A Question and Answer interview from Counterpunch. (Emphases mine.)
Read on:
Q.-Daniel Falcone: The “blue wave” looked like an opportunity to take the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and to coalesce around socialists and Greens. Much to the corporate media’s delight, the progressives recently hit some setbacks and obstacles in primaries, although I wanted to ask you about social democratic or New Deal styled candidates popping up in forthcoming elections, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar in New York City, as well as a host of other progressives like Jasmine Robinson and Zephyr Teachout who also come to mind for me personally. Do you see a potential long term eclipse, of any sort, of donor class-oriented politics with these candidates especially if third parties join in endorsing the platforms or similar platforms and vice versa?
A.-Noam Chomsky: That’s a real battle. I mean, we’re not dealing with a small question. This is practically all of American political history. This goes way back as you may recall to Mark Hanna, who was the great campaign organizer for the late nineteenth century. In 1895 he was asked, “What are the most important things for a political campaign?” He said, “There are two things. The first one is money, and I’ve forgotten what the second was.” That was 1895. So, this is deeply entrenched. You’ve seen Tom Ferguson’s work on it. It’s not just the White House; it’s also Congress. In fact, I don’t know if you saw Tom’s study of the 2016 election, a very important study, which shows and details that in the last couple of weeks of the campaign the Republican establishment, who didn’t like Trump, realized that there could be a big Democratic wave — which they certainly didn’t want.
In the last couple weeks of the campaign, there was a huge flood of money both for President and Congress, and he said if you compared it with voting attitudes, as usual [they] changed along[side] the campaign funding of the negative ads. And, in fact, that’s what swung both the congressional and the White House election. It wasn’t just Trump, it was also Congress. So, it’s another triumph of campaign spending. This is 2016, and [not far off from 1895].
The amazing thing about 2016 was the Sanders campaign. It’s the first time in American history that a candidate probably could have won, if it hadn’t been for party managers who kept him out, with no funding from the corporate sector, and no funding from the wealthy, and no media support. So, it’s a real breakthrough, but to carry out [a potential eclipse of the donor class] moving forward is going to be really hard because there’s also going to be a mobilized effort on the part of the entire capitalist class, Republican and Democrat, to prevent that from happening. In fact, if Sanders had run I think he would have been slaughtered by the propaganda, and it would have been massive propaganda about this Jewish, atheist, communist that wants to bring immigrants in to kill everybody.
It’s kind of like what you see with Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, both the Tories and the Labour Party — the Labour Parliamentarians, the Blair guys, the media, like The Guardian– they’re all trying to destroy him. These latest attacks on him for anti-Semitism are just insane, but they’ll do anything to try to destroy his chances because he’s trying to create a political party in which people actually participate; not just the rich and powerful guys who tell you what to do, and that’s intolerable. So, I think maybe it’s going to be a real fight.
—snip—
As usual, Chomsky is right on the money.
We will miss him when he’s gone…if of course there are any of “us” left.
As he said:
So, I think maybe it’s going to be a real fight.
Fight ain’t over yet.
Bet on it.
America may be better than any of us have thought.
Watch.
AG
