6 ms·

Chomsky: The U.S. behaves nothing like a democracy

54 points by robdoherty2 13y ago

joshuahedlund 13y ago
Chomsky's dogmatism and oversimplification of complicated factors weakens his points (some selective polls I'm not linking to show overwhelming support for things the government doesn't do - but compared to how many things with overwhelming support that is done by the government?). There are certainly plenty of examples of ways the US is not a perfect democracy, or even a perfect democratic republic, but it is trivial to disprove that it behaves nothing like one.
- illumen 13y ago
  If it is trivial, can you disprove it? Quacks like a plutocracy... We need better democracies.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    > We need better democracies. Yes. But for that we need better people
    - contingencies 13y ago
      Or, perhaps less corrupt and more broad minded actions from government/business. Positive change can begin with enforcing transparency and social and environmental concerns that presently all but escape the first world's de-facto economic rationalist system, which is rapidly infecting all corners of the planet, crowding out any space for existing or proposed, often functional and noteworthy alternatives. Recommended read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
    - illumen 13y ago
      People working on a better democracy would do too :) Rather than early 90s web guest book, we need late 90s slashdot, or even better... 2013 HN/reddit.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > If it is trivial, can you disprove it? Quacks like a plutocracy... Quacks like a democracy with a unitary executive and high level of electoral disproportionality, see Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphard (1999). > We need better democracies. We have better democracies (i.e., most modern democracies), and we can only understand how they are better and what the defects are in the US system when we understand the US as a democracy, and understand the features that make it a poor one in terms of effective representation. Hyberpolic polemic like claiming the US behaves "nothing like a democracy" might sometimes have value in drawing attention to the problems (but probably not if it is coming from Chomsky), but it doesn't help understand or fix the problems, and if actually taken seriously it inhibits understanding and progress.
  - joshuahedlund 13y ago
    Proof: We have regular, non-violent, non-coercive elections where the results are typically very close to aggregated pre-election polling. Now you can talk about the influence of money and corruption and people blinded by the media and disenfranchised demographics or whatever, but if we had nothing like a democracy, we wouldn't even have that. Also: see snowwrestler's sibling comment on the mere existence of progressive taxes and a public school system.
    - illumen 13y ago
      What percentage of people vote? The majority don't even vote.
nefreat 13y ago
> The reality is that there is massive state intervention in the productive economy and the free-trade agreements are anything but free-trade agreements. That should be obvious. Just to take one example: The information technology (IT) revolution, which is driving the economy, that was based on decades of work in effectively the state sector – hard, costly, creative work substantially in the state sector, no consumer choice at all, there was entrepreneurial initiative but it was largely limited to getting government grants or bailouts or procurement. Except by some economists, that’s underestimated but a very significant factor in corporate profit. If you can’t sell something, hand it over the government. They’ll buy it. > After a long period – decades in fact – of hard, creative work, the primary research and development, the results are handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. That’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so on. It’s not quite that simple of course. But that’s a core part of the picture. The system goes way back to the origins of industrial economies, but it’s dramatically true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the study of the productive economy. Can someone comment on this? I am of course aware of ARPA and DARPA but is it really as one sided as he says?
- hobs 13y ago
  The beginnings of computers being used for artillery projections and code breaking and then transferred over to commercial enterprise almost wholesale is documented fairly well in a book called Turing's Cathedral, but there were all sorts of pissed off people when Von Neumann went ahead and commercialized stuff that invented by others and was top secret. The british couldnt even comment on the fact that they had computers for a good 30 years.
- papaf 13y ago
  I didn't believe this when I read it. It was such I shocking statement. So I thought of what I find personally the most important developments in computing and their sources (in no particular order): 1) Unix - AT&T 2) WWW - CERN 3) The transistor - NASA 4) The computer - Government Code and Cypher School 5) The compiler - IBM 6) The internet - DARPA
JonSkeptic 13y ago
>Yet economic policies have changed little in response to one electoral defeat after another. The left has replaced the right; the right has ousted the left. Even the center-right trounced Communists (in Cyprus) – but the economic policies have essentially remained the same: governments will continue to cut spending and raise taxes. I like his ability to cut to the truth of the matter. What the people vote for and desire is quite secondary at the end of the day.
gyardley 13y ago
Hey, original poster - this is a blatantly and thoroughly political article. While it might very well be interesting and worthy of discussion somewhere, that somewhere should be somewhere else.
- davidw 13y ago
  The above comment is correct, according to the guidelines. It's probably not worth complaining anymore though, this site really turned a corner with the NSA stuff.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    Seriously. Now Chomsky is working his way onto the front page with some regularity? Not to mention when I woke up this morning the top post was somebody writing for an online magazine of "Art-activism, eco-anarchism, subversion and sedition" positing a conspiracy by the plutocrats to put people in make-work jobs. Alas, I lost my flagging privileges around the time we had a front page with half a dozen postings about a plane to Cuba that no one of interest was on.
- cowcatcher 13y ago
  Agreed, this is just far-left polemics. Can we at least have some link to technology, however tenuous?
JonSkeptic 13y ago
>The Federalist Papers were basically a propaganda effort to try to get the public to go along with the system. But the debates in the Constitutional Convention are much more revealing. And in fact the constitutional system was created on that basis. Does anyone have any insight into this? Is there truth to this claim?
snowwrestler 13y ago
> The MIT professor lays out how the majority of U.S. policies are opposed to what wide swaths of the public want This is a feature of the design of the U.S. federal government. The framers of the Constitution were very familiar with the history of governments and knew that direct democracy was a disaster. It devolves into mob rule, and let's face it, most people don't know much about most things. Chomsky says that the lower 70% of the population has no effect on policy, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The U.S. system of income taxation is progressive and refundable, meaning that there is substantial transfer of wealth from the richest people to the poorest. The upper income brackets pay a disproportionately large percentage of all income taxes. U.S. states fund universal public education through high school; a policy that benefits the poor and middle class far more than the rich, who can afford to send their children to private schools. Health care funding like Medicare and Medicaid I'm not saying that these are bad! Just that they demonstrate the extent to which U.S. policy does benefit a broader swath of the population than you might think from reading this essay. Ironically, some of the things that Noam Chomsky likes the least are in fact popular with a majority of the U.S. population. Pew reports that 61% of American citizens approve of the drone assassination program, for instance [1]. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/25/big-gender-gap-in-global-public-opinion-about-use-of-drones/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/25/big-gender-g...
- contingencies 13y ago
  If large numbers of American citizens support drone strikes, that probably reflects more upon the hegemonic control of its media and the failures and biases of its various educational institutions than on the population itself. To put it bluntly, there is no democracy without an educated and informed population, and the US population cannot be honestly characterized as educated and informed.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    But you are obviously educated and informed! How did you slip through the hegemonic net of control?
jaryd 13y ago
This is a link to the transcript of the speech. If you'd prefer to listen (or watch) the talk the recording is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlgQs0UDxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlgQs0UDxY
rogerthis 13y ago
OK, Mr Chomsky. Why don't you go talk about democracy to your friend, Fidel "Butcher" Castro?
- killerpopiller 13y ago
  what? if one compares the deaths caused by US forces and those of Castro, Castros atrocities are dwarfed to subatomic levels. Besides, a two-party system can't be democratic.
- droope 13y ago
  This has got to be the most stupid, ad hominem, ignorant comment of the whole HN. Congratulations!

