Deconstructed Special: The Noam Chomsky Interview

The Noam Chomsky Interview

Legendary linguist, activist, and political theorist Noam Chomsky has been speaking out against U.S. interventionism from Vietnam to Latin America to the Middle East since the 1960s. He’s the most cited author alive, but you won’t see him on the nightly news or in the pages of most major newspapers. On this week’s Deconstructed, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, the 2020 Democratic field, and why he opposed Trump’s Syria troop withdrawal.

Noam Chomsky: The current moment is the most grim moment in human history and the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn’t give a damn. He’s having fun. He’s serving his rich constituency. So what the hell, let’s destroy the world.

[Music interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan.
This week who better to speak with about a combination of domestic and international crises, from violence in Syria to the Democratic presidential race in the U.S., than the legendary writer, activist, and political theorist, Noam Chomsky. Wanna know what he makes of impeachment too?

NC: I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. He’s a major crook. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it.

MH: Today, in a special episode of Deconstructed, I speak to the one, the only, Noam Chomsky.

My guest today has been a scathing critic of U.S. presidents, and especially U.S. foreign policy, for more than 50 years. He rose to prominence as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war and was even included on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. An academic, activist and best-selling author, he’s been described as “the founding father of linguistic philosophy,” but he’s best known today as the intellectual hero to anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, socialists and anarchists.

I’m talking of course about Noam Chomsky, who is often referred to as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities, along with Shakespeare and the Bible, and yet you rarely if ever, see him quoted, published or invited onto the mainstream media, whether it’s the New York Times op-ed page or CNN primetime.

Chomsky, the arch-anti-interventionist surprised a lot of people last year on my colleague Jeremy Scahill’s Intercepted podcast, when he said that the U.S. should maintain a troop presence in Syria in order to deter Turkish aggression against the Kurds. Does he still feel that way today, in the wake of President Trump’s controversial withdrawal of U.S. troops? And what’s his view on impeaching Trump and on the presidential prospects of his old friend Senator Bernie Sanders?

Recently — and I should add shortly before Donald Trump announced the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi — Noam Chomsky joined me for an interview from his new academic base at the University of Arizona, where, aged 90, he’s now laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics and chair of an environment and social justice program.

[Music interlude.]

MH: Professor Chomsky, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.

Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you.

MH: In recent weeks, we’ve seen some pretty gruesome images coming out of northeastern Syria, rebel groups backed by Turkey on the offensive killing and mutilating, not just Kurdish fighters from the SDF, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, but women and children too.

Announcer [translated from Arabic]: This house you see here, there were children playing. A motor fell and killed a boy. The girl she lost her leg.

MH: Am I right in saying that you didn’t support President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the front lines in Syria?

NC: That’s correct. For a long time, I’ve been trying to organize support for opposition to the withdrawal.

MH: And why is that?

NC: Because the, from the left at least, the call for withdrawal was based on anti-imperialist principles. But principles have to be understood in connection with the human reality of the existing circumstances. A small, U.S. contingent with the sole mission of deterring a planned Turkish invasion, which was obvious, is not imperialism. It’s protecting the Kurds from an expansion of the atrocities and massacres that Erdogan has been carrying out both within Turkey itself and in the areas of Syria that he’s already conquered.

MH: And a lot of people listening especially on the left might be surprised to hear you say this. They might say Noam Chomsky, we associate him with anti-interventionism, with opposition to U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. military interventions abroad. Why are the Kurds the exception to that, you know, life-long, career-long opposition to U.S. military interventions, especially in the Middle East?

NC: If you take a look at what’s happening, it’s not intervention. Syria was already invaded by Turkey. The troops that are there were essentially doing nothing except deterring an expansion of a further invasion. You have to not deal with slogans as if it’s a religious catechism. You have to ask how they apply in particular to complex human circumstances.

MH: I take your point. But I do want to explore this a bit more broadly because I’ve agreed with a lot of what you’ve written over the years in terms of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Latin America. And as you know, and you’ve written so eloquently on, a lot of these interventions, invasions, bombing campaigns, regime changes, are justified on humanitarian grounds, with leaders saying what you’re saying that we should protect civilians. A liberal interventionist listening to you speaking now might say, “Well, why didn’t Noam Chomsky support the Kosovo intervention to protect Albanians? Why didn’t he support a no fly zone for Syrian Arabs in Idlib or Aleppo who were being bombed by Assad? Why only the Kurds?”

NC: Let’s take your first example, Kosovo. I opposed the NATO bombing because it was known both to the Clinton administration and to the press, which refused to report it, that the bombing would radically increase the level of crimes and atrocities against the people in Kosovo. General Wesley Clark informed the Clinton administration weeks earlier that that’s exactly what would happen. He informed the press when the invasion began that that’s what was gonna happen. The reason I opposed it was because there were diplomatic options available. And instead, NATO, meaning the U.S., chose to undertake a major military attack consciously knowing that it would greatly increase atrocities as the Serbs couldn’t react by bombing Washington. So they’d react on the ground.

You have to ask yourself, in each circumstance, what are the consequences of your decisions? If you don’t do that, you’re not a moral human being. Now you’re perfectly right that every monster you can think of in history has declared that whatever acts they’re going to carry out are for humanitarian reasons. Now, if you have a brain functioning, what you do is ask is this correct? Or isn’t it correct? You don’t say, because Hitler said it was a humanitarian intervention in the Sudetenland therefore, there are no humanitarian interventions.

MH: No, of course, but in Syria, for example, as you know, very complicated conflict with people, you know, people of good faith and bad faith on many sides. There are a lot of Syrian Arabs who would say, why didn’t Noam Chomsky ask for U.S. troops to protect us when we were being butchered by Assad? Why only for the Kurds when they’re being butchered by Erdogan?

NC: Because there was no way for a small contingent of U.S. troops to deter Assad. What in fact was done was that under Obama when they were still planning to overthrow the regime, the CIA was providing heavy weapons to the rebels who were by then mostly jihadi rebels.

Newscaster: There’s word tonight that the CIA has been delivering weapons to rebels in Syria over the last two weeks. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration is sending vehicles and other equipment to boost the muscle of rebel fighters in Syria’s two-year civil war.

NC: They in fact, slowed down Assad’s advance, but quite predictably, they brought the Russians in to escalate the conflict.

Newscaster: There’s growing concern among top officials in the Defense Department over Russia’s growing involvement in Syria’s civil war. It’s escalating by the day and so are the risks of a confrontation with the U.S.

NC: So yes, you have to ask yourself, what are the likely predictable consequences in every situation? You can’t find formulas in human affairs that will determine the action in every particular case.

MH: And just on Iran, because as you well know, a lot of U.S. politicians, especially on the right, they want American troops in Syria, partly to “deter Iran.”

Mitt Romney: At a time when we’re applying maximum pressure on Iran by giving them a stronger hand in Syria, we’ve actually weakened that pressure.

Lindsey Graham: President Trump, if you remove all of our forces from Syria, you’re throwing the Kurds over. ISIS will come back on your watch and Iran will take over.

MH: How worried are you about a U.S. attack on Iran next year? Because it’s election year and with Trump behind in the polls, I for one can see the appeal for Trump of launching a new war in the Middle East in the run up to November?

NC: Well, first of all, let’s separate those two issues. A small contingent of troops to deter Turkish aggression would have nothing to do with Iran. So we put that aside, what are the prospects for a war against Iran? It’s hard to say.

I don’t think the Trump administration could answer. I don’t think they want a war. A war could have extremely harsh effects not only out of Iran, but much more generally. So for example, Saudi Arabia’s major oil production, almost all the oil production is in the northeast corner right in the Shiite areas, very close to Iran. They have missile capacities. They could devastate one of the main oil producers in the world.

There could be many other consequences. So I don’t think the United States wants a war with Iran. What they want to do is torture Iranians as much as possible in the hope that destruction of the economy will lead to some breakdown inside Iran. But that can easily get out of hand. Any accidental incidents in the Gulf, could blow up suddenly and could lead to an attack.

Newscaster: Tensions on the rise in the Persian Gulf once again. The United States says Iran is behind attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf. Now, lawmakers say the Trump administration says it already has the legal authority to begin a war with Iran.

NC: It wouldn’t really be an invasion. The U.S. is not going to invade Iran. That’s much too costly. It would be an attack from a safe distance.

MH: And of course, as you say, that could escalate as well. No one knows what the unintended consequences of such dangerous action could be. I want to talk about the Donald Trump presidency especially with impeachment on the cards. But before I do, does the seemingly global rise of the far right, of authoritarianism, and nativism from Putin to Orban to Duterte to Narendra Modi in India, how much does that worry you? And what do you think is driving it at this moment in human history?

NC: Of course, it’s worrisome. It’s very hard to detect geo-strategic planning in the chaos of the Trump administration, which is highly personalized, and so, yeah, megalomaniac, and so on. But you can kind of detect something.

MH: Yeah.

NC: The effort which is overt in Steve Bannon’s case to construct a kind of a reactionary international which will consist in the Middle East of the most reactionary states in the region, Saudi Arabia.

Donald J. Trump: The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine. You’ve done really spectacular job.

NC: United Arab Emirates, Egypt under the Sisi dictatorship.

DJT: Egypt has a great leader. He’s highly respected. He’s brought order.

NC: Israel, which is now far to the right.

DJT: Netanyahu, a very special man. He’s done a great job.

