by LAURA FLANDERS
VIDEO/The Laura Flanders Show/Youtube
At 93, Noam Chomsky is the most important leftist intellectual alive. At 32, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of our most important leftist elected officials. The two recently spoke about our prospects for winning a better world.
We are at a moment in American history when all sorts of long-held assumptions about markets and governments, and even our relationship to one another and to nature, seem to be loosening their grip. The manufacturers of consent no longer seem to have quite so much control over what everyday people do.
To discuss our new environment, left-wing writer and broadcaster Laura Flanders sat down earlier this year with both MIT professor emeritus, author, and public intellectual Noam Chomsky and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th congressional district. What follows is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. A portion of the discussion is available on The Laura Flanders Show’s YouTube channel. You can subscribe to the show here.
I believe this is the first time you have actually met. Is there anything you want to say to each other?
I’ve been greatly admiring what you’ve been doing, AOC, and following it closely. So it’s a real pleasure to be with you.
Likewise, it’s such an honor and a culminating moment to be able to engage with the one and only Professor Chomsky.
Noam, you and I have talked on and off for about thirty years. In that time, there have always been, as you put it, a long list of unthinkable thoughts in America. Yet I recently read in our newspaper of record, the New York Times, that workers have real power, but the economy just might need some sort of planning — and that, just possibly, leaving so many things to markets isn’t the best idea, especially when it comes to the environment and health care.
Is something shifting? And when you think of the “unthinkables,” what’s changed and what hasn’t, in your view?
We should, first of all, recognize that we’ve been living through about forty-five years of a particular socioeconomic political system, neoliberalism.
Some people think that “neoliberalism” means a completely marketized society. But that’s never really been the case.
What we’ve really had for forty-five years is what so many economists have called a “bailout economy.” We have the obvious consequences, financial crisis after financial crisis. And every time it comes, there’s a taxpayer-funded bailout.
The TARP [Troubled Assets Relief Program] agreement under George W. Bush, for example, had two elements to it. One was to bail out the perpetrators of the crisis — the people giving out predatory loans. And the other was to provide support for the victims of the crisis — people who had lost their homes, lost their jobs.
You can guess which one of the two was actually implemented.
But Noam, years ago, you couldn’t even say the word “neoliberalism,” let alone “socialism.” We didn’t talk about systems in relation to our economy. Today we are.
We also did sixty, seventy years ago. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was not known as a flaming liberal, said that anyone who doesn’t accept New Deal policies, anyone who doesn’t believe that workers have the right to freely organize without suppression, doesn’t belong in our political system. That was the 1950s. It changed a little bit with Jimmy Carter, then broke with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Since then, we’ve been living in the kind of system that you described, a one-sided class war: markets for the poor, protection for the rich.
I want to come to you on this, AOC. I’ve interviewed you before, when you were just running for office, for a program about young people in politics. I recall with chagrin that even I, a confirmed optimist, ended that interview by saying, “But if you don’t win this time, will you run again?” I thought it likely that you might not be victorious against powerful Joe Crowley that first time, but you were, and you’re not alone. Has a dam broken, do you think?
I do think that there is a dam breaking, in electoral politics but also in organizing beyond our electoral system, like what we’re seeing with strikes, on a scale that really has not been seen in many years. It’s a bit of an emperor-has-no-clothes type of situation for our political establishment and our capitalist system. People are beginning to realize that we can name these systems and describe them, that this water that people have been swimming in actually has a name, and that there are alternative ways of doing things.
After I won, there was such a large, concerted attempt by the media to marginalize my victory as a fluke. You had then governor of New York Andrew Cuomo saying, within days, that this was a complete accident. You had every major elected official and Democratic Party member trying to dismiss what happened.
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