54 points by robdoherty2 13y ago

Chomsky's dogmatism and oversimplification of complicated factors weakens his points (some selective polls I'm not linking to show overwhelming support for things the government doesn't do - but compared to how many things with overwhelming support that is done by the government?). There are certainly plenty of examples of ways the US is not a perfect democracy, or even a perfect democratic republic, but it is trivial to disprove that it behaves nothing like one.

illumen 13y ago
If it is trivial, can you disprove it? Quacks like a plutocracy... We need better democracies.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  > We need better democracies. Yes. But for that we need better people
  - contingencies 13y ago
    Or, perhaps less corrupt and more broad minded actions from government/business. Positive change can begin with enforcing transparency and social and environmental concerns that presently all but escape the first world's de-facto economic rationalist system, which is rapidly infecting all corners of the planet, crowding out any space for existing or proposed, often functional and noteworthy alternatives. Recommended read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
  - illumen 13y ago
    People working on a better democracy would do too :) Rather than early 90s web guest book, we need late 90s slashdot, or even better... 2013 HN/reddit.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > If it is trivial, can you disprove it? Quacks like a plutocracy... Quacks like a democracy with a unitary executive and high level of electoral disproportionality, see Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphard (1999). > We need better democracies. We have better democracies (i.e., most modern democracies), and we can only understand how they are better and what the defects are in the US system when we understand the US as a democracy, and understand the features that make it a poor one in terms of effective representation. Hyberpolic polemic like claiming the US behaves "nothing like a democracy" might sometimes have value in drawing attention to the problems (but probably not if it is coming from Chomsky), but it doesn't help understand or fix the problems, and if actually taken seriously it inhibits understanding and progress.
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  Proof: We have regular, non-violent, non-coercive elections where the results are typically very close to aggregated pre-election polling. Now you can talk about the influence of money and corruption and people blinded by the media and disenfranchised demographics or whatever, but if we had nothing like a democracy, we wouldn't even have that. Also: see snowwrestler's sibling comment on the mere existence of progressive taxes and a public school system.
  - illumen 13y ago
    What percentage of people vote? The majority don't even vote.

