There are already long lines for early voting around the country. You do other political activities the vast majority of the time, and once in a while you go pull a lever. However, if the presidential election is so consequential, can we be justified in spending only the time on it that it takes to vote? Surely if we believe Trump imperils the future of Earth, we should not just be voting for Biden, but be phone-banking and knocking doors for him.
Well, I actually think it might well be true that we should be doing that, reluctant as I am to admit it. Climate change makes presidential elections increasingly consequential. The difference between, say, a 2nd Gerald Ford term and the Jimmy Carter presidency were not as large as one where Donald Trump is on the ballot and the window for climate action is closing. Likewise, a race with David Duke is vastly more urgent than a normal Louisiana gubernatorial race, and might morally require not just voting for Edwin Edwards but campaigning for him as well.
Note, though that that means the only serious debate is: is there a moral obligation to vote for Joe Biden, or is there a moral obligation to both vote for Joe Biden and campaign for Joe Biden? No, I do not like that that is the question.
I hate that that is the question. But here we are. We can ask other questions in a month, when this is over. Right now, the election predominates over everything else. That fact explains one reason that Gray and Texas had such a frustrating time talking to Chomsky.
They seemed exasperated that he kept repeating the same point about the election. Gray said at one point that we should assume most Bernie people would ultimately vote Biden, and wanted to know how we can fix the party if not by using the power to grant or withhold our votes. The November election is, right now, quite important. Once it is over, we are going to have one of two outcomes, and which outcome we get is going to be crucial in determining what we do next.
How do we embark on that long-term project of dismantling capitalist institutions? How are we going to pressure a Biden administration to move left? This is where we must move decisively away from an obsession with the vote. Our task is to build independent left institutions, working class organizations, and social movements.
How do we engage with Black and brown workers struggling to survive? We organize in the labor movement, and along the way we build the only working class institutions of real political consequence.
We wage campaigns for community land trust housing or public housing. How do we break out of the seemingly ever-rightward drift of the political class? We build membership organizations with an explicit left orientation, like the DSA.
More about Noam Chomsky Donald Trump. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? That fits into, I guess, what I said about you being willing to answer e-mails and letters and sign petitions or so on. Do you have any regrets about that and how that played out?
No, I have no regrets about standing up for freedom of speech and opposing the Stalinist-style laws in France—which say that the state, the holy state, has the right to determine historical truth and to punish deviation from what it asserts.
I have no reservations about opposing that. That letter was so anodyne and insignificant; I barely noticed it. The only interesting thing about that letter is the reaction to it. The reaction was extraordinary. It showed that the problem is far greater than I thought it was.
Some of the interpretations were really wild. A lot of the protest was about the people who signed it. How can you sign a statement when such-and-such a person signs it? It takes thirty seconds of thought to understand that if you accept that principle, there are no statements, for very simple reasons.
Do you know who else is going to sign it? If the question of who else signs a statement is a criterion for signing it, then nobody in their right mind ever signs anything. If a census worker says there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood, stating it as a fact, that is different from Donald Trump saying it at a rally.
We all know that one has different intent, and it seems like we should react to them differently based on the person saying it. Maybe this gets back to you not caring about intentions so much.
Yes, people read things differently. Probably different signers had different intentions, no doubt. I can see that from the list of signers.
Cancel culture is all over the mainstream. It goes on all the time. People of the left are making a serious mistake when they try to imitate it. They love it. They are important. Pay attention to them and do not adopt the characteristic repressive behavior of the mainstream. I think one of the things people objected to was the letter saying that freedom of speech was becoming more and more constricted.
To your point, this has always been going on, and has always been part of the mainstream, and some people thought that by saying it was getting worse, the drafters of the letter were making a specific point about the left and cancel culture. So to add a small fraction to what the mainstream always does is a mistake. People of different races and gender identities are able to speak their voices more clearly now, and that in many ways—.
So the first moves they made were to impact and severely undermine the labor movement. So, yes, that must be brought in as well. Now, all of these things ought to be brought together. All of these concerns interact. They all ought to be dealt with.
The Trump Presidency has taken us down the rabbit hole. A past era of reform suggests a way out. By David Rohde. He never imposed any demands on Israel. And everyone knows it. The Israeli press reported correctly that it had no effect. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are looking forward to ending four years of hostility between Ramallah and Washington. If you go back 20 years, the support for Israel would be among liberal democrats.
And support for Palestinians is growing among liberals — especially the young ones. Sooner or later that might influence policy. Jotam Confino Nov. Get email notification for articles from Jotam Confino Follow. Play audio. Open gallery view.
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