NC: To be kind of a base for U.S. power in the region. And that extends beyond to try to bring Modi’s India into it.

DJT: Prime Minister Modi is doing a truly exceptional job for India.

NC: Orban is another case. Salvini in Italy, Farage if he emerges in the post-Brexit period. Bolsonaro in Brazil.

MH: But is there a particular social or economic or political driver of all this that links all this together?

NC: Sure, yeah, it’s very simple and straightforward. Forty years of the neoliberal assault on the general population which has been extremely harmful almost everywhere. It’s led to anger, resentment, contempt for institutions. And when you have a period of unfocused anger, resentment and so on, it’s fertile territory for demagogues to arise, and try to mobilize it, and blame it, not on its sources. So, like not on the international financial institutions that are lying behind it to a substantial extent. But to focus it on scapegoats. Typically, people even more vulnerable than you are, immigrants, Muslims, Afro-Americans. This goes way back to Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare queens” and so on and many other demagogues in the past. So yes, that’s rising. There are also counter-forces that are rising. Now they’re very significant. It’s pretty common these days to quote Gramsci’s famous —

MH: Interregnum.

NC: Yeah, Interregnum with morbid symptoms, but there are morbid symptoms and there are positive symptoms. And it’s a real question which will prevail.

MH: Let’s talk about Donald Trump specifically. You have witnessed, I think 16 presidents over the course of your lifetime. Donald Trump being the 16th. How does Trump stack up against the rest of them? Is he sui generis in your view?

NC: Yeah, he’s off the spectrum. But the fact is that that’s true of the Republican Party generally. Two well-known commentators from the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein years ago, described the Republican Party since Newt Gingrich as a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics, and is now often a different dimension. What’s actually happened is that during the neoliberal period both of the political parties have shifted to the right. So the mainstream Democrats, the ones who are now meeting with their billionaire friends to try to figure out how to get rid of Sanders and Warren, they’re basically what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Democrats abandoned the working class by the late ’70s. The last bit of a show of interest was the Humphrey Hawkins 1978 Full Employment Bill which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth. And after that, they kind of gave up. They handed the working class over to their class enemy, the Republicans who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues. They’re shafting them at every turn, including Trump, but you can try to mobilize them on the basis of abortion, immigrants, guns, anything but the real issues.

MH: And I agree with you that the Republican party as you said, you call them the biggest threat to mankind in terms of their views on climate change. As you say, the radical insurgency, but having said that, even a Ted Cruz or a Mike Pence, as radical as they may be, they still fit within some sort of understandable political prism. Trump, as you say, is off the spectrum. Have you ever seen a western Democratic leader like him in your lifetime? Who behaves like him, talks like him?

NC: No. But it’s worth looking back a little bit. So for the last, I suppose, 15 years, take a look at the Republican primaries. Every Republican primary, a candidate who arose from the base was so outrageous that the Republican establishment tried and succeeded in suppressing them. Michele Bachmann —

Michele Bachmann: Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas. It is a harmless gas.

NC: Rick Santorum —

Rick Santorum: I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.

NC: Herman Cain —

Herman Cain: Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.

NC: All madmen, and they managed to suppress them. What was different in 2016 is that they failed. And the guy who came into office over their opposition was a megalomaniac, narcissist, kind of like a three-year-old who’s enjoying the opportunity to smash everything in sight and knows he can get away with it and a very good politician. He has his finger on the pulse of his voting constituency. It’s a kind of an adoring constituency that will support him no matter what he does, and he’s playing to that gallery. The only policy that you can discern clearly in the Trump administration is a very simple one: me. Anything that benefits me I’ll do no matter what the consequences. If it destroys the world, okay.

MH: While acknowledging that point and you’re hundred percent right to talk about his kind of narcissism and egomania, but is it also fair now to describe the president as a white nationalist or white supremacist? Because when I spoke to you in 2016, shortly after his election, you made the point that every far-right, nationalist, neo-Nazi has been encouraged and excited by his victory, you said. But then you said we don’t know what direction he’ll go in.

 We don’t know if he’ll go in that direction. Given the last three years, the Charlottesville, the, you know, what’s been going on recently, the attacks on synagogues and mosques, his far-right rallies where they chant “send them back,” it’s pretty clear that he has now gone in a full on white nationalist white supremacist direction, isn’t it?

NC: But that’s part of the problem of the Republican party. Its primary constituency is extreme wealth and corporate power. Those are the ones they serve. So you take the one legislative achievement of the Trump administration, the tax scam. That was for the rich and the very rich and the corporate sector. Take deregulation, does it help working people to eliminate eliminate health and safety conditions in the workplace? Does it increase profits? Okay, we know the answer. Same across the board.

So you run across the legislative programs, the ones that are carried out by the really evil characters, Mitch McConnell. Before him, Ryan and so on. Those, those policies are dedicated to the traditional Republican constituency. But you can’t get votes on those policies. So you have to mobilize some kind of a voting base. And the way they did it is, as I described it, as you know.

MH: Mobilize the racists.

NC: So if it turns out that white nationalists are the voting base that you can mobilize, Trump will become a white nationalist. I think it does him too much credit to attribute to him beliefs like support for white nationalism, or fascism or anything else. His motive is himself. And he’s a good enough politician to understand that the only way he’s going to get support is by appealing to those sectors of those sectors of the population. One should bear in mind the utter cynicism of the Republican Party since Reagan.

Take their actual planks. One unbreakable commitment of the Republican party is anti-abortion. What’s called pro-life. Where’d that come from? You go back to the 1960s. The leading republican figures, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, all the rest of them were what we call pro-choice. What changed? Well, in the 1970s, Republican strategist, Paul Weyrich, had the brilliant idea that if the Republicans pretended, I stress pretended, to be anti-abortion, they could pick up the evangelical vote and the northern working class Catholic vote. So they turned on a dime. They all became passionately anti-abortion. Take climate change. That’s an interesting one. You go just 10 years, 2008 John McCain when he ran for president had a global warming plank, not very strong but something.

John McCain: There are vital measures we can take in the short-term even as we focus on long-term policies to mitigate the effects of global warming.

NC: The Republicans were in fact toying with cap and trade. What happened to it? Very simple. David Koch, died recently. The Koch brothers launched a huge campaign, major juggernaut, bribing congressmen, threatening them, intimidating them. Huge lobbying organization, fake popular organizations to you know, knock on doors and so on. They switched. Now, part of the catechism is you have to be against climate change.

MH: Let’s talk impeachment. The Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into President Trump specifically around this suggestion that he was pressuring a foreign country Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponent and even withholding military aid until they agreed to do so. Do you support the House Democrats’ decision to finally start an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump?

NC: First notice something, they’re going after Trump not on his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn’t go after Nixon on his major crimes. They were off the record. It was because he had attacked the Democratic party.

MH: Good point.

NC: So yes, they’ll protect themselves. Is it the right thing to do? I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. You know, he’s a major crook. There’s no doubt about it. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me.

MH: I had the filmmaker Michael Moore on the show last week, and he thinks that eventually this evidence is going to pile up against Trump that’s so damning — and we’ve already seen some of the testimony from the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and others — that actually he thinks Republican senators, some of them who you know, who need to save their skins will join Senate Democrats to vote to remove Trump from office. You don’t seem to buy that?

NC: I think you may find a handful who will find a way to evade taking a position But if you just look at the record of the party — I gave you a couple of examples, but we could go on — it’s very hard to imagine any bit of principle emerging. It’s true that if some of them thought they were really going to suffer for it politically or in other ways, maybe they’d change, but that doesn’t seem too likely. I mean, just take a look at Trump’s voting base, you know, there are pretty regular polls and studies. They haven’t changed. They buy his line. Here’s our hero. The one man in the world who’s willing to stand up for us.

MH: Although whether it works or not in the Senate, it doesn’t mean the House Democrats shouldn’t take a stand regardless of whether Republican Senators convict. Can Trump be beaten at the ballot box next November? Is there a Democratic candidate who you think can beat him or more than one candidate?

NC: Well, here it’s very interesting to see what’s being done. You may have seen a day or two ago in the New York Times was a big article about a meeting of the Democratic centrists, the establishment, the billionaires, the donors, you know, the mainstream political figures. And it was about, their concern about just what you asked, is there a Democrat who can defeat Trump? And they went through the possible Democratic candidates and discussed their flaws, and then asked, can we bring in someone else like Bloomberg or Michelle Obama? Take a look at the leading candidates they listed: Warren, Biden and Mayor Pete. Do you notice somebody missing?

MH: Senator Sanders doesn’t make the cut of these lists.

NC: There’s a very good reason for it. He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime. It’s not his policies. His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home. Their job is to watch not to participate.

MH: To be fair to Elizabeth Warren, who you mentioned a moment ago, she has upset a lot of big democratic donors.

Newscaster: Some Democratic donors on Wall Street are reportedly threatening to vote for President Trump or sit out of the 2020 election cycle if the party nominates Elizabeth Warren.

MH: Is she someone you’re not impressed with, are impressed with? What’s your take on Senator Elizabeth Warren?

NC: I think she’s seems to me quite honest. I think many of her plans are perfectly reasonable. She’s working with quite serious economists, some of them friends. But she doesn’t pretend to be to try, to hoping to institute radical institutional changes. Sanders does. Furthermore, she has not organized a mass political movement which Sanders did. And it’s had a lot of effect. That’s how you get people in Congress like Ocasio-Cortez and others because of this movement.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to assert and recognize my inherent value.

