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AUDIENCE: Do you think
there's been any developments

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policy-wise that are
helping the situation, that

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are making the situation better
in any way in the recent years?

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Or is it all coming
down, I guess?

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NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think
it goes in many directions.

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So actually, I think
the most dramatic fact

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about the last election,
the 2016 election,

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was not the election of Trump.

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The most striking fact
was the Sanders campaign.

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I mean, the fact that a
billionaire was elected.

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OK, it's not a big break
from American history.

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That goes on all the time.

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But the Sanders
campaign broke sharply

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with over a hundred years of
American political history.

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I mean, if we had media that
were talking about reality,

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that would be the headline.

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American elections are bought.

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There's plenty of substantial
mainstream political science

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research on this.

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If you look just at
simple variables,

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like, say, campaign
funding-- something

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as simple as that-- the
predictability of electability

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by campaign funding is literally
almost a straight line.

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There's a recent
study by Tom Ferguson

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over at UMass, one
of the main scholars

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who works on this, who studied
congressional election--

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for presidential elections have
been shown for a long time.

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But that was the
first main study

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of congressional elections.

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They went from
1980 to the present

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all over the country
simply asking,

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what's the relation
between campaign spending

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and electability?

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And it is literally
a straight line.

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You just don't get results like
that in the social sciences.

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The more campaign spending,
the more you get elected.

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And that goes back well
into the late 19th century.

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There's a famous
campaign manager,

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Mark Hanna, back 1890s.

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He was asked once, what's
the secret for running

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a successful election campaign?

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And he said, you have
to have two things.

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The first one is money.

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And I can't remember
the second one.

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That's American
politics, literally.

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Just with overwhelming
near-certainty.

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Well, all of a sudden, you
get a guy who's unknown,

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has no support from any
of the sources of wealth,

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no support from the wealthy,
no corporate support, dismissed

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by the medial as ridiculous,
very negative media campaign.

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He was basically unknown.

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And he even used a
scare word "socialist."

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He would have won the
Democratic Party nomination

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if it hadn't been for the
Clinton-Obama shenanigans

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to keep the party
from reflecting

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its popular constituency.

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That's an incredible
break from history.

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And right now,
incidentally, he is

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by far the most popular
political figure

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in the country.

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Way above anyone else.

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Well, those are signs that
other things are-- especially

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among young people, he's way up.

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That's the future electorate.

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So these are things
that are going off

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in the other direction.

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There's plenty of opportunities,
if they're grasped.

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And it's kind of easy to sink
into sort of hopelessness.

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What's the point?

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But it's just really
a bad mistake.

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First of all, the issues
are extremely important.

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There's an awful
lot can be done.

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Even in the kind of thing that
Arlie Hochschild was doing,

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reaching people who
were deeply embedded

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in the ultra-red
constituency, the deeply

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religious, conservative,
traditional, anti-government

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for the reasons that they
see, which you can understand,

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can be changed.

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Incidentally, if you
look back in the past,

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the same sectors
of the population

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were the most carried
forward, the most extreme

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00:04:57,797 --> 00:05:01,534
radical democratic programs
in American history.

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The term "populism"
is thrown around now,

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00:05:04,637 --> 00:05:06,639
but it used to mean something.

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And the populist movement
in the United States,

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which began with
farmers in Texas

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00:05:13,880 --> 00:05:18,484
and spread through the Midwest,
to Kansas and place like that,

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00:05:18,484 --> 00:05:25,158
was a really powerful,
radical democratic movement.

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Linked up with the
Knights of Labor,

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the main labor movement, whose
slogan was the working people

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00:05:32,165 --> 00:05:34,734
ought to own and
run the factories.

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00:05:34,734 --> 00:05:37,103
And it was smashed
by force finally,

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but this is by far the most
real democratic movement

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in American history.

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And maybe the world,
that comes out

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of Texas and Kansas farmers.

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It's the same people.