November 1, 2019

Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders 'Has Absolutely Infuriated The Liberal Establishment'

"“He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime,” Chomsky said, explaining that the Democratic elite is not opposed to Sanders just because they don’t like his policies, but because he has managed to build a powerful movement of activists willing to participate in the political process.

“His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home.”


"... But, according to Chomsky, the term (socialist) has been rendered meaningless. In the United States, he said, it is understood as New Deal liberalism promoted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Sanders is neither a socialist nor a democratic socialist, Chomsky argued, but a progressive, New Deal Democrat, whose policies would not be considered out of the ordinary in the 1950s, not even by Republicans such as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“To be quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President Eisenhower very much,” the political commentator noted, explaining that Sanders’ proposals are considered radical by the political mainstream because both parties have “shifted so far to the right.”


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Original source [link:https://theintercept.com/2019/10/31/deconstructed-special-the-noam-chomsky-interview/|