NC: That’s scary. Nobody in the political mainstream wants that.

MH: Some argue, as you know, Bernie Sanders is a deeply controversial figure for good reasons and bad. You know, he’s a divisive figure, again, for good reasons or bad depending on your perspective. Some would say with Elizabeth Warren, you get the best of both worlds, you get left wing policies, but you get a candidate who can reach out across the Democratic party. Why not go with her instead of Bernie Sanders?

NC: Well, you can make that calculation. I think it’s up to individuals to decide.

MH: But Bernie’s got your vote, it’s fair to say?

NC: If I were voting in the primary, I would vote for him. But I think Warren would be a reasonable candidate, almost anybody you can think of, you know, the next guy you meet in the street would be better than Trump.

MH: Of course, of course, even Joe Biden, what’s your view of Joe Biden?

NC: (laughs) You know, he’s a kind of a mild Obama. Nothing very special. I suspect in a debate with Trump, I think he’d probably be overwhelmed just by the showmanship and the deceit and the lies, but he’d certainly be better candidate than Trump.

MH: I suspect you’re right about him being overwhelmed. One of the things that a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters point to, they say, “Look, Elizabeth Warren says she’s a capitalist to her bones. Bernie says he’s a socialist.” Do you think it’s accurate to describe Bernie Sanders, number one, do you think is accurate to describe him as a socialist? And number two, how would you define your own politics, your own ideology?

MC: Well, I don’t think the word socialism should even be used in this context. Bernie Sanders is a decent person. I like what he’s doing. To be quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President Eisenhower very much. He’s a progressive, New Deal Democrat. Politics has shifted so far to the right during the neoliberal period that things that were sort of conventional and mainstream 50-60 years ago now sound radical.

MH: So why do you think he calls himself a socialist given it’s not going to help him with the electorate? Why do you think he describes himself as a socialist then?

NC: Well, you know, what does socialism mean these days? Socialism means the New Deal. In the United States, you don’t call it socialism because socialism is a curse word. We’re a very business-run society.

MH: That’s my point. He uses the word to self-define in that way when it doesn’t really help him. And you’re saying he’s not one.

NC: He is if you want to use the term that way. Most terms of political discourse have almost totally lost their meaning. So, Reagan is called a free-market Republican. His administration intervened radically in the market over and over for the benefit of the rich.

MH: So on that point then, dare I ask, how would you define your own politics, your own ideology? Is there a label we could give you?

NC: By now I don’t even like labels, but I’ve been more or less, I hate to use the word because it’s so misunderstood, but one or another form of anarchist all my life and never saw any reason to change. Actually, I think most people are anarchists in the traditional sense.

MH: How would you define that to someone listening at home saying, “Well, what does that mean if Noam Chomsky is an anarchist?”

NC: Well, what does anarchism mean? And it’s the whole long tradition actually going back to classical liberalism. It fundamentally means opposition to structures of authority and domination unless they can justify themselves. Illegitimate structures of domination and hierarchy ranging from paternalistic family to business which is a tyranny in which people rent themselves as slaves, to international affairs. Anywhere across this domain if you find illegitimate authority, it should be eliminated. I suspect most people believe that. Of course, that means lots of consequences. It means they should be opposed to private tyrannies. People who are called libertarians in the United States, strange notion, very anti-libertarian, are fundamentally calling for rule by unaccountable private tyrannies. I don’t see anything libertarian about that.

Mh: That’s a very good point and I kind of know where you stand on the economy and on foreign policy. What I’m wondering is where do you stand on issues of political reform? Do you think it’s time for the Democrats to take action to fix the ridiculously undemocratic and archaic U.S. political system, would you, for example, support abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster? Would you back packing the Supreme Court to undo Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? Would you support statehood for DC and Puerto Rico?

NC: Well, you have to take each case on its own. Take the Electoral College, that’s bad enough, take the Senate. The Senate is one of the most undemocratic institutions in the western world. Take a look at the number of voters that each senator represents. If a country tried to enter the European Union with the U.S. political system, they’d be turned down by the European Court of Justice. I mean, there’s a whole history here that has to be thought of. The Constitution in the 18th century, though it was a pretty conservative doctrine nevertheless, by the standards of the eighteenth century was pretty novel and even progressive in some respects.

But to adhere to the 18th century constitution in the 21st century is a pretty strange phenomenon. I mean, take the people who are called originalists, you know the right-wing originalist Gorsuch and so on who say we have to interpret the Constitution the way the founders and the framers in the 18th century understood it. I mean, does that even approach rationality? To discuss the modern world the way somebody in 1780 perceived it?

MH: So you would like to see the Democrats take a much stronger line on some of these issues, on changing some of this stuff?

NC: Well, you’re living in the real world, not in some ideal world. We’re actually facing a constitutional crisis. The way the demography and the political structure are organized, it’s increasingly becoming the case that a very small sector of voters, maybe 20% or so, who are white, often white nationalist, Christian, often Evangelical, traditional, older, less educated, rural, can actually run the country. And that can’t be changed by amendment, because there’s enough votes in the small states to prevent it.

How do you deal with this? Well, you have to deal with it piecemeal in some fashion. Maybe you’d like to say this very reactionary system should be overturned. But that’s like saying I’d like to have peace on earth.

MH: But you could do stuff like pack the Supreme Court which doesn’t require any constitutional amendments?

NC: That’s a possible tactic, but even that wouldn’t get you very far and it could avert some of the extreme reactionary decisions of the Roberts Court, which is the most reactionary in living memory. You’d have to go far back to find anything like it. But the serious issues, like for example, the un-amendable commitment to a radically undemocratic Senate, that’s going to be hard to change.

MH: Before we finish, you’ve lived through and documented, analyzed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Reagan era, the Iraq War, the financial crisis. Given that, how unique, how toxic even, is this current political moment that we’re living through right now?

NC: The current moment, not just political, is the most grim moment in human history. We are now in a situation where this generation, in fact, in the next few years, is going to have to make a decision of cosmic significance which has never arisen before: Will organized human society survive? And there are two enormous threats. The threat of environmental catastrophe, which at least is getting some attention, not enough. The other is the threat of nuclear war, which is increasing sharply by the Trump administration, in fact. These have to be dealt with quickly. Otherwise, there’s nothing to talk about.

And notice that the wrecking ball in the White House just doesn’t give a damn. He’s having fun. He’s serving his rich constituency. So what the hell, let’s destroy the world. And it’s not that they don’t know it. Some months ago, maybe a year ago by now, one of the Trump bureaucracies the National Transportation Administration came out with what I think is the most astonishing document in the entire history of the human species.

It got almost no attention. It was a long 500-page environmental assessment in which they tried to determine what the environment would be like at the end of the century. And they concluded, by the end of the century, temperatures will have risen seven degrees Fahrenheit, that’s about twice the level that scientists regard as feasible for organized human life. The World Bank describes it as cataclysmic. So what’s their conclusion? Conclusion is we should have no more constraints on automotive emissions. The reasoning is very solid. We’re going off the cliff anyway. So why not have fun? Has anything like that ever appeared in human history? There’s nothing like it.

MH: There’s nothing like this administration in particular. One last question before I let you go, you’re about to turn 91 years old. You’re still going strong doing interviews like this one, teaching at the University of Arizona. What keeps you going? What motivates you? I’m sure a lot of people listening would like to know.

NC: What’s the alternative? It’s fine. It’s easy, personal life. You know, the political scene, the issues that have to be addressed, professional work which is exciting, all the things in life that make life worth living.

MH: Do you ever get exhausted having to campaign and argue and debate and push for these things decade after decade?

NC: Not really, just more incentive as time goes on.

MH: Professor Noam Chomsky, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

NC: Very pleased to be with you.

MH: That was Noam Chomsky and that’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

The Resurgence of Political Authoritarianism: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

By C.J. Polychroniou

 

Following the end of World War II, liberal democracy began to flourish in most countries in the Western world, and its institutions and values were aspired to by movements and individuals under authoritarian and oppressive regimes. However, with the rise of neoliberalism, both the institutions and the values of modern democracy came rapidly and continuously under attack in an effort to extend the profit-maximizing logic and practices of capitalism throughout all aspects of economic and social life.

Sketched out in broad outlines, this story explains the resurgence of authoritarian political trends in today’s Western societies, including the rise of far-right movements whose followers feel threatened by the processes unleashed by neoliberal economic policies. In the former communist countries and in the non-Western world, meanwhile, authoritarianism is also on the rise, partly as a residue of authoritarian legacies, and partly as a reaction to perceived threats posed to national culture and social order by global capitalism.

Is it possible to counter this rise in extreme populism? In this exclusive Truthout interview, the world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky — the author of more than 100 books and thousands of academic articles and popular essays — offers his unique insights on this and more, bringing into the analysis issues and questions that are rarely addressed in the current debates taking place today about the resurgence of political authoritarianism.

C.J. Polychroniou: In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published an intellectually embarrassing book titled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he prophesied the “end of history” after the collapse of the communist bloc, arguing that liberal democracy would become the world’s “final form of human government.” However, what has happened in this decade in particular is that the institutions and values of liberal democracy have come under attack by scores of authoritarian leaders all over the world, and extreme nationalism, xenophobia and “soft fascist” tendencies have begun reshaping the political landscape in Europe and the United States. How do you explain the resurgence of political authoritarianism in the early part of the 21st century?

