Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident, and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are unable to understand the new pol

Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident, and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are unable to understand the new polarities at work in the world. He's been an important critic of American foreign policy, but it has blinded him (and his followers) to the absolutely more terrible nature of e.g. Russian hegemony. (I actually think this turn began for him around the conflict in Serbia.) But I find him a useful and important antidote to the dominance of total relativism postmodernism/poststructuralism on the "left" and respect him for doubling down on the important of reason, rationality, and an empirical method. These days, especially in American academia, most people preposterously labelled (by conservative opponents) as "cultural Marxists" or "Marxists" generally are anything but. Marx and many other people in that vein in the 20th century were committed materialists -- attempting to ground their analysis in rather cold hard economic analysis -- you can debate whether they were right or not or using the right tools, etc but this was their philosophical position, what they were trying to do. The bulk of today's apparently-left wing intellectuals are effectively idealists (in the epistemological sense, not the moral sense). They fundamentally believe in the primacy of ideas over the material world, but they've done a slight of and instead of referring to it as Forms ala Plato, or Idea as in Hegel, etc. it's now the "Narrative" etc. I think it is having a destructive effect, and has in large part discredited this line of though about the people it's supposed to be liberating. It's a middle class movement for middle class academics, and has little to offer the working class. Chomsky is a refreshing antidote to this. I can't speak to his linguistic analysis, though. He's also very very old at this point.