Counterculture's Saint Chomsky Goes Mainstream

“You know, we’re not living in a fascist state,” he says. “We don’t have to face torture chambers and secret police and so on. Consumerism is a much easier threat to face than torture chambers."

I should say so. But is there anything here that "vindicates" Chomsky?

All we've got to go on is that nobody bothers trying to bust up Chomsky's lecture events anymore and most Americans are now as despairing, cynical, alienated and overcome by hopelessness as Chomsky was when he started writing counterculture critiques almost 40 years ago.

This is progress?

Chomsky looks on the bright side: "I mean, we have every possible opportunity, and an incomparable legacy of freedom, of privilege, of opportunity, and there’s numbers that I’ve never seen involved, engaged, and concerned."

America the Beautiful, then.

But still, the hopelessness, which Chomsky attributes to the erosion of unions, the general atomizing trend of America's consumer society, increasing debt loads borne by ordinary people, a growing materialism, and the stagnation of real wages: "I mean, if you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.”

Nervermind that last contradiction. In his conversation with Brian Lynch, Chomsky succinctly and accurately describes certain objective conditions, as we used to say, that prevail among most Americans. But it's his analysis I don't quite buy: The 1960s was a golden age, and we're all still suffering from the establishment's backlash against all the great things that were accomplished in that decade - in fact "we're in the middle of that period now."

I know it's apostasy for hippie geezers and other 60s' enthusiasts to contemplate this question, so I'll ask it for them: Isn't it just remotely possible that the rise of the counterculture left - with its flakiness, its frivolous politics, its narcissism and its bourgeois, self-congratulatory arrogance - is just maybe at least part of the reason for the alienation and the cynicism of the masses of ordinary American people?

Chomsky is a brilliant American linguist who has contributed much to analyses and critiques of American power. You have to give him that. But there's another brilliant linguist, this one a Canadian, teaching in the UK, that you should also know a little about.

Shalom Lappin is concerned with the same objective conditions that Chomsky finds in the lives of ordinary people, but what distinguishes Shalom's analysis is its refusal to engage in the weirdly ritualistic litany-recitals that have come to define Chomsky's polemics, and which are also a defining and crippling characteristic of the Chomskyite left. As an intellectual firmly and unambiguously situated on the left, Shalom is not afraid to suggest that we might benefit from a bit of self-criticism. Yes, Lappin argues, a juncture was reached in the 1960s and the "left" took a particular path. Where has this got us?

First, much of what remains of the radical left has aligned itself with extreme Islamic political movements that promote the establishment of religious regimes in Asia and Africa, with the ultimate objective of a global caliphate. In Europe a not insignificant part of what currently passes for the liberal left also expresses sympathy for these movements. Second, in the United States, working-class voters consistently and consciously vote against their class interests by supporting conservative Republican politicians whose plutocratic economic policies they reject. Although these phenomena seem to be unrelated, it is possible to discern a connection between them when one looks at the more general historical context within which they have emerged.

So by all means, read, learn and recite your Chomsky. While I don't much go for the for-or-against approach, it's true he has legions of detractors, and I mean legions, and much as it might discomfit the more ardent among Chomsky's personality cult, the fact is The Great One has quite a few intellectual detractors on the left. Some of them are positively bonkers, of course. But I warn you: If you approach these controversies with an open mind and a legitimate curiosity, you just may find yourself experiencing the very thing Hamish Hamilton describes:

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose.
It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. So a sense of its integrity is crucial. It is obsessively well-read, but rather famished in original research, except when it is counting how often the liberal media say this or that in their search for hidden, and sometimes not-so-hidden, bias. Crucially, it is not interested in debate, because balance is a ruse of the liberal media elites used to con the dumb masses.

Oliver Kamm, though a bit of a miseryguts, has noticed the same kind of thing, and is similarly disinclined to Chomsky hagiography.

Rebel Sell is also a valuable companion to any Chomsky text.

Keep an eye on Andy.