Noam Chomsky: The “political landscape” is indeed ominous. While today’s political and social circumstances are much less dire, still they do call to mind Antonio Gramsci’s warning from Mussolini’s prison cells about the severe crisis of his day, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

One morbid symptom is the resurgence of political authoritarianism, a highly important matter that is properly receiving a great deal of attention in public debate. But “a great deal of public attention” should always be a warning sign: Does the shaping of the issues reflect power interests, which are diverting attention from what may be more significant factors behind the general concerns? In the present case, I think that is so, and before turning to the very significant question of the resurgence of political authoritarianism, I’d like to bring up related matters that do not seem to me to receive the attention they merit, and in fact are almost totally excluded from the extensive public attention.

It’s entirely true that “the institutions and values of liberal democracy are under attack” to an unusual extent, but not only by authoritarian leaders, and not for the first time. I presume all would agree that primary among the values of liberal democracy is that governments should be responsive to voters. If that is not the case, “liberal democracy” is a farce.

It has been well established that it is not the case. Ample work in mainstream political science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their own elected representatives, who listen to different voices — the voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector (Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton University Press, 2014; Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It, University of Chicago press, 2017; Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2^nd ed., Princeton University Press, 2018, among others). Furthermore, the penetrating work of Thomas Ferguson reveals that for a long time, elections have been substantially bought, including Congress, continuing right to the present, 2016.

These facts alone show that the furor about alleged Russian interference with our pristine democratic process reveals profound indoctrination — in capitalist, not democratic, values.

Furthermore, those who find foreign interference to be especially troublesome despite its marginality should clearly be looking elsewhere. It is not even in question that Israel interferes massively in US elections and governance, proudly and ostentatiously. One recent case that was unusually brazen was in 2015, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress without even informing President Obama in order to undermine his Iran program, a mere fragment of Israel’s constant and far-reaching efforts to influence US politics.

Putting aside these secondary matters, the major attack on the institutions and values of liberal democracy is by the powerful business classes, intensifying since Reagan as both political parties have drifted toward greater subordination to their interests — the Republicans to such an extreme that by now they barely can be considered a political party. Anyone who finds this surprising must be uninformed about American society and how it functions. By now, as business power has been unleashed by its servants in the Republican Party, the traditional business attack on “the institutions and values of liberal democracy” has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, if even then.

Of course, it is quite legal to buy elections, to send lobbyists to congressional offices to write legislation, and in other ways “to shape public policy in a way that serves [private power’s] narrow interests” — indeed, these comprise “an essential, nonaccidental part of … business strategy,” Zephyr Teachout writes in a valuable study. Investigation has shown, she adds, that a CEO’s investment in changing laws to decrease corporate tax rates yields a vastly greater return than investment in reducing cost of production. Small wonder that all of this is normal business strategy.

Teachout cites a Supreme Court decision of 1874 which concluded that, “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves [for] the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption.” That was, of course, before the ideology of business supremacy had risen to the level of “hegemonic common sense,” in Gramscian terms. The sharp transition well illustrates the force of indoctrination in a society with a powerful and highly class-conscious business community.

The Reagan-Thatcher project of enhancing untrammeled business power, carried forward and extended by their successors, has been the political reflection of a dedicated and coordinated campaign by the business classes to reverse the “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s that deeply troubled liberal international elites, who devoted the first major publication of the Trilateral Commission to this serious malady. Their prime concern was the increased engagement of popular classes in the political arena to press their demands, all of which imposes too much pressure and the state, threatening (though this remains implicit) the dominance of the business world. As the American rapporteur, Harvard professor of government Samuel Huntington, observed nostalgically, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” but those happy days were disappearing under the attack of the great majority, whose role in a liberal democracy is to be passive and acquiescent, a doctrine with a rich pedigree, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.

That was the liberal end of the political spectrum. Toward the conservative end, at the same time, the influential “Powell memorandum,” directed to the Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), called for open war by the business world to defend itself from the virtual takeover of the country by radical forces that were destroying “free enterprise” under the leadership of Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other “dangerous extremists.”

The messages are pretty much the same, but the rhetoric is quite different. The liberal rhetoric is largely reserved, while the business rhetoric reaches the frenzied pitch of a 3-year-old who has all the toys and laments that one might be taken away.

The business world, of course, did not need these reminders to dedicate its resources to reversing the democratic progress and highly successful regulated capitalism of the postwar era that was indeed infringing on business power, and crucially threatening the rate of profit, as political economist Robert Brenner has shown. The neoliberal counterattack substantially beat back these threats, sharply increasing private power and the wealth of a tiny segment of the population while leaving the majority to face economic stagnation or decline, increasingly precarious lives, and the natural loss of political influence as concentrated private economic power gains even greater dominance than before.

All of this continues under the revival from the housing-financial crisis that proceeds under Obama and Trump. The latest report of the Department of Labor finds that, “From May 2017 to May 2018, real average hourly earnings decreased 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted. The decrease in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.6-percent increase in the average workweek resulted in a 0.5-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.” Meanwhile, surging corporate profits are inflated still further by the tax scam that is the jewel in the crown of Trump’s Republican Party, overwhelmingly used for buyouts and other devices to enrich the wealthy rather than productive investment that would benefit society and lift wages.

The other side of the coin is the Reagan-Thatcher assault on unions, now advanced by the authorization of right-to-scrounge laws (in Orwellian terminology, “right-to-work” laws) by the most reactionary Supreme Court in over a century. The guiding doctrine is to create a world of isolated individuals at the mercy of concentrated private power in accord with the Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no society,” Thatcher’s unwitting paraphrase of Marx’s bitter condemnation of authoritarian leaders who sought to turn society into a “sack of potatoes.”

There are other sources for the malaise of the general population. The radical financialization of the economy during the neoliberal years and the prioritization of shareholder value, expedited by Reagan’s “Chicago Boys,” has shifted corporate behavior sharply from the retain-and-invest model of the great growth years of regimented capitalism to the “buyback economy” of the neoliberal reaction, matters explored with much insight by William Lazonick.

Apple, the world’s largest corporation in market value, was once devoted to product innovation and development. Under its new CEO, Tim Cook, it has become the “buyback king,” enriching shareholders (and management). Others are doing much the same. Lazonick estimates that “trillions of dollars that could have been spent on productive investment have instead been used to buy back stock in order to boost share prices,” enriching the rich but not providing meaningful and steady work or useful goods. The Republican tax scam of 2018 is having the same effects, all to the detriment of working people and the general population. The rapid increase in speculation has had similar consequences. The same is true of the repeated financial crises following deregulation, severely harming the poor and working people, though no longer the culprits in the financial industry, who are bailed out by the public and emerge richer than before.

There are remedies, but their advocates remain for now at the fringes of the political economy. Though perhaps not for long.

These are, to be sure, generalities. Like most complex processes, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the concomitant anti-social tendencies are over-determined. There are many more specific factors but the essence, I think, is along the lines just outlined.

Today’s most powerful authoritarian leaders — e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel and Donald Trump in the US, to name just a few — are enjoying widespread popularity with the masses and happen, in fact, to have risen to power via democratic means. What’s going on? Is something wrong with today’s democracy? 

Here specific causes intrude.

In the case of Western democracies — Trump, Western Europe — what’s wrong with today’s democracy is its decline, with the attendant attack on prospects for a decent life as the political system falls even more than usual under the control of concentrated private power and hence becomes less responsive to human needs. These are natural consequences of the concentration of wealth under the neoliberal assault against the social democratic tendencies of the early postwar decades. It should be recalled that the Great Depression and World War II unleashed radical democratic forces over much of the world, and although the reaction of the business world was quick to come (e.g., Taft-Hartley in 1947), it was muted until the economic disruptions of the 1970s, which provided an opportunity for vigorous class war.

It’s also worth recalling the rather belated recognition in 1978 by United Auto Workers President Doug Fraser that businessmen had “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country, a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society” and had “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.” In fact, the class war was underway in the latter days of the pre-war New Deal years, but it was not yet one-sided, since a vigorous labor movement existed — the target of bitter and increasingly one-sided class war in the postwar years.

In Europe, the attack on democracy is amplified by the strongly undemocratic institutions of the European Union. Major decisions over policy are made by the unelected Troika — European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank — with the northern banks right at their shoulders. The population has little to say, and knows it — a large reason for the general collapse of the centrist parties that have governed the countries since World War II.

In a very revealing inquiry, economist Mark Weisbrot reviews the reports of the regular IMF consultations with member governments of the European Union. He discovered “a remarkably consistent and disturbing pattern.” The financial crisis was exploited as an opportunity to lock in the neoliberal reforms: spending cuts in the public sector rather than tax increases, reduced benefits and public services, cuts in health care, undermining of collective bargaining, and in general, moves to create a society “with less bargaining power for labor and lower wages, more inequality and poverty, a smaller government and social safety nets, and measures that reduce growth and employment.”
“The IMF papers,” Weisbrot concludes, “detail the agenda of Europe’s decision-makers, and they have accomplished quite a bit of it over the past five years.” The agenda is quite familiar in the US and in fact, wherever the neoliberal assault has proceeded.

In England, Thatcher-Major and Blair’s New Labour, followed by Tory austerity, had similar effects. The Corbyn movement is an encouraging reaction, bitterly opposed by the Labour establishment and most of the media.

The other cases mentioned have their own special features.

