Zach Cartwright | November 14, 2016

Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent voices among the American left, says America is in for a dangerous four years under a Trump administration.

In an interview with TruthOut’s C.J. Polychroniou, Chomsky said even if Trump was in the White House just for one term, there would be “huge issue[s] for human survival,” chiefly in reference to climate change and nuclear war. He also said with a Republican supermajority and a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, there will be disastrous consequences for many future generations.

“[The Republican Party] has become the most dangerous organization in world history,” Chomsky said. “The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.”

“It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans are facing the most important question in their history — whether organized human life will survive in anything like the form we know — and are answering it by accelerating the race to disaster,” he added.

Chomsky said that while Trump’s victory signifies a major defeat for the Republican Party establishment, it also signifies a frighteningly radical change toward extremism at the highest levels of government.

“The consequences have been evident in recent Republican primaries. Every candidate that has emerged from the base — such as [Michele] Bachmann, [Herman] Cain or [Rick] Santorum — has been so extreme that the Republican establishment had to use its ample resources to beat them down,” Chomsky said. “The difference in 2016 is that the establishment failed, much to its chagrin, as we have seen.”

When analyzing why Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Chomsky said the left failed to properly engage with rural, white, working-class voters in regions of the country long seen as Democratic strongholds. The MIT linguistics professor also said that blame for the ongoing degradation of the working class lies with neoliberal Democrats like the Clintons.

“[F]or working people, there is a great difference between a steady job in manufacturing with union wages and benefits, as in earlier years, and a temporary job with little security in some service profession,” Chomsky said. “Apart from wages, benefits and security, there is a loss of dignity, of hope for the future, of a sense that this is a world in which I belong and play a worthwhile role.”

Chomsky also faulted the Clinton campaign for running on a continuation of the status quo, saying that Trump represented a change that, while scary for many, was preferable to the ongoing political and economic climate of today’s America.

“That is a crucial difference between today’s despair and the generally hopeful attitudes of many working people under much greater economic duress during the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Chomsky said.

Chomsky doubts Donald Trump will follow through on his promise to unite America in the victory speech he gave after he officially secured 270 electoral votes and became President-elect.

“How is [Trump] going to do that when the nation is so divided and he has already expressed deep hatred for many groups in the United States, including women and minorities?” Chomsky said, drawing comparisons to the victory of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom earlier this year.

“[T]hese developments are quite frightening,” he added.

However, the author and political thinker also said Trump’s election signifies the rise of white supremacist ideology in the United States, saying white Americans  lashing out at a changing demographic landscape made a Trump presidency a reality.

“In a decade or two, whites are projected to be a minority of the work force, and not too much later, a minority of the population,” Chomsky told TruthOut. “The traditional conservative culture is also perceived as under attack by the successes of identity politics, regarded as the province of elites who have only contempt for the ”hard-working, patriotic, church-going [white] Americans with real family values” who see their familiar country as disappearing before their eyes.”

Read Chomsky’s full interview with TruthOut here.

Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email at zachcartwright88@gmail.com, and follow his work on the Public Banking Institute blog.