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As I was reading today's interview between David Barsamian of Alternative Radio and the remarkable Noam Chomsky, now 93 years old and still so much in and of our world, I had a "memory" flash of sorts. I wondered what, in his twenties, Tom Engelhardt would have thought of this ever more extreme planet if, as in one of the sci-fi novels he then read so avidly, he had been transported more than half a century into the future to this very America. And you know exactly the country I mean.
Admittedly, that Tom didn't consider 1960s America " above all, his country's horrific war in Vietnam " anything to brag about. Still, how would he feel to find himself in a land where most of the members of one major party believe, based on nothing, that the last presidential election was quite literally "stolen"; a country increasingly filled with extremist militias; one that spent four years with a mad and maddening president with, it seems, every intention of facing off one more time against Joe Biden who, in 2024, will be 82 years old. We're talking about a candidate who, were he to win " or even somehow claim a lost election as his " could turn the U.S. into a proto-fascist state? (Honestly, speaking of the past, why didn't all those Big Macs and Wendy's Burgers take him down?)
And that, of course, would just be an introduction to a planet on which " forget the war still going on in Ukraine amid increasing fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin might consider using nuclear weapons for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taken out in 1945 " week by week, month by month, the news only gets worse. It matters little whether you're speaking about record droughts, fires, floods, storms, melting ice, rising sea levels, you name it, since these days it seems as if no horror we might dream up couldn't become reality.
In such a context, let me introduce the young Tom Engelhardt to the four horsemen of the apocalypse of the twenty-first century and leave it to Noam Chomsky, interviewed by the superb David Barsamian for their new book, Notes on Resistance, to tell us where, in such a world, hope might still lie. Tom
Optimism of the Will
And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
By David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky
[The following is excerpted in shortened form from Chapter 9 of Notes on Resistance by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, published by Haymarket Books.]
David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented " a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a deeply authoritarian, also proto-fascist, state, when the Republicans come back into office, which looks likely. So, that's four horses.
And remember that the Republicans are the denialist party, committed to racing to climate destruction with abandon in the hands of the chief wrecker they now worship like a demigod. It's bad news for the United States and for the world, given the power of this country.
Barsamian: The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance just issued the Global State of Democracy Report 2021. It says that the United States is a country where democracy is "backsliding."
Chomsky: Very severely. The Republican Party is openly dedicated " it's not even concealed " to undermining what remains of American democracy. They're working very hard on it. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republicans have long understood that they're fundamentally a minority party and not going to get votes by advertising their increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector. So, they've been long diverting attention to so-called cultural issues.
It began with Nixon's Southern strategy. He realized that Democratic Party support for civil rights legislation, however limited, would lose them the southern Democrats, who were openly and overtly extreme racists. The Nixon administration capitalized on that with their Southern strategy, hinting, not so subtly, that the Republicans would become the party of white supremacy.
In subsequent years, they picked up other issues. It's now the virtual definition of the party: so, let's run on attacking Critical Race Theory " whatever that means! It's a cover term, as their leading spokesmen have explained, for everything they can rally the public on: white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights.
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