Putin seems to have been genuinely popular throughout his tenure. Crimeans, it appears, support the takeover by Russia. There seemed to be possibilities for social democratic developments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, possibly even for mutually supportive linkages to social democratic Europe. Such hopes were dashed by the harsh effects of the US-backed market reforms, which devastated the economy and led to millions of deaths, along with opening the way for immense corruption as oligarchs took over state assets. Putin was seen by the public as a corrective to the neoliberal disaster and the decline of Russia on the world scene. Authoritarian no doubt, often brutal, but, it seems, popular.

In Israel, too, the right-wing nationalist-religious coalition is genuinely popular. Threats to Netanyahu are primarily from his right. This is quite a change from the time when Israel conquered Palestinian lands in the 1967, and soon set forth on its illegal settlement programs. The change was predicted early on by those who understood the natural dynamics of crushing people under your jackboot. One commentator who was particularly outspoken was the respected Israeli sage Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He condemned the occupation bitterly, not because of concern for the Palestinians, for whose fate he expressed only contempt, but because of the predictable effect on Jews, who, he warned, would become “Judeo-Nazis” as they carried out the tasks of repression and displacement.

The signs by now are dramatic, both in actions and in legislation, both with regard to the criminal acts in the occupied territories and the shift to unconcealed racism at home. The occupied territories include Gaza, despite Israel’s claim to the contrary, which is not even accepted by its loyal US supporter. In the full knowledge that the home of 2 million people is likely to become literally “unlivable” within a few years, as international monitors have predicted, Israel maintains its stranglehold, designed officially to keep the population on a “diet” while the self-described “most moral army in the world” pounds away with atrocities that are appalling the world.

Turkey, too, is a special case, with a long and complex history since the current Turkish state took form after World War I. Keeping to recent times, in the ‘90s, Turkey was the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the period during the state terror campaign against the Kurds. Tens of thousands were killed, thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — were driven from their homes, some now barely surviving in abandoned buildings in Istanbul. The main support for the state crimes was Washington: Clinton provided 80 percent of the arms in an increasing flow as atrocities increased. Little was reported even though the major press had bureaus in Turkey, of course. Much of the information available comes from the detailed reports of the outstanding researcher for Human Rights Watch, Jonathan Sugden — so outstanding that he was finally expelled by the government. Particularly significant were a remarkable group of Turkish intellectuals – leading writers, artists, journalists, publishers and others — who not only protested the crimes, but undertook civil disobedience, facing and sometimes enduring long and severe punishment. I know of no group like them anywhere.

By the turn of the century, the situation was improving, soon quite considerably, including the early Erdoğan years. But soon regression began under his leadership, and it has become extremely severe.
Turkey held the worst record in the world for persecuting journalists, and the repression has extended to academics and many others. Vicious attacks on Kurdish areas have increased. The country is divided between a secular liberal-left sector and a deeply religious, mostly rural population. A dedicated Islamist, Erdoğan has rallied support among this sector and is relying on it to create a harsh and repressive authoritarian state with strong Islamist elements. What is happening is particularly painful to observe, not just because of the crimes, but because of the hopeful prospects that were lying ahead only a few years ago and the fact that Turkey could serve as a valuable bridge, culturally as well as economically, between West and East.

Hungary is another special case. It is a cultural/linguistic island, which has had remarkable cultural achievements and also an ugly record of fascism and cooperation with the Nazis. From what I have read — I have no close knowledge — the country has long been obsessed with the fear of decline, even disappearance — fears exacerbated by the passage of refugees through Hungary to Western Europe. The population is declining, partly from low fertility, partly from a large exodus to the West. Orbán has exploited these fears to construct an “illiberal democracy” dedicated to “saving Hungary” and “traditional values,” with the usual xenophobic and racist elements of such appeals.

There’s a good deal more to say about racism in Europe, not visible when the populations are highly homogenous, but quickly apparent as soon as there is any “contamination” by those who are a bit different. And there is no need to comment on the history of the Jews, and of the Roma right to the present.

Speaking of authoritarian leaders, I’ve been dumbfounded by the US political establishment’s reaction to Trump’s handling of the Helsinki summit with Putin. What’s wrong with the idea of the US and Russia working together to address major international issues facing the world today, including the threat of nuclear weapons? What’s your own reaction to this matter? Was Trump wrong? Was he being “anti-American”?

There’s surely nothing wrong with the US and Russia seeking rapprochement and cooperation on such issues. It is essential for hopes for a better future, even survival. Russia should not refuse to deal with the US and (were it imaginable) impose sanctions on the US and UK because they invaded and devastated Iraq with all of the hideous regional consequences, or (with France) destroyed Libya with terrible effects from West Africa to the Levant, along with other crimes too numerous to mention. Or conversely (putting aside the scale of crimes).

There are numerous issues on which the countries must cooperate, and sometimes do, as in Syria to avoid clashes that could set off war. The needs are far greater at the Russian border, where, as a result of NATO expansion and build-up of forces, accidents with indescribable consequences could easily occur. There are many other cases where serious interchange is necessary. On nuclear issues, even more so. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Obama’s programs of modernization of nuclear weapons increased “killing power” sufficiently to create “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” as explained in an important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Trump’s nuclear programs enhance the threat even beyond, with new and very dangerous weapons systems and severe lowering of the threshold for nuclear war — an existential threat to Russia, and the world; even the attacker would be devastated by a first-strike. Under George W. Bush, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, another serious threat to Russia. Russian weapons initiatives and reactions also enhance the threat of terminal destruction.

Turning to Trump, his actions make no sense at all if they are guided by some geopolitical strategy.

On the one hand, he is talking politely with Putin (some say genuflecting) and calling for reduction of tensions, while on the other hand, he is significantly escalating tensions and threats. The nuclear program just mentioned is one very serious example. He is also sending arms to Ukraine and increasing NATO forces and operations on the Russian border — actions that any Russian leader would regard as a severe threat. Harsher sanctions have been imposed on Russia, which is by no means unaware of the increasing threats – how could they be? The business press, citing US Treasury reports, observes that Russia is “liquidating dollar assets at a record pace, selling four-fifths of its cache of U.S. government debt, $81 billion worth, over a two-month period” in order to safeguard assets in case relations continue to deteriorate.

While Trump’s policies make no sense from a geostrategic perspective, they fall into place on the assumption that he is continuing to pursue his “Me First” agenda, damn the consequences for the world, matters we’ve discussed before. The agenda requires maintaining the loyalty of his base and ensuring that they will remain loyal if the Mueller investigation comes up with something that damages him. The centerpiece of his press conference with Putin, bitterly condemned by elite opinion, was his effort to discredit Mueller. The tactic is succeeding quite well. A large majority of Republicans approve of the way Trump dealt with Putin, and polls show that Mueller’s public image is at an all-time low.

Meanwhile, the sharp escalation and threats satisfy the national security hawks.

The latter constitute a broad spectrum. While it is sometimes hard to believe, we cannot overlook the fact that the most highly regarded moderates firmly uphold doctrines that are, quite literally, too outlandish to discuss. For example, Richard Haass, a respected scholar and diplomat and long-time president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, instructs us with a straight face that “International order for 4 centuries has been based on non-interference in the internal affairs of others and respect for sovereignty. Russia has violated this norm by seizing Crimea and by interfering in the 2016 US election. We must deal [with] Putin’s Russia as the rogue state it is.”
Words fail.

In Israel, a controversial bill about the “Jewish nation-state” was just passed that makes no mention of minority rights. Is there something new behind the passing of this bill that wasn’t always a reality from Israel’s standpoint of view?

Regrettably, within Israel itself, the new nationality law of July 2018 was not very controversial, though it has appalled liberal opinion throughout the world. Rather typical is what is happening in the US, which since the 1967 war, has been Israel’s leading supporter. For a long period, Israel was the darling of liberal and progressive opinion. By today, that has changed considerably. “According to a Pew Research Center survey in April [2018], self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.”

Support for Israel has shifted to the ultranationalist right and Christian evangelicals — many of whom combine passionate support for Israel with the doctrine that the Second Coming, perhaps very soon, will consign all Jews to the torments of eternal perdition apart from a very few who will find Christ in time — a level of anti-Semitism unmatched even in Nazi Germany.

Israel is well aware that it is losing support among sectors of world opinion that have at least some concern for human and civil rights. It is therefore seeking to expand its base of support to the East, primarily to China and India, the latter becoming a very natural ally for a number of reasons, including the drift in both societies toward ultranationalism, reactionary internal policies and hatred of Islam. It is also firming up what have been tacit alliances with the most reactionary and brutal Arab states, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, joined now by Egypt under the current harsh military dictatorship.

The new nationality law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, downgrades the status of Arabic and formally authorizes Jewish-only communities. It does break some new ground, but not very much. What is new is primarily the elevation of these racist principles to the Basic Law — constitutional status. Long ago, Israel’s highest court determined that Israel is “the sovereign state of the Jewish people” … but not the state of its 20 percent non-Jewish citizens, essentially the same doctrine.

One of the few articulate critics of the new law, the fine Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor, reminds us that in debates on the Land Law of 1960, Zerach Warhaftig, a founder of the National Religious Party and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, declared that, “We wish it to be clear that the land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel. Nation of Israel is a wider concept than the nation that lives in Zion, because the nation of Israel is found in the entire world…. [In this new law] there is a very great judicial novelty: we are giving a legal cover to the regulations of the Keren Kayemet leYisrael [Jewish National Fund, or JNF]” (translated from Hebrew).

