Chomsky BRILLIANTLY Dissects Trump, Democrats & RussiaGate

Video Statistics and Information

Video

Captions Word Cloud

Captions

so noam chomsky brilliantly explained American politics on democracy now he basically lays out everything that's going on in just the most genius way possible in under ten minutes check it out and then we'll discuss explain president Trump to us and assess the massive response to him well Trump is a you know I think there are a number of illusions about Trump if you take a look at the Trump phenomenon it's not very surprising think back for the last ten or fifteen years over Republican party primaries and remember what happened during the primaries each primary when some candidate rose from the base they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it Michelle Bachman Herman Cain Rick Santorum anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment the change in 2016 is they couldn't crush him but the interesting question is why was this happening why an election after election was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment and the answer to that is think about that the answer is not very hard to discover during the since the 1970s during this neoliberal period both of the political parties have shifted to the right the Democrats by the 1970s that pretty much abandoned the working class in the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party the legislative probe proposals was the humphrey-hawkins full employment act in 1978 which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth just became voluntary but the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class they became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans meanwhile the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum of the two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute Thomas Mann Norman Ornstein about five or ten years ago described the Republican Party as what they called a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics well why did that happen it happened because the Republicans faced a difficult problem they have a primary constituency a real constituency extreme wealth and corporate power that's who they have to serve that's their constituency you can't get votes that way so you have to do something else to get votes what do you do to get votes this was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern Strategy try to pick up a racist in the South the mid-1970s poll vibrantly one of the Democrat Republican strategists hit on a brilliant idea northern catholics voted Democratic tended to vote Democratic a lot of working-class the Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending cursorily pretending to be opposed to abortion by the same pretense they could pick up the evangelical vote those are big votes evangelicals northern Catholics notice the word pretense is crucial you go back to the 1960s every leading Republican figure was strongly what we call now pro-choice the Republican Party position was that's Ronald Reagan George HW Bush all the leadership their position was portion is not the government's business it's a private business government has nothing say about it they turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues same with gun rights the gun rights become a matter of Holy Writ because he can pick up part of the population that way in fact what they've done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically onyx you know tolerable to the establishment but they don't like it okay and they've got a hold that those two constituencies together the real constituency of wealth and corporate power they're taken care of by the actual legislation so if you look at the legislation under chunk Trump it's just lavash gifts to the wealth on the corporate sector the tax bill of the deregulation you know every case in point that's kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan those guys they serve the real constituency meanwhile Trump has to maintain the voting constituency with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the vote of the voting base and he's doing it very skillfully it's a as just as a political manipulation it's skillful work for the rich and the powerful chef's everybody else but get their votes that's not a swindle it's not an easy trick he's carrying it off and I should say the Democrats are helping him they are take the focus on Russia gate what's that all about I mean it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you're not gonna find anything very serious about Russian interference and elections I mean for one thing it's undetectable in the in the 2016 election of the Senate and the house went the same way as the executive but nobody claims that was worse than interference there in fact you know Russian interference in the election if if it existed was very slight a much less say than the interference by say Israel the Israel the Prime Minister Netanyahu that goes to Congress that talks to a joint session of Congress without even informing the White House to attack Obama's policies I mean that's dramatic interference with elections not whatever the Russians tried it's not gonna be anything like that and in fact there's no interference in elections that begins to compare with campaign they remember that campaign funding alone gives you a very high predict prediction of election electoral outcome it's again Tom Ferguson's major work which shone this very persuasively that's massive interference and elections anything the Russians might have done is going to be you know peanuts and compared as far as Trump collusion with the Russians that was never going to amount to anything more than minor corruption you know maybe building a Trump Hotel and Red Square or something like that but nothing of any significance the Democrats invested everything in this issue well turned out there was nothing much there they gave Trump a huge gift in fact they may have handed him the next election that's just that's a matter of being so you know unwilling to deal with fundamental issues that they're looking for something on the side that'll somehow give political success god damn god damn that was 8 minutes and 56 seconds of pure brilliance he nailed it he nailed it in every way so he's saying here's the dynamic at play here the Republicans are in a very bad position of having to serve their real constituency which is the mega wealthy and corporations while at the same time getting enough votes from the public so you can't just go out there and say what you're all about which is tax cuts for the rich and deregulation and things of that nature and endless wars which helps the military-industrial complex so what do you have to do you got to go out there and get