nefreat 13y ago

> The reality is that there is massive state intervention in the productive economy and the free-trade agreements are anything but free-trade agreements. That should be obvious. Just to take one example: The information technology (IT) revolution, which is driving the economy, that was based on decades of work in effectively the state sector – hard, costly, creative work substantially in the state sector, no consumer choice at all, there was entrepreneurial initiative but it was largely limited to getting government grants or bailouts or procurement. Except by some economists, that’s underestimated but a very significant factor in corporate profit. If you can’t sell something, hand it over the government. They’ll buy it. > After a long period – decades in fact – of hard, creative work, the primary research and development, the results are handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. That’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so on. It’s not quite that simple of course. But that’s a core part of the picture. The system goes way back to the origins of industrial economies, but it’s dramatically true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the study of the productive economy. Can someone comment on this? I am of course aware of ARPA and DARPA but is it really as one sided as he says?

hobs 13y ago
The beginnings of computers being used for artillery projections and code breaking and then transferred over to commercial enterprise almost wholesale is documented fairly well in a book called Turing's Cathedral, but there were all sorts of pissed off people when Von Neumann went ahead and commercialized stuff that invented by others and was top secret. The british couldnt even comment on the fact that they had computers for a good 30 years.
papaf 13y ago
I didn't believe this when I read it. It was such I shocking statement. So I thought of what I find personally the most important developments in computing and their sources (in no particular order): 1) Unix - AT&T 2) WWW - CERN 3) The transistor - NASA 4) The computer - Government Code and Cypher School 5) The compiler - IBM 6) The internet - DARPA

JonSkeptic 13y ago

>Yet economic policies have changed little in response to one electoral defeat after another. The left has replaced the right; the right has ousted the left. Even the center-right trounced Communists (in Cyprus) – but the economic policies have essentially remained the same: governments will continue to cut spending and raise taxes. I like his ability to cut to the truth of the matter. What the people vote for and desire is quite secondary at the end of the day.

gyardley 13y ago

Hey, original poster - this is a blatantly and thoroughly political article. While it might very well be interesting and worthy of discussion somewhere, that somewhere should be somewhere else.

davidw 13y ago
The above comment is correct, according to the guidelines. It's probably not worth complaining anymore though, this site really turned a corner with the NSA stuff.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Seriously. Now Chomsky is working his way onto the front page with some regularity? Not to mention when I woke up this morning the top post was somebody writing for an online magazine of "Art-activism, eco-anarchism, subversion and sedition" positing a conspiracy by the plutocrats to put people in make-work jobs. Alas, I lost my flagging privileges around the time we had a front page with half a dozen postings about a plane to Cuba that no one of interest was on.
cowcatcher 13y ago
Agreed, this is just far-left polemics. Can we at least have some link to technology, however tenuous?

JonSkeptic 13y ago

>The Federalist Papers were basically a propaganda effort to try to get the public to go along with the system. But the debates in the Constitutional Convention are much more revealing. And in fact the constitutional system was created on that basis. Does anyone have any insight into this? Is there truth to this claim?

snowwrestler 13y ago

> The MIT professor lays out how the majority of U.S. policies are opposed to what wide swaths of the public want This is a feature of the design of the U.S. federal government. The framers of the Constitution were very familiar with the history of governments and knew that direct democracy was a disaster. It devolves into mob rule, and let's face it, most people don't know much about most things. Chomsky says that the lower 70% of the population has no effect on policy, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The U.S. system of income taxation is progressive and refundable, meaning that there is substantial transfer of wealth from the richest people to the poorest. The upper income brackets pay a disproportionately large percentage of all income taxes. U.S. states fund universal public education through high school; a policy that benefits the poor and middle class far more than the rich, who can afford to send their children to private schools. Health care funding like Medicare and Medicaid I'm not saying that these are bad! Just that they demonstrate the extent to which U.S. policy does benefit a broader swath of the population than you might think from reading this essay. Ironically, some of the things that Noam Chomsky likes the least are in fact popular with a majority of the U.S. population. Pew reports that 61% of American citizens approve of the drone assassination program, for instance [1]. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/25/big-gender-gap-in-global-public-opinion-about-use-of-drones/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/25/big-gender-g...

contingencies 13y ago
If large numbers of American citizens support drone strikes, that probably reflects more upon the hegemonic control of its media and the failures and biases of its various educational institutions than on the population itself. To put it bluntly, there is no democracy without an educated and informed population, and the US population cannot be honestly characterized as educated and informed.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  But you are obviously educated and informed! How did you slip through the hegemonic net of control?

jaryd 13y ago

This is a link to the transcript of the speech. If you'd prefer to listen (or watch) the talk the recording is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlgQs0UDxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlgQs0UDxY

rogerthis 13y ago

OK, Mr Chomsky. Why don't you go talk about democracy to your friend, Fidel "Butcher" Castro?

killerpopiller 13y ago
what? if one compares the deaths caused by US forces and those of Castro, Castros atrocities are dwarfed to subatomic levels. Besides, a two-party system can't be democratic.
droope 13y ago
This has got to be the most stupid, ad hominem, ignorant comment of the whole HN. Congratulations!