The JNF regulations in turn obligate the organization to work for the benefit of “persons of Jewish race, religion, or origin.” It may be added that these radical violations of civil rights are funded by American taxpayers thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF as a charitable organization.

Warhaftig was quite right almost 60 years ago. An array of legal and administrative rules was established to ensure that the JNF would have authority over all state lands – 93 percent of the territory of the country – hence, authority to ensure that lands would be reserved for Jews alone, with minor and derisory exceptions. Details are spelled out and documented in my Towards a New Cold War (1982).

Laor reminds us that since the law was established, “700 settlements were established, all for Jews, apart from a few cities for [displaced] Bedouins (which merit ridicule).” Meanwhile, the 20 percent non-Jewish minority has been restricted to the 2 percent of the land allotted to them when the state was established 70 years ago.

In 2000, the racist land administration arrangements finally reached Israel’s High Court. It issued a narrow ruling that granted the petitioners, a professional Arab couple, the right to move to the all-Jewish town of Katzir. Very soon, arrangements began to be contrived to get around the law, but now it is no longer necessary, since segregation is legally authorized by the Basic Law.

Much of this should be familiar to Americans. New Deal public housing projects were restricted to whites by laws that remained in effect until the late 1960s, when it was too late to help African Americans because the postwar years of rapid and egalitarian growth, which offered them some opportunities, were coming to an end, and the neoliberal assault was soon to come, imposing stagnation. Another grim chapter in the history of racism in America.

Also familiar to Americans is US isolation in support of such measures (with the attractive exceptions noted earlier), now reaching new levels in the Trump administration. In the last days of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Reagan was alone in the world in supporting it, even denying the existence of Apartheid, even after Thatcher and Israel had abandoned the sinking ship. We might also recall that during the last throes of Apartheid, in 1988, the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be “one of the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world. While greatly honored internationally, Mandela remained on the US terrorist list until 2008, when at last a congressional resolution allowed him to enter the “land of the free” without special dispensation.
Often, there is indeed little new under the sun.

The World Bank continues to support authoritarian regimes throughout the Global South by providing funds and bailouts. How can the UN and Western democratic governments tolerate such a stance on the part of the World Bank?

Unfortunately, the answer is all too clear. As their own practice consistently illustrates, the “Western democratic governments” pursue similar policies with enthusiasm. It should be superfluous to illustrate, but since we live in an atmosphere of self-celebration, it might be useful to consider at least one example. Take the Congo, which should be one of the richest and most advanced countries of the world, with huge resources and no threats — from its neighbors, that is. When Europe was despoiling Africa, the Congo was the domain of King Leopold of Belgium, whose hideous crimes surpassed even the normal standards of the “enlightened” West. He didn’t pass without censure. In the famous 11^th edition of the Britannica, the article on the monarch lauds his achievements, but does add a phrase at the end saying that he treated his subjects harshly – slaughtering millions and ordering atrocious tortures to gain more rubber for his overflowing coffers.

“The horror, the horror” finally came to end in 1960, when Congo declared independence. Its leading figure was the young charismatic Patrice Lumumba, who might have extricated Congo from the misery of colonialism. But it was not to be. The CIA was assigned the task of murdering him, but the Belgians got there first, and together with other liberal democracies, helped plunge Congo back to terror and destruction under the leadership of the Western favorite, the murderous kleptomaniac Mobutu, who ensured that the riches of the Congo would flow in the right direction. Fast forwarding to today, all of those who enjoy smart phones and other technical delights benefit from the rich minerals of Eastern Congo, handed over to the multinationals hovering nearby by warring militias and marauders from US-backed Rwanda while the death toll mounts to many millions.

That Western democracies should tolerate support for authoritarian regimes is not much of a mystery.

What do you think will take to halt the spread of political authoritarianism across the globe?

The familiar advice, easy to state, hard to follow, but if there’s another way, it’s been kept a dark secret: honest, dedicated, courageous and persistent engagement, ranging from education and organization to direct activism, carefully honed for effectiveness under prevailing circumstances. Hard work, necessary work, the kind that has succeeded in the past and can again.

Noam Chomsky (2017) "Making The Future: Hopes and Challenges" [New Interview with Wallace Shawn]

Trump Will Be a 'Severe Disappointment To Millions'

SPIEGEL speaks to the editor of the New Yorker about the dangers of fascism under Donald Trump, international leaders' reactions to the election and the role of the press in reporting on the next administration.

 by Holger Stark

SPIEGEL: On the night of the election, you published a stunning warning that the election's outcome was "surely the way fascism can begin." It's been three weeks now. Has fascism begun?

Remnick: No it has not and I want to be clear about what I wrote. The whole sentence, the complete thought is this: I don't think there will be fascism in America, but we have to do everything we can to fight against it. As the Germans know better than we do, disaster can take a nation by surprise, slowly, and then all at once. My deep sense of alarm has to do with his seeming lack of fealty to constitutionalism. He seems to think it is within his rights to trample the First Amendment, to disdain the press, to punish protesters or flag-burners, to ban ethnic categories of immigrants, and so on. He has myriad conflicts of interest. He appoints people of low quality, to say the least. He lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume. His temperament and character is precisely what you would hate to see in your children, much less your president. We can wish all these things will magically change once he is in office, but will they?

I've lived through terrible presidents, we all have. I lived through the Nixon administration, which prolonged a horrific war for years and ran a criminal operation out of the White House, and I lived through the years with George W. Bush. And I lived for years in the Soviet Union and have seen the promise of democratic development turn, with Putin, into an authoritarian state. So yes, I think we should be alarmed, watchful, and, as journalists, rigorous and fearless. I think we should be alert.
SPIEGEL: Similar developments have taken place in other countries as well.

Remnick: Trump's election is part of an international trend that's no less alarming, in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Austria. Vladimir Putin wanted to see this outcome no less than he would like to see nationalists and anti-Europeanists win in France. He wants to become the de facto head of an illiberal, xenophobic, hypernationalist trend in world politics. He wants practical things, like the end of economic sanctions, but he also wants far greater sway in Europe and in the overall ideological trends of the world. So Trump's rise is troubling not just on an American level but on an international level.

SPIEGEL: Donald Trump sends mixed messages. He claims to want to unite the country but he appointed a person like Steve Bannon, a white supremacist, as his chief strategist. What does all this mean in terms of the direction the Trump administration might take?

Remnick: There are inconsistencies in his ideology. It's worth remembering that this is very different than the Reagan experience. Ronald Reagan came to office and had already been an experienced politician as governor of California, whose ideology and ideas, no matter how simplistic or no matter how much you may disagree with them, were fairly well-developed and fairly consistent. Donald Trump is a real-estate branding operator and a reality-show television star whose entrance into big-time politics, as a victor, as someone who will now wield tremendous power, was as shocking to him as it was to everybody else. I think that he got into the race thinking that it would be good for his brand, that he would surprise some people by doing better than expected, and then lose, and then come out of it with a certain amount of embellishment of his celebrity and, therefore, his business. He expected to gain, both financially and in prestige, by losing. But now he has won.

Suddenly, he finds himself president of the United States. Suddenly, he's not only wrestling with whatever competing ideas exist in his head, but also with the shock of the responsibility itself. Again, we can hope that the responsibilities and realities will weigh on him and he will not be the president we fear, but rather something more stable.

SPIEGEL: Trump put the economy at the center of his campaign and promised to bring jobs back to the United States. What's wrong with that?

Remnick: There's nothing wrong with creating jobs. What's wrong is to seed the illusion that you will magically bring back the economy of 1970, that you will reopen coal mines. The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

SPIEGEL: He combines antidemocratic policies with unconventional proposals. Reaching out to Putin might open new opportunities in foreign policy ...

Remnick: ... and maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality. I would love to have a stable, productive relationship with Russia. I would also like to see Russia not interfere in our elections. I would like to see Russia not invade Ukraine or put pressure on and threaten Baltic states. But we live in the real and existing world. And now, despite the long election campaign, Donald Trump is going to have to live in the real world in which Vladimir Putin is exactly who he presents himself to be, and Putin is extremely skilled. He's not going to make it very easy for the United States or Germany. And he's going to test Trump.

SPIEGEL: Who knows how they will handle each other. Maybe Putin will find his match in Donald Trump.

Remnick: I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot. I want to make something clear. By the laws of the United States, Trump won the election. And unless some sensational story is discovered about manipulation or vote counts, we're going to have to live with that. And I know, too, that millions and millions of people voted for Trump not because they are cartoon racists, but because they did not like Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, because they had real economic and social grievances. I think the hacking of the DNC, the FBI's behavior, and, above all, the idea of Russian interference, are outrageous, but there is the law. And I think the Electoral College is an absurd 18th-century construct. But that is the law. Yet I say all these critical things not out of a sense of anti-patriotism but out of a sense of patriotism, out of a sense of alarmed and informed concern for my country.

SPIEGEL: It's remarkable how many people suddenly made their peace with Trump following the election. Why is that?

Remnick: A lot of it is opportunism as well as reflex and resignation.

SPIEGEL: Even President Obama offered him more assistance and advice than usual. Why is he doing that?

