Noam Chomsky: The Tea Party is the ‘petit bourgeois’ face of corporate oligarchs

[UCmeNdc]

The Tea Party is just the popular face of corporate power in the United States, says political philosopher Noam Chomsky.

“I wouldn't call them revolutionary,” Chomsky said, dismissing a suggestion that the conservative political faction had anarchist characteristics.

He told Radio VR during an interview posted online last week that he agreed with the conservative political analyst Norman Ornstein’s characterization of the Tea Party.


“He just described them as a radical insurgency opposed to rationality, to political compromise, to participation to a parliamentary system — in fact, with no positive goals themselves,” Chomsky said.

He said traditional anarchists opposed the inherent inequality in the relationship between a government and its people or business owners and their workers, while Tea Party conservatives promote this imbalance.

“They’re in favor of having the population subordinated to concentrated private power, which should have no limits,” Chomsky said.



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/20/noam-chomsky-the-tea-party-is-the-petty-bourgeois-face-of-corporate-oligarchs/

[Little Star]

1. Sounds right to me.

[anti partisan]

2. I will always maintain that Tea Party and libertarian types

Are the easiest Republicans to convert into Democrats. They generally share a lot of our dissatisfaction with a lot of areas of government, and just are horribly misguided when it comes to solutions.

[shaayecanaan]

3. I'm not sure thats correct...

Trotsky already had a response for this:-

Parliamentary cretins, who consider themselves connoisseurs of the people, like to repeat:

"One must not frighten the middle classes with revolution. They do not like extremes."

In this general form, this affirmation is absolutely false. Naturally, the petty proprietor prefers order so long as business is going well and so long as he hopes that tomorrow it will go better.

But when this hope is lost, he is easily enraged and is ready to give himself over to the most extreme measures. Otherwise, how could he have overthrown the democratic state and brought fascism to power in Italy and Germany? The despairing petty bourgeois sees in fascism, above all, a fighting force against big capital, and believes that, unlike the working-class parties which deal only in words, fascism will use force to establish more "justice". The peasant and the artisan are in their manner realists. They understand that one cannot forego the use of force.

It is false, thrice false, to affirm that the present petty bourgeoisie is not going to the working-class parties because it fears "extreme measures". Quite the contrary. The lower petty bourgeoisie, its great masses, only see in the working-class parties parliamentary machines. They do not believe in their strength, nor in their capacity to struggle, nor in their readiness this time to conduct the struggle to the end.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p8

I dont think that the Tea Party has anarchist tendencies, but certainly it has right-wing populist, fascist tendencies.

[Arneoker]

4. In the end though I think Chomsky is right when he says:

“They’re in favor of having the population subordinated to concentrated private power, which should have no limits." Perhaps the Tea Partiers are amenable to radical tactics, and I would agree that they have at least some fascist tendencies. But their "radicalism" comes from their fear that an old order that they cherish is passing away.