Chomsky: Overturn Of “Roe” Shows How Extreme An Outlier The US Has Become

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Noam Chomsky

An NPR/Ipsos poll released in January revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” What the poll does not disclose, of course, is the anomalous situation of the United States in comparison to other democracies. For starters, the U.S. is a very conservative and militaristic country, with a two-party system and a political culture that overwhelmingly favors powerful private interests over the common good. Indeed, in many respects, it operates more like a reactionary plutocracy than a democracy. For instance, the U.S. is the only wealthy country without a universal health care system. It spends more on health care than any other high-income country but has the lowest life expectancy. The U.S. is also a global outlier in terms of gun ownership, gun violence and public mass shootings. Income and wealth inequality is also higher in the U.S. than in almost any other industrialized country, and the U.S. also has the distinction of spending lesson children than almost any other wealthy country. Moreover, as evidenced by the recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court acts for the most part as an agent of reaction.

Indeed, the U.S. is a “highly unusual society, in many ways,” as Noam Chomsky states in the following interview about the economic and political organization of the U.S. polity and the shockingly reactionary rulings of the Supreme Court on guns and abortion.

Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics, a leading dissident and social critic, and one of the world’s most cited intellectuals. His work has influenced a variety of fields, including cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, computer science, mathematics, childhood education and anthropology. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from some of the world’s most prestigious universities, and is the author of more than 150 books.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as gun massacres continue to plague U.S. society, the question that naturally pops into mind is this: Why is the U.S. government so uniquely bad among developed countries at tackling issues in general that affects people’s lives? Indeed, it is not just gun violence that makes the U.S. an outlier. It is also a big outlier when it comes to health, income inequality and the environment. In fact, the U.S in an outlier with regard to its overall mode of economic, political and social organization.

Noam Chomsky: We can begin by taking note of an important date in U.S. history: June 23, 2022. On that date, the senior Justice of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, issued a decision solemnly pronouncing his country completely unhinged, a threat to itself and the world.

Those were not of course Justice Thomas’s words, speaking for the usual 6-3 majority of the reactionary Roberts Court, but they capture their import: In the United States, people may carry a concealed weapon for “self-defense,” with no further justification. In no functioning society have people been living in such terror of their fellow citizens that they need guns for self-defense if they’re taking a walk with their dogs or going to pick up their children at their (properly barricaded) nursery school.

A true sign of the famous American exceptionalism.

Even apart from the lunacy proclaimed from on high on that historic date, the United States is a highly unusual society, in many ways. The most important are the most general. In your words, “its overall mode of economic, political, and social organization.” That merits a few comments.

The basic nature of the modern state capitalist world, including every more or less developed society, was well enough described 250 years ago by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations and in the Madisonian framework of the Constitution of what was soon to become the most powerful state in world history.

In Smith’s words, the “masters of mankind” are those with economic power — in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England. They are the “principal architects” of government policy, which they shape to ensure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to,” however “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of England but more severely those subject to its “savage injustice” abroad. To the extent that they can, in every age they pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves, nothing for other people.”

In the Madisonian constitutional framework, power was to be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” men (women were property, not persons) who recognize the rights of property owners and the need to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The basic principle was captured succinctly by the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” His current successors understand that very well, to an unusual extent.

Madison’s doctrine differed from Smith’s description of the world in some important respects. In his book The Sacred Fire of Liberty, Madison scholar Lance Banning writes that Madison “was — to depths that we today are barely able to imagine — an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor.” He expected that those granted power would act as an “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher,” “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property and independent circumstances … whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

His illusions were soon shattered.

In very recent years, the reigning doctrine in the courts has been a variety of “originalism” that would have judges view the world from the perspective of a group of wealthy white male slaveowners, who were indeed reasonably enlightened — by the standards of the 18th century.

A more rational version of “originalism” was ridiculed 70 years ago by Justice Robert Jackson: “Just what our forefathers did envision, or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions, must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.” That is a saner version than the Bork-Scalia-Alito et al. current version because of the highlighted phrase.

The contortions about “originalism” are of no slight interest. There’s no space to go into it here, but there are a few matters that deserve attention, just keeping to the most dedicated adherents to the doctrine — not the saner version ridiculed by Justice Jackson, but the very recent and now prevailing doctrine, which Jackson presumably would have regarded as too absurd even to discuss.

One issue has to do with the role of historical tradition. In Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, he stresses the importance of relying on historical tradition in determining whether rights are implied in the Constitution (and Amendments). He points out, correctly, that the treatment of women historically gives little basis for according them rights.

In plain words, the history in law and practice is grotesque.

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