Noam Chomsky Calls GOP a ‘Danger to Human Survival,’ Sizes Up Bernie Sanders

Scholar, social critic, writer and political activist Noam Chomsky is making the rounds to give his views on the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Chomsky called out the GOP for becoming an “abject service to private wealth and power.” Chomsky advocates for strategic voting against the Republican party at all costs, even if that means voting for Hillary Clinton on election day. Although Chomsky has condemned Clinton repeatedly, he feels the consequences of a GOP victory would be disastrous, especially in light of the “looming environmental catastrophe.”

The Huffington Post reports:

“Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails,” Chomsky, a frequent critic of both parties, said in an interview Monday with The Huffington Post. “It’s become what the respected conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call ‘a radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics.”

Chomsky cited a 2013 article by Mann and Ornstein published in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, analyzing the polarization of the parties. The authors write that the GOP has become “ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Chomsky said the GOP and its presidential candidates are “literally a serious danger to decent human survival” and cited Republicans’ rejection of measures to deal with climate change, which he called a “looming environmental catastrophe.” All of the top Republican presidential candidates are either outright deniers, doubt its seriousness or insist no action should be taken—“dooming our grandchildren,” Chomsky said.

[…] Chomsky advised 2016 voters to cast their ballots strategically. He said the U.S. is essentially “one-party” system—a business party with factions called Republicans and Democrats. But, he said, there are small differences between the factions that can make a “huge difference in systems of enormous power”—like that afforded to the president.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Chomsky called Bernie Sanders a “New Dealer” who supports the best policies of the Democratic presidential candidates but said that Sanders could not win, as U.S. elections are “mainly bought”.

—Posted by Donald Kaufman. 

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