Remnick: I don't think President Obama gave him more advice and assistance than usual. He gave him precisely the amount of advice and assistance that is required for the peaceful transition of power in the United States. His hope, at least until January 20th, is that he can impress upon Trump the gravity of his position, convince him that things are not so simplistic or not simplistic at all. Obama called him "uniquely unqualified" and "temperamentally unfit," and you can be sure he thinks that today, just as he thought it before November 8th. I know from my conversations with people in the administration that every world leader that Obama met in Berlin, in Peru, in Athens was extremely alarmed by Trump's election. That very much includes Angela Merkel.

SPIEGEL: Let's talk about the mistakes on the left. We learned from the hacked emails that the DNC supported Hillary Clinton at a very early stage and wanted her to be the party's nominee. Was it wrong to get behind Clinton so wholeheartedly?

Remnick: Do I think that everybody on the Clinton side had a proper understanding of the resentments aimed at them? No, I don't. Do I think they made mistakes in places where they could have campaigned and they didn't campaign enough? Yes, I do. Michigan, Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. Hindsight is always 20/20.

SPIEGEL: But again: Was Clinton the wrong candidate?

Remnick: In hindsight. The person that most obviously had strengths where she had weaknesses was Joe Biden.

SPIEGEL: The Clintons made it clear to him at an early stage that he should stay out of her way.
Remnick: Joe Biden had a relationship with places like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Ohio and the white working class that Hillary Clinton didn't. The one thing I'm quite critical of her for, and it obviously hurt her, is that at some level, the Clintons had to know that she was going to run for president. Why did they feel it necessary to make tens of millions of dollars with speaking engagements? They must have known that it would look grotesque. The word for it is "buckraking." It's beyond me. I don't understand it.

SPIEGEL: Maybe they are so entangled in their own world of private email servers and million-dollar incomes. Maybe they live in a different universe.

Remnick: The private email server was a mistake, a serious mistake, and she should have apologized for it months earlier, but she kept making lawyerly excuses. The buckraking seemed to me to have an ethical and moral dimension that was just inexcusable.

SPIEGEL: There is currently a heated debate taking place on the left about how to integrate the various interests of different social groups under one tent. Was it a mistake to have relied on minorities in the electorate?

Remnick: The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites. And the minority vote is growing, which is part of the alarm of so many Republicans and why Trump constantly whipped up their alarm with his racist statements. But it's also important to remember that a huge constituency, such as Hispanics, is not 100 percent Democratic. It's more complex than that.

SPIEGEL: But would you agree with people like Bernie Sanders who claim that the political left should focus more on the white working class?

Remnick: To some degree, sure. There are real grievances there that must be addressed not just rhetorically but in policy. But you have to understand that a lot of the working class is not white too.

SPIEGEL: But many people's job-losses and fears are real.

Remnick: Of course. Although it is worth pointing out that unemployment was heading toward catastrophic levels in 2009 and is now under 5 percent. The question for so many is the quality of work, the future of work under globalism and de-industrialization. A typical example is a person who had a good factory job making 80,000 dollars, with health insurance, who was able to send his kids possibly to college and then he or she suddenly loses that job because the factory closed down. And now that same person is bagging groceries at Walmart and making $35,000. That person has lost a huge amount of income and a sense of pride, and, unfortunately, with a demagogue like Trump, there is the danger that this same person will be encouraged to believe that he or she lost their job and status because all the goodies are being given by politicians to darker people, to undocumented immigrants. And resentments bloom.

It's a classic case of pitting one group against another for political gain. You are losing because of Jewish bankers. You are losing because blacks are getting their civil rights in the cities. You are losing out because Mexican rapists are taking your job. There are two forms of populism, left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism requires the denigration of an "Other." Left-wing populism tends to be about the haves and have-nots.

SPIEGEL: There was one person during the campaign who seemed to outshine the others: Michelle Obama. Will we see her on the national stage at one point, maybe to challenge Trump?

Remnick: I doubt it very seriously. I've never encountered someone in public life who has less desire to hold office than Michelle Obama, though she is incredibly gifted at retail politics.

SPIEGEL: This election presented an unprecedented challenge to journalists. Trump himself concocted hundreds of lies without consequences and false news spread like a virus, almost always in Trump's favor.

Remnick: Trump didn't have to come up with them. They were provided for him by all kinds of fake news outlets that sometimes had their origins in places like Macedonia or Georgia or… anywhere.
SPIEGEL: What are the implications for democracy?

Remnick: It corrodes public discourse, it undermines our collective knowledge of reality. It makes democracy more complicated. I don't want to romanticize the world in which everybody watched three networks and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were incredibly dominant. That time has passed. And the internet is very democratizing in some ways, but it also has other effects. So that on Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That's a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another. We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news. We've seen these tendencies before in previous elections, but now it's just incredibly powerful.

SPIEGEL: What are the lessons for the media?

Remnick: It means we have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it. As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before. We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That's the job.

SPIEGEL: As a result of the efforts of Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, a recount is taking place in Wisconsin, maybe also in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In response, Trump claimed that the election had been fraudulent. What does it say about the status of American democracy that the outcome is being questioned by people in both parties?

Remnick: I live in a country where, at least by my sense of arithmetic and justice, Al Gore should have been president, not George W. Bush. To this day, John Kerry probably thinks he won Ohio in 2004 because he had suspicions about the vote in Ohio. And, by the way, Richard Nixon had suspicions in 1960 about the vote in Chicago when he lost to JFK. Democratic institutions, even in the oldest operating democracy in the world, are anything but perfect.

SPIEGEL: So even if there are irregularities, the outcome won't change?

Remnick: I just don't know. Prediction is a low form of journalism.

SPIEGEL: Looking forward four years from now, are you sure that we won't look back and say, well, maybe Trump was indeed a second Reagan?

Remnick: It's not as if I wish that he becomes a catastrophically terrible president. I want to hope for the best. But I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it? As a citizen and as a journalist, it's my job to exert as much pressure on power to help that not become the case.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Remnick, we thank you for this interview.


About David Remnick

• 

  Brigitte Lacombe/ The New Yorker
  Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick, 58, has been the editor in chief of The New Yorker since 1998. He is also the author of a widely praised biography of Barack Obama and has privileged access to the current president. He conducted several interviews with Obama after the election

'We Could See More and More Divisions'

In an exclusive interview with German public broadcaster ARD and DER SPIEGEL, outgoing US President Barack Obama discusses the legacy he has built and his worries about the future of democracy, as well as Donald Trump, the man who will succeed him in office.
 by Klaus Brinkbäumer and Sonia Seymour Mikich

 It's not easy landing an interview with Barack Obama, particularly since he seldom speaks to the foreign media. Leading German public broadcaster ARD and DER SPIEGEL decided to team up and request a joint interview with the American president on the occasion of his final visit to Berlin this week. The following is a longer version of the interview ARD broadcast in primetime on Thursday evening. The English-language video from that broadcast is embedded in this article.

 ARD/SPIEGEL: Mr. President, Donald Trump won the election, revealing massive discontent and rifts within American society. Did the amount of anger actually surprise you?

Obama: I think it's important not to overstate what happened. The truth is that America has been closely divided politically for quite some time. That was reflected in some of the challenges I had with the Republican Congress. What was unusual in this election is that my approval in the United States is as high as it has been since I was elected. And the economy is going relatively well. I think what is true is that there's been an underlying division in the United States. Some of it has to do with the fact that economic growth and recovery tends to be stronger in the cities and in urban areas. In some rural areas, particularly those that were reliant on manufacturing, there has been weaker growth, stagnation, people feeling as if their children won't do as well as they will.

There are cultural, social and demographic issues that came into play. They're not that different from some of the issues that Europe faces with immigration, the changing face of the American population. I think some reacted there, and Trump was able to tap into some of those anxieties.

American politics is always somewhat fluid. In this age of social media, it means that voters can swing back and forth. I mean, there were probably millions of voters who voted for me and supported me and this time also voted for Donald Trump, and it just indicates that some of this is less ideological and more just an impulse towards some sort of change.

And the question now, going forward, is whether the president-elect is able to move on those elements of his agenda that I think can garner broad support, like rebuilding our infrastructure. And if he can lessen some of the more controversial rhetoric that could divide the country more. That's going to be the test for him in the years to come.


ARD/SPIEGEL: When you took office, you sent a message of hope and reconciliation to the American people, and yet today the USA seems to be completely divided. I think we can call it a 50-50 nation, with one half not really understanding or knowing the other side. Have you missed your goals?

Obama: Well, it's interesting. We're not actually a 50-50 nation. We're probably more like a 60-40 nation. The problem is that we're 50-50 when it comes to voting. If you look at the new generation of Americans, they reflect the vision that I spoke about. They're diverse. They believe in tolerance. They're accepting of things like same-sex marriage. They believe in integration. The problem, though, is that young people are less likely to vote than older people. What results is a situation in which sometimes the elections don't fully reflect the views of the American population. Essentially, the president-elect was supported by about 27 percent of the American population. One of our challenges, historically, is that we have very low voting rates, even during presidential elections.

But what is true, and I think that we can't deny it, is that some of the same concerns about globalization, about technology, rapid social change that were reflected in Brexit, that's been reflected in some of the debates in Germany and France and other places, that those exist in the United States as well. My view is that over the long term, over the next 10, 15, 20 years, if we are able to address the legitimate economic concerns of those who feel left behind by globalization, then many of these tensions will be reduced. And we will see a world that is less divided. But if the global economy is unresponsive to people who feel left behind, if inequality continues to grow, then we could end up seeing more and more of these divisions arise throughout advanced economies around the world.

