a bad one, I think, is that they are people who see themselves as
standing in line trying to get ahead. That they’ve worked hard, they’ve “done”
their place in line, and they’re stuck there. The people ahead of them are
shooting off into the stratosphere, and the people behind them, in their view,
are being pushed ahead in the line by the federal government. That’s what the
federal government does [in their view]—it takes people who are behind them and
who haven’t worked hard enough they way they have, and pushes them ahead by some
supportive programs. They listen to talk radio, for example, and hear laments
about how Syrian immigrants are treated like kings while “I can’t get my kids
my college.”
Question: Recently, economists
Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified a marked decrease in life expectancies or
increase in mortality rates among white, middle-aged Americans, often due to
drug abuse or suicide. How would you say that change in mortality rates has
been affecting American culture or society?
Noam Chomsky: It’s the other way around, I think: the changes in American
culture and society have led to the mortality rates. This is a sector of
exactly the kind of people I was describing, mostly white and mostly male, in
the sort of working age period of their lives, who are apparently suffering
from depression, loss of face, lack of sense of any self-worth, and turning to
drugs and alcoholism. Something similar happened in Russia during the market
reforms of the 1990s. There was a huge increase in the death rate, and probably
millions of people died. And a lot of it was the same sense that “everything’s
falling apart, we have nothing, I’ll just drink myself to death.”
Question: Do you think that the
changes in mortality rates are necessarily connected with the changes in politics—that
it’s all part of a similar phenomenon?
Noam Chomsky: I think it’s a reflection of it. Very much like, in another
way, the Brexit vote is. That is, “I have no way out, so I’ll scream.” It would
be quite different if, say, there was an organized labor movement, which could
mobilize people. In the 1930s the situation was objectively far worse, but
there was a sense of hopefulness. I am old enough to remember—there was
militant labor action, CIO organizing, left-wing parties, and a relatively
sympathetic administration, and so somehow we were going to get out of this.
And now people don’t have that. It’s a striking difference.
Question: You’ve talked a lot
about the use of drones and, especially during the Obama administration, have
criticized their use. Do you think there are ever conditions under which drone
strikes are justified? What would be necessary to meet a moral threshold?
Noam Chomsky: For example, just recently, ISIS was blocked with a drone
that had an explosive in it. Would that be legitimate? It’s wartime, [the
launchers of the drone were] under attack, they’re using a weapon for
self-defense. I don’t approve of it because I don’t approve of them, but in
that kind of situation I guess you could argue that it’s like any other kind of
weapon. On the other hand, when it’s a technique of assassination of suspects,
it’s a different story. I mean, it’s not a question of drones. Suppose we sent
killers to assassinate people who we think are planning attacks on us. Would
that be legitimate? Suppose they did it to us—would that be legitimate? The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,
the Washington Post, and other major newspapers have published op-eds saying we
should bomb Iran now, not wait. So would Iran be justified in sending somebody
to assassinate the editors? How would we react?
Question: Do you think that US
politics has been changing in its attitude toward humanitarian issues, or
toward using drones in a better way?
Noam Chomsky: Take a look at US history. We’ve been at war for five
hundred years without a break. The people who lived here were driven out or
exterminated. Up until the twentieth century it was clearing what we now call
the national territory, with constant war and vicious, brutal war. Immediately
after that it expanded to other parts of the world. It’s five hundred years,
virtually without a break, and the policies really haven’t changed much.
Question: Do you see potential
for greater change, and by what means? How do you think the attitude towards
humanitarian issues could change?
Noam Chomsky: It has in some respects. Take, say, torture again. The
popular negative reaction was sufficient, so that it’s now apparently not being
used like the way it was being used under Bush. On the other hand, we shouldn’t
exaggerate. Take maximum security prisons in the United States: they’re torture
chambers. I mean, prisoners are subjected to solitary confinement, which is
torture, for long periods, maybe a large part of their life, so torture still
goes on all the time.
Question: Psychologist Steven
Pinker argues that over time we’ve been able to use reason and the “better
angels of our nature” to make improvements in reducing violence. Would you
agree with his analysis?
Noam Chomsky: There’s something to that, but the story that he presents is
pretty shaky. I mean, ninety-five per-cent, roughly, of human history is in
hunter-gatherer societies. He claims that they were very violent and brutal,
but the specialists on the topic don’t agree with him. There’s work by some of
the leading people who work on indigenous societies—Brian Ferguson, Douglas
Fry, Stephen Cory—they just claim [that Pinker’s notion about hunter-gatherers
is] completely false. The large-scale killings are pretty much associated with
the origin of cities and the state system. One [of Pinker’s] strongest
arguments is in what’s called the “democratic peace,” that democracies don’t
fight each other. Almost all the evidence for that comes from the post-Second
World War period, but during this period non-democracies don’t fight each other
either. Russia and China have been virtually at war, but never broke out into a
war. They’re not democracies, but the United States and Russia also didn’t go
to war, and Russia’s certainly not a democracy. What happened in 1945 is that
great powers, or powers of some scale, recognized that you just can’t go to war
anymore. If you do, everything’s destroyed. So Europe had centuries of murders
and internal wars, but not after 1945 because the next one’s the end. I don’t
think that shows anything about the better angels of our nature. In fact, most
of the wars since 1945 have been exported, and if you take a look at the way
Pinker handles these, he mostly blames the victims. The wars, he says, are in
Southeast Asia and Muslim areas. I mean, is that because of the Iraqis and the
Vietnamese?
Question: What do you think is
the most important issue in international politics that is not being adequately
discussed today?
Noam Chomsky: Well, there are two huge issues, neither of them being
adequately discussed. One is an increasing and very serious threat of possible
nuclear war, especially at the Russian border. The other’s an environmental
catastrophe, which is coming at us very fast, and there’s nothing much being
done about it. These are issues of species survival, really, beyond anything
that’s ever been written about in human history. Take, say, the [last US
presidential] election campaign. [These two problems were] barely mentioned,
which is just astounding. Here we have an election campaign in the most
powerful state in human history, which is going to have a major effect on
determining what happens in the future, and the most crucial issues that have
ever arisen in human history are just not being discussed. What we’re
discussing is Trump’s 3 a.m. tweets and things like “did Hillary lie in her
emails?”
Question: Why do you think those issues are not being discussed more
broadly?
Noam Chomsky: I think there’s a kind of a tacit recognition that people
should be kept out of the democratic system. It’s not their area, so divert
them with something else. That can be consumerism, that can be obscene remarks
about women, anything, but not the major issues. I don’t think that’s a
conscious choice, but it’s just kind of implicit in a subconscious, elite
recognition of the way the world is supposed to work.
Question: Does that apply for
these issues as well— the nuclear threat and the environmental threat?
Noam Chomsky: If you start looking at the nuclear threat, you have to ask
yourself a lot of questions that maybe are best kept under the rug. Like, for
example, why did NATO expand to the East? In fact, why does NATO exist? NATO
was supposed to be a defense against the Russians. No Russians after 1991, so
why NATO? A lot of questions like that are quite serious, and of course, it’s
not that they’re not discussed at all. There’s scholarship, but they’re not in
part of the mainstream. The way we talk about it is demonizing Russia, and
they’re doing plenty of rotten things, but there are other questions.
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