Noam Chomsky at Occupy protest in 2011. (photo: Andrew Rusk/Flickr)
Noam
Chomsky: Why the Resistance Against Trump Will Continue to Build
By Alexandra Rosenmann,
AlterNet
13 April 17
"The institutions look powerful but they collapse as soon as
the population becomes engaged."
Two
months into Trump's presidency, Noam Chomsky delivered a Starr Forum lecture at
MIT Center for International Studies praising the Bernie Sanders campaign as a
model for the resistance movement. For Chomsky, Sanders' grassroots coalition
is the silver lining following a presidential election year of
billion-plus-dollar loss.
"Back
in 1895, there was a great campaign manager named Mark Hanna, and he was asked
once what's necessary to run a successful political campaign," Chomsky
began.
Hanna
said, "You need two things: the first one is money, and I've forgotten
what the second thing is."
Through
the entire last century, this held true.
Then
"somebody comes along who nobody ever heard of and he uses a scare word,
'socialist,'" Chomsky said of Sanders. "He had no funding, nothing
from the corporate sector... the media [was] totally against him, almost either
ridiculing and/or dismissing him."
Sanders,
Chomsky believes, "could have easily have won the Democratic Party
nomination if it hadn't been for the party shenanigans to keep him out."
What
Sanders' success in the Democratic primaries showed is that "the
institutions look powerful, but they collapse as soon as the population becomes
engaged," Chomsky noted. "They're basically very weak."
According
to Newswhip, a social analytics measurement company, left-leaning social
engagement is on the rise.
This
year in particular, such activity has proven successful in fueling small-dollar
fundraising efforts by progressive politicians, from Massachusetts
Senator Elizabeth Warren to Georgia
Democratic congressional candidate Jon Ossoff.
"The
same Facebook tactics used by conservatives to fuel an anti-establishment
movement during the election are now being used by the left to fuel an
anti-Trump movement," Sara Fischer reported for Axios on
Tuesday.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment