TRUMP EXPOSED FRAGILITY OF U.S. DEMOCRACY, NOAM CHOMSKY SAYS

Foremost linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky says Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and his inept, ignorant handling of state affairs have exposed the fragility of US democracy in the face of a faction of the elite that refuses to abide by the rules and takes to heart the class rule as enunciated by the first Chief Justice, John Jay who said “those who own the country ought to govern it, and James Madison, a framer of the US Constitution, insisting the prime duty of government is to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

In an interview with C.J. Polychroniou of Truthout, Chomsky warned that by insisting he had won the election despite losing to Joe Biden by more than 6.9 million votes, Trump thinks he has a franchise on the White House and it is in his interest to destroy the incoming administration and claim the restrictions imposed to control the COVID-19 pandemic are part of the schemes of a “Communist-run deep state.”

Chomsky stressed that Rana Foroohar, associate editor of The Financial Times, was correct in saying: “Anyone with a pulse knows that in the US today the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful.” Chomsky said a paper also revealed that US policy is crafted by the elite, with at most 10% involved in crafting policy. The rest have nothing to do with how the affairs of the US are conducted.

“We have just endured 40 years of regression, the neoliberal regime, a bitter assault against democracy and on the kind of society that can sustain it. An estimate of the monetary cost to the general population was recently given by the Rand Corp.: $47 trillion transferred from the working and middle classes (90 percent of the population) to the super-rich; the top 0.1 percent doubled their share of wealth to 20 percent of the total since Ronald Reagan… The serious decline of functioning democracy is a virtual corollary of the radical concentration of wealth and dispatch of much of the general population to stagnation and precarity,” Chomsky concluded.