ARD/SPIEGEL: During your presidency, you were confronted with a very hostile Congress. Donald Trump now is going to enjoy Republican majorities (in both the House and the Senate). Do you fear that your reforms like Obamacare, the nuclear deal with Iran and the Paris climate change agreement will be overturned or, as Donald Trump has put it, "cancelled"? What remains of your legacy?

Obama: First and foremost, it's important to remember that, from my perspective at least, my most important legacy was making sure that the world didn't go into a Great Depression. Keep in mind that, when I came in, we had had a crisis that was the worst we've seen since the 1930s, and working with people like Chancellor Merkel, working with the G-20 and other institutions internationally, we were able to stabilize the financial system, stabilize the US economy and return to growth.
We've now had 73 consecutive months of job growth. It's the longest period of job growth in the United States in our history.

Unemployment is low, incomes are up, poverty is down -- and that's going to be a lasting change. When I turn over the keys to the president-elect, the country will be much stronger than it was when I came into office.

With respect to some of the specific legislation or initiatives that I've made, it's true that Republicans often opposed these things. Sometimes they opposed them because I proposed them. Now that they are responsible for governing, I think they'll find that reversing them would be counterproductive.
Let's take the example of the Iran deal. There was a vigorous debate around this issue. There were many who were very skeptical of the deal. They believed Iran would not fulfill its commitments. Of course, now we have a year of proof that, in fact, Iran has done everything that they said they were going to do. And without engaging in a war, through diplomacy, we've been able to dismantle much of Iran's nuclear weapons-making capabilities. And it has the broad support of the international community. It would be unwise -- and, I think, ultimately the president-elect will recognize this -- to do that.

With respect to healthcare, 20 million people now have health insurance who didn't have it before. He says that he can improve on that system, and my view is that if, in fact, he can provide the same amount of people with health care in a better way than I could, then I would support such efforts. Of course, I think when you actually try to do it, he may discover that the system we put in place is the best one that we can design. I always say that campaigning and governing are two different things. My hope and expectation is that regardless of what the president-elect said during the campaign, he's going to have to look carefully at the realities when he moves forward.

ARD/SPIEGEL: Let us dwell on the Paris climate agreement a bit more. It's an issue that doesn't really directly touch the daily lives of many American people. But it is urgent and definitely not a No. 1 priority for Mr. Trump. Do you fear it might be dead before it even takes off?

Obama: You are absolutely right that climate change is one of the issues I worry most about because its impacts are enormous. But they're gradual, they're not immediate. One of the hardest things in politics is to convince people to do things now that will have a good effect 20 or 30 years from now because politicians tend to have a short-term view. They are more attentive to things that people care about today.

The good news is that the Paris Agreement is not just a bilateral agreement between the United States and some other country. You have 200 countries who came together. It's an international agreement. Historically, when a previous US administration enters into an agreement, it carries forward into the future administration. I've always viewed the Paris Agreement as a starting point. If you look at all the commitments that have been made by all the countries, it's still not sufficient to deal with the very dangerous situation we face. What it has done is that it created an architecture whereby as technology improves, as we find new clean sources of energy, as we make our economies more efficient, then gradually we can turn up the dial and improve the outcomes of Paris.

I don't want to sound too optimistic. It is true that the president-elect and many of his supporters are less interested in this issue than I am, but I think that it can survive -- even if for the next two or three or four years, they are not as active as I was.

What has happened, because of some of the regulations we put in place, for example, is that US automakers make much more efficient cars now. US utilities find that it's more efficient to produce energy differently than they used to. Many of the initiatives that we've put forward are now embedded in the economy and give us a chance to continue on this progress -- probably not as fast as I would like but, as I've said before, history doesn't always move in a straight line. Sometimes it zigs and zags.

ARD/SPIEGEL: In many Western societies, there is a groundswell of alienation between politicians and the citizens, and people are asking: "Are politicians at all in touch with everyday life?" People are anxious. We're talking about populism, of course. Is this a pivotal moment for leadership?

Obama: I think it is. Look, I was elected because I believed in what we call "grassroots politics," politics from the bottom up, not the top down. And I was able to excite and engage people who previously hadn't been involved in politics, and part of the reason that I was able to be re-elected and stay relatively popular in the United States was because even when the economy was bad or we had problems, people sensed that I listened to them and I was on their side.

I do think that all politicians today have to be more attentive to people wanting to be heard, wanting to have more control over their lives. The more we can encourage participation, I think the better off we are. Here in Europe, for example, some of the challenges have to do with structures that are so complicated. You've got Brussels, and you've got parliament, you've got councils and then you've got national governments. So people sometimes don't feel as if they know who's making decisions, and the more that we can bring people in and engage them, the better. Some of it is also cultural and social, people's sense of identity. You have social media and the Internet and immigration and so, suddenly, cultures are clashing and people feel as if they're less familiar with the people around them. That causes social anxieties.

ARD/SPIEGEL: What was the darkest moment of your presidency? Here in Europe, of course, people will talk about drone attacks, Guantanamo and, of course, about terrorist attacks and shootings.

Obama: Look, early on, I think people didn't fully appreciate how severe the economic crisis was, partly because we took smart steps, and we were able to avert complete disaster. But there were weeks where I wasn't sure whether we were going to be able to pull out of the crisis. For me, personally, the most difficult moments had to do with not just terrorist attacks, but also shootings.
You will recall that there was an event at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 six- and seven-year-old children were shot by a troubled young man, and I had to meet with the parents just two days after they had lost their child. The pain that they feel is hard to describe and will always haunt me.

Internationally, I have obviously been deeply concerned about how we fight the terrorist threat. How do we make sure that we don't change, even as we protect our people? I'm very proud of the fact that we ended torture. It's true that I have not been able to completely close Guantanamo, but we've drastically reduced the population from 700 or so to around 60 now, and I am going to continue in these two months to make every effort.

We have created a legal structure that is much more disciplined and consistent with rule of law and international norms. I know that drones have been a source of concern for a lot of people, understandably, but if you look at how we have constrained their use, we've created a framework that is consistent with how all of us going into the future should be thinking about minimizing the loss of life, but also being able to reach terrorist organizations in countries that sometimes don't have the ability to capture them. The alternative in some cases is to invade these countries where there would be much greater loss of life, and so we have to make difficult choices in these situations.

The good news is we've had very strong allies. In Europe, where the terrorist threat is probably greatest at the moment, the amount of information-sharing that's been taking place, the effectiveness of law enforcement across borders gives us the ability to protect ourselves while still being true to the basic precepts of our liberal democracies. I hope that that continues, and it is something that I think we should be worried about.

ARD/SPIEGEL: You have praised Angela Merkel, but you also said there is a free-ride mentality among American partners, that a large amount of the work is left to the Americans. Donald Trump has said that American engagement has to be reduced. Is this the moment for Western leaders like Angela Merkel to step up and assume more leadership?

Obama: Angela Merkel has been an extraordinary partner for me and for the United States throughout my presidency. One of the great qualities of Chancellor Merkel is that she is steady. She analyzes a situation. She's honest. Sometimes we've had disagreements, but when we do, it's very constructive. And we are consistently open with each other about how we should approach these issues.

But I do believe that Chancellor Merkel and Germany are a lynchpin in protecting the basic tenets of a liberal, market-based democratic order that has created unprecedented prosperity and security for Europe, but also for the world. I think sometimes Europe may take for granted the extraordinary progress that's been made over the last 40, 50 years. I recognize that sometimes there is great frustration that arises out of the euro zone or out of the EU.

Probably at no time in human history has there been as much prosperity and security as has existed in Europe during this period. The reason is because the values that we share -- freedom of speech, freedom of religious practice, freedom for civil society, free and fair elections, all the innovation that's been created through a market-based economy -- those things are ultimately going to be the path for us to continue into a better future. I hope that, despite some of the challenges we have, that people appreciate that. And I hope people appreciate Chancellor Merkel because, although she traditionally is considered center-right and I'm considered center-left, the truth is that we share those core values, and those are worth protecting. As the senior leader in Europe, as the leader who's been longest lasting, I think she has great credibility, and she is willing to fight for those values. I'm glad that she's there, and I think the German people should appreciate her. Certainly, I have appreciated her as a partner.

ARD/SPIEGEL: Are you going to pardon Edward Snowden?

Obama: I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves, so that's not something that I would comment on at this point. I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

At the point at which Mr. Snowden wants to present himself before the legal authorities and make his arguments or have his lawyers make his arguments, then I think those issues come into play. Until that time, what I've tried to suggest -- both to the American people, but also to the world -- is that we do have to balance this issue of privacy and security. Those who pretend that there's no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don't recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways.

And those who think that security is the only thing and don't care about privacy also have it wrong.
We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government -- and I think the German people should want their government -- to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

That may mean that, as long as they do it carefully and narrowly, that they're going to have to find ways to identify an email address or a cell phone of a network. On the other hand, it's important to make sure that governments have some checks on what they do, that people can oversee what's being done so the government doesn't abuse it. But we shouldn't assume that government is always trying to do the wrong thing.

My experience is that our intelligence officials try to do the right thing, but even with good intentions, sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they can be overzealous. Our lives are now in a telephone, all our data, all our finances, all our personal information, and so it's proper that we have some constraints on that. But it's not going to be 100 percent. If it is 100 percent, then we're not going to be able to protect ourselves and our societies from some people who are trying to hurt us.

ARD/SPIEGEL: Mr. President, we thank you for this interview.