Does Noam Chomsky Need To Be Re-Assessed?

The usual circular firing-squad is forming on what passes for an American left, this time to decimate our all-too-limited ranks "re-assessing" Noam Chomsky as a "gatekeeper" for the U.S. empire he brilliantly critiqued for almost sixty years. That this fool's errand obviously benefits establishment elites desperately trying to shore-up their fading legitimacy by setting social justice groups at each other's throats appears to be escaping our attention.

Such a controversy speaks to the problem of our tendency to deify people we admire. Chomsky himself has always been critical of this propensity for hero-worship, because we can’t raise up heroes without diminishing ourselves in some important way. One suspects that a fair number of the unhinged accusations about Chomsky allegedly being a “sellout,” “fraud,” deceitful or gullible “gatekeeper” and the like, are not really assessments of Chomsky at all, but knee-jerk projections of him as (previously) a Saint and now a Devil. Clearly, Chomsky is neither, and what is called for is a rational assessment of his work, not a stimulus-response sequence of triggered reactions. Politics of the triggered by the triggered and for the triggered cannot possibly lead us to a better world.

There is also the problem of both his fans and his critics not really being very familiar with his work, which is no easy job, as he put out something on the order of 150 books. Anyone who has read and re-read a substantial portion of his political body of work (say half or more of it) should find it impossible to believe he is doing the establishment’s bidding. The establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Noam’s political ideas away from mass audiences. For years his political writings could most reliably be found in South End Press, a worker-owned and managed publishing house, and Inquiry magazine, a right-wing libertarian journal. Why did the establishment subject him to such a black-out if he was actually friendly to its agenda? It makes no sense.

Chomsky’s few appearances on U.S. corporate outlets were not characterized by him finding common ground with elite ideology. Quite the contrary. He offered his usual rational critique, but in doing so he may simply have convinced the corporate-captive audiences that he was a lunatic, since brief flashes of rationality amidst a flood of propaganda are unlikely to be perceived as such. As Chomsky himself said, “If they (elites) were BETTER propagandists they’d have me on more often.”

 

Useful follow-up to this commentary:

For un-triggered analysis of Chomsky, see "The Public Life of Noam Chomsky," Legalienate, November 28, 2024. 

For un-triggered analysis of the Epstein fiasco, see Michael Tracey, "The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology," Legalienate, December 24, 2025

For critical, but not dismissive commentary about Chomsky, see "Debating Chomsky on Lesser Evilism, BLM, Stolen Elections, and Responsibility For WWII," Legalienate, December 26, 2020

Also, "The Lesser-Evil Syndrome: Noam Chomsky's Fall Into Self-Contradiction," Legalienate, April 12, 2020