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AUDIENCE: Do you think
there's been any developments
policy-wise that are
helping the situation, that
are making the situation better
in any way in the recent years?
Or is it all coming
down, I guess?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think
it goes in many directions.
So actually, I think
the most dramatic fact
about the last election,
the 2016 election,
was not the election of Trump.
The most striking fact
was the Sanders campaign.
I mean, the fact that a
billionaire was elected.
OK, it's not a big break
from American history.
That goes on all the time.
But the Sanders
campaign broke sharply
with over a hundred years of
American political history.
I mean, if we had media that
were talking about reality,
that would be the headline.
American elections are bought.
There's plenty of substantial
mainstream political science
research on this.
If you look just at
simple variables,
like, say, campaign funding--
something as simple as that--
the predictability
of electability
by campaign funding is literally
almost a straight line.
There's a recent
study by Tom Ferguson
over at UMass, one
of the main scholars
who works on this, who studied
congressional election--
for presidential elections have
been shown for a long time.
But that was the
first main study
of congressional elections.
They went from
1980 to the present
all over the country
simply asking,
what's the relation
between campaign spending
and electability?
And it is literally
a straight line.
You just don't get results like
that in the social sciences.
The more campaign spending,
the more you get elected.
And that goes back well
into the late 19th century.
There's a famous
campaign manager,
Mark Hanna, back 1890s.
He was asked once, what's
the secret for running
a successful election campaign?
And he said, you have
to have two things.
The first one is money.
And I can't remember
the second one.
That's American
politics, literally.
Just with overwhelming
near-certainty.
Well, all of a sudden, you
get a guy who's unknown,
has no support from any
of the sources of wealth,
no support from the wealthy,
no corporate support, dismissed
by the medial as ridiculous,
very negative media campaign.
He was basically unknown.
And he even used a
scare word "socialist."
He would have won the
Democratic Party nomination
if it hadn't been for the
Clinton-Obama shenanigans
to keep the party
from reflecting
its popular constituency.
That's an incredible
break from history.
And right now,
incidentally, he is
by far the most popular
political figure
in the country.
Way above anyone else.
Well, those are signs
that other things are--
especially among young
people, he's way up.
That's the future electorate.
So these are things
that are going off
in the other direction.
There's plenty of opportunities,
if they're grasped.
And it's kind of easy to sink
into sort of hopelessness.
What's the point?
But it's just really
a bad mistake.
First of all, the issues
are extremely important.
There's an awful
lot can be done.
Even in the kind of thing that
Arlie Hochschild was doing,
reaching people who
were deeply embedded
in the ultra-red
constituency, the deeply
religious, conservative,
traditional, anti-government
for the reasons that they
see, which you can understand,
can be changed.
Incidentally, if you
look back in the past,
the same sectors
of the population
were the most carried
forward, the most extreme
radical democratic programs
in American history.
The term "populism"
is thrown around now,
but it used to mean something.
And the populist movement
in the United States,
which began with
farmers in Texas
and spread through the Midwest,
to Kansas and place like that,
was a really powerful,
radical democratic movement.
Linked up with the
Knights of Labor,
the main labor movement, whose
slogan was the working people
ought to own and
run the factories.
And it was smashed
by force finally,
but this is by far the most
real democratic movement
in American history.
And maybe the world,
that comes out
of Texas and Kansas farmers.
It's the same people.