a ragtag group of voters together and how do they go about it well first of all Southern Strategy is the old school playbook it's still in effect to this day so they go after the you know southern white racists that you know neo Confederates you can call them that's one group the other group is evangelical Christians then you have the cultural reactionaries who they go after and then you know gun lovers so they try to scrap together they hit a bunch of very specific issues culturally to seek to signal to these people like I'm with you I'm on your side and then those people they extrapolate and they almost project onto the Republicans what they want them to be so not only does this guy agree to me on guns he's also looking out for me and he's gonna like cut my taxes and stuff and the reality is of course 80% of the Republican tax bill Trump's tax bill goes to the top one percent over a decade so it's not like and Chomsky points out that's not an easy trick man like and I always said the Republicans are good at marketing and they're good at making their case because they are they take these just incredibly disliked positions and they find a way through sheer confidence and bluster and marketing to win elections that's not a simple thing to do that's very complex and Trump is the best example of it now the one thing I think Chomsky misses there is not only is it the ragtag group of you know the base which the elites are actually scared of the Republican base but they need them for the votes but not only does Trump get those people Trump's cherry on top of a trick is the fake populism which I think got him over the top because all it was those 70,000 votes in the Rust Belt that really turned the election over to him and I don't think he would have been able to win without the fake populism and without Hillary being objectively terrible and not doing any kind of populism and just running on cliches and almost expecting like she's entitled to win so that's the the cherry on top was the fake populism that got Trump over the edge now in terms of the Democrats God he nails it again he says and the Democrats are helping the Republicans effectively not that they want to who said that's what ends up happening because they put all their eggs in the wrong basket the thing that they spoke the most about the thing that they focus the most about recently is Russia gate and it is the malla report and then the mother report did not give them exactly what they wanted now you could say it's an open question on obstruction of justice fair enough I think there it's clear Trump probably did obstruct justice but what the other thing that's clear is muller says no evidence of collusion not there so when you focus on that non-stop and then it comes up giving you not really what you were looking for yeah that's gonna end up helping Trump I think and whether or not they want to admit it now whether or not it's immediately reflected in the polls especially if they keep doubling down on that and why are they doing it that's the important part it's not just because hey they're not that smart that's not the only reason why the Democrats are fucking this up massively but it's because they fundamentally cannot focus on the issues that they need to focus on to in elections because for Democrats to win elections and focus on the right issues would mean they're holding themselves to very specific policies and very specific things that they're fighting for to help the people now ultimately establishment Democrats don't care and don't want to help to people because they also have allegiances to corporate America and to their donors to the elites so think about it because now the Democrats are in a similar position to the Republicans the Democrats the establishment Democrats need to keep serving the powerful and the elites and the corporations but they also have to try to win elections how do you win elections while still maintaining your loyalty to your funders the elites how do you do it if you're a Democrat while they're trying to find some way to walk that tightrope and the answer they came up with is let's just talk about Mulder non-stop let's just talk about Russia gate and say collusion non-stop and that'll maybe help us win an election by ignoring the main issues that people struggle with health care the economy wages endless war extreme poverty by let's ignore the main issues people struggle with because we can't help though on that that much because we're beholden to the establishment too but we still want to win so what are we gonna do I don't know make make a mountain out of a molehill and this side issue of the Muller report and Russia gate make that the number one thing and then that is it's not gonna work dude it's not gonna work so thankfully thankfully the cow is on the way though because we do have you know a new class of Young Democrats and a couple of presidential candidates Bernie Tulsi and some others who will focus on the right issues and actually care about it that's the good news the bad news is the dominant strain in the Democratic Party is still the establishment wing and so that dynamic that Chomsky is talking about is still alive and well and it's beyond frustrating and like he says no kind of election interference comes even remotely close to Israeli election interference I would also say Saudi Election interference but most importantly corporate election interference where corporations just buy the government through campaign funding and then get what they want and the regular people get screwed and if you're not talking about that as worse than you know a hundred thousand dollars in facebook ads from fucking some Russian troll farm then you're being mislead or you're a dunce so if you don't take it from me on Russia gate then take it from the world's most prominent living intellectual political intellectual that's Noam Chomsky

Info

Channel: Secular Talk

Views: 1,316,052

Rating: 4.7046847 out of 5

Keywords: news, politics, election, 2020, noam chomsky, donald trump, bernie sanders, democrat, republican, liberal, gop, kyle kulinski show, kyle kulinski

Id: llzoItQgLOQ

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2019

Reddit Comments

This was great.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/ExpertResponse 📅︎︎ Apr 24 2019 🗫︎ replies

What’s Chomsky’s reason for ignoring all the DT/FSB conspiracy evidence. it’s all been out in the open.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/churchofpain 📅︎︎ Apr 24 2019 🗫︎ replies

https://old.reddit.com/r/seculartalk/comments/bgvza3/i_heard_chomskys_analysis_on_trump_and_russia_in/

I have refuted Chomsky’s arguments as relate to this here. What do you think, OP?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 25 2019 🗫︎ replies