From the article <a href="http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=54" source="Dissent Magazine" author="Michael Berubé">Torture: Business as Usual?</a>: <bq>[I]t’s crucial to know when you’re dealing with a radical break and crucial not to normalize it by saying, in effect, move on, move on, nothing new to see here.</bq> But Chomsky doesn't really say "move on, move on, nothing new to see here", does he?. To me, Chomsky's leftism always seemed to emphasize the importance of tackling what is in fact not an ephemeral or generational problem. It may be a hopeless endeavor because no one is listening, but it's only misguided if it's actually wrong. Perhaps the Krugman style of liberalism -- fool people into fighting for a *return* to a morality that never was -- has a better chance of success than the Chomsky one -- inspire people to fight for a morality that may never be. So we're left with a brutally honest way that will fail because no one's listening and a deceptive way that will fail once people realize they've been manipulated. Berubé again: <bq>No one on the American left believes that the United States was a happy land of benevolence and ponies prior to 9/11.</bq> This is pretty much a straw-man reformulation of what Chomsky is actually saying. Chomsky addresses the popular myths of American culture, which subconsciously inform many Americans' attitudes toward important issues. When pressed, many on the left will admit that the U.S. has seldom been a force for good in the past. That does not prevent them from -- at the very same time -- believing that the U.S. is a force for good and letting that belief steer their opinion. Cognitive dissonance is a national pastime. Berubé again: <bq>Perhaps there are some historical amnesiacs out there somewhere who need to be reminded of the bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of Allende, and the funding of death squads in Central America lest they lapse into the belief that the United States “lost its innocence” (yet again!) when the towers fell.</bq> This strikes me as an almost deliberately ivory-tower attitude. The problem is not that leftist intellectuals don't know about the history of the U.S. but that *most Americans* don't know about it. It honestly doesn't matter if Berubé and his clever young friend are smugly historically aware if the rest of America isn't. It is exactly those Krugman-like appeals to imagined ideals that allow Americans to be deluded into helping out the world by waging humanitarian war and "spreading democracy". Not only that, but leftist appeals to those myths will lose to more right-leaning ones (at least for the foreseeable future) because the right has proven themselves better at manipulation than Krugman and Co. The left can't lie as well. It is only when a majority knows that American morality is essentially a myth that it will have an influence on public policy. An attempt to use these misplaced beliefs to "do good" (à la Krugman) are almost bound to backfire. <hr> <n>This is from a comment I posted on the article <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/03/the-chomsky-left-and-the-krugman-left.html" source="" author="">The Chomsky Left and the Krugman Left</a>.</n>