Noam Chomsky is exactly right about how mainstream Bernie’s policies really are — no matter how much the GOP calls him a ‘socialist’
Editors Note: Alternet originally published this interview on April 28, 2016. Salon published this article on April 29, 2016. Lost in the discussions about Bernie Sanders’s “socialism” is an obvious and…
Editors Note: Alternet originally published this interview on April 28, 2016. Salon published this article on April 29, 2016.
Lost in the discussions about Bernie Sanders’s “socialism” is an obvious and important fact: What he’s actually proposing is not only not radical – it’s mainstream. Sanders decided not to dodge the “socialist” label and instead own it by contextualizing it in the broader American tradition. He even gave a sweeping speech in which he grounded his philosophy in the tradition of FDR:
All Sanders has done is challenge the gospel of neoliberalism, which has systematically gutted our country’s public institutions. America’s economy has been steadily deregulated since the 1980s, when President Reagan first surrendered to the privatization scheme of neoliberalism. What we’re left with now, as Sanders pointed out in that speech, is a system “which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out.” In other words, we now have socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else. This is a perverse inversion of the historical norm, and Sanders is right to attack it.
Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about Bernie Sanders’s platform. His answer was what you’d expect from someone aware of the nation’s political history:
This point can’t be made enough. For all his talk of a “revolution,” Sanders’s proposals are far too modest to be called revolutionary. He’s merely demanding a return to the midcentury norm, to the nation of FDR and Eisenhower and Johnson.
Another critical point is how aligned with public opinion Sanders’s policies are. If you cut through the rhetoric and the white noise, you find that most Americans support what are undeniably socialist programs, like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. These programs aren’t understood popularly as “socialist,” but that’s what they are. Chomsky continues:
And yet we’re told, repeatedly, that Sanders is the outlier, the extremist. This is patently false, and the result of media-driven confusion about our history and the term “socialism.” The only radical movement in this country the last several decades has been led by the Republican Party, which has shifted our discourse so far to the right that what was once a bipartisan mainstream position is now radical by comparison.
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