I wish you had some quotes or from Chomsky to shore up your view that this his view is anti-American. I see him as quintessentially American. What he says and does seems entirely grounded by American idealism, an ideal of the United States as the kind of country that should not have an empire. His work seems on a continuum with other American critics of war, such as Mark Twain—whose writing is the opposite of what bugs you about Chomsky, as he understood motivations wonderfully. Chomsky can get things very wrong, but if he weren’t grabbed by central American values, I don’t think any of his writing would even make sense. I never see him doubt the fundamental value of the individual, nor of individual rights, or any of the most basic principles of our system. His two most basic views are that US citizens should have substantial political power, and the US government should not to use its power for military domination of other people. What makes him a leftist is nothing Marxist, but egalitarianism, which is also an American value, even if it is the most contested. He gets the facts wrong in some spectacular ways but aren’t these basic views reasonable and principled? The country went in another direction than that—but there’s nothing in the DNA of the United States that is opposed to those two hopes.
It’s not Chomsky particularly I want to defend but why shouldn’t a free country that’s also the global hegemon have a gadfly like this? Should we continually wage war without criticism? Few other prominent people have had the inclination—and you can see why. Few people would be willing or able to withstand the ferocity of the pushback he gets. It takes an odd kind of person to weather it. He gotten the same relentless scorn when he’s correct as when he’s wrong. I doubt it is likely or even possible for anyone with the prestige and professional security of Chomsky to do what he did in the future, even if they always batted 1000. When he goes, he’s not going to be replaced.
It's definitely a fair point, editorially, to ask me for more textual evidence of my assertions vis a vis Chomsky. I'm sure if I had written this for a magazine, they would have asked for that.
I think my sense of Chomsky is that he shares what you and I think of as American values, but doesn't feel a super strong attachment to America as the source or grounding of those values, or even as an appealing embodiment of them. He's a universalist. If I were to make a more thoroughgoing case that he's anti-American, it would involve demonstrating that he cherrypicks evidence of our evildoing and isn't very interested in mitigating or complicating factors. At some point, if someone does that often enough, you begin to suspect that they just don't like you very much.
As to the gadfly question, I probably agree with you, which is in some sense why I wrote the piece. He may be valuable even if he's flawed in all these ways. Certainly we would benefit from more gadflies, not fewer. It's why I still read people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, etc. I mostly think they're wrong headed, but it's valuable to have that outsider critical perspective to keep you honest and introduce ideas that you aren't going to get from within the mainstream.
That's very interesting that you don't see American values as universal values. I can't see your face right now but your avatar makes you look younger than I was. Maybe they aren't lately. But they certainly were during the postwar era of the liberal consensus--so up until very recently.
I'm younger than Chomsky but American values, as presented to us back in the day, were 100% universal values. Everything that made America great was based on general (and universalizable) moral principles --the value of the individual, the rights of the person, freedom, equality, and democracy. The whole Cold War was based on that. This is *why* the government lied to us so frequently (almost every time) about what we were doing in other countries--because Americans believe in these values. So they will reject other reasons when they do not comport with these American values.
We had to be told that we were saving 'the freedom loving people of S. Vietnam' and saving the Iraqis from the tyrant Hussein, and that that every military action we performed was to liberate the populations of each country from tyranny. What could be more universal than this?
All that Chomsky does, is show that in all of these events that lead to mass killing, and destruction of these societies, this is not the case. And he has been correct much more often than not. But not always-- he seems to have developed a singular principle that every military adventure or involvement must be spuriously grounded. That's usually when he gets things wrong. He believes false accounts because he's so unwilling to believe the US government.
For most of these actions though, there aren't true mitigating factors if one believes in universal moral values of any kind, such as human rights, because these are direct violations, and no justification of these actions by any conceivable just war or humanitarian principle. And there are also extremely shady domestic politics going along with these, if one believes the US should be a democracy. So this is a second issue--our imperialism messes with our democracy. It's not very controversial among historians that most of these interventions by the US Chomsky focuses on are indefensible for reasons of national security, or on the faux moral grounds offered to the public, or even on the theories that were internally held, like the 'Domino Theory' or whatever.
To put myself into Chomsky's head, I'd say that it was much more shocking for people of Chomsky's age to find out this was happening--especially during the Vietnam War. And this is why the secrecy was much harder to violate, and the secrets were more explosive, and the political reaction was so intense. I don't know how to explain any of that if people aren't reacting on the basis of universal ideals that Americans either held about their country or hoped was true about their country. It's not the reaction someone has to another country doing it, and it's not the reaction anyone would have to a private actor, like a corporation doing it. It's a sense of involvement and personal responsibility .
Below I link to a pretty typical speech of his. To me, it seems SO American, and so much a product of a genuine American idealism. The outrage by people like Chomsky--an outrage I share, I suppose, though not always about the same things, since I know he's got his facts wrong sometimes--is that we can't get over that *we* would do this. We can't become completely cynical about America. If we thought America was nothing but a sham, or if we were completely internationalist, we wouldn't have this reaction. He's honestly talking about the perversion of other values, not held completely but which are real to him and that come from the American value system, though it might not seem like that on first glance.
Well he has a kind of monomaniacal charisma, maybe like Bernie in a way. There’s a profound force to his character. So even if you think he’s full of it, it’s hard not to be affected by him in some way, even if it’s a negative one.
Well I've gotta say, you've captured my own ambivalence to Chomsky perfectly. Bravo!
As a student, when I came across his fierce takedown of postmodernism (https://libcom.org/article/noam-chomsky-postmodernism) he became an intellectual hero of sorts for articulating the critiques I wanted to make but couldn't quite put so directly and eloquently. Yet not too long ago I heard him interviewed on Yascha Mounk's podcast (https://www.persuasion.community/p/chomsky#details) where he sounded like a CRT proponent, using terms like "white supremacy" in ways that are consistent with postmodern principles.
So when it was intellectually fashionable (as it was back then) he ripped on it? But now that it has been embraced broadly by the left he supports it, or at least doesn't challenge it?
I would also be surprised if he'd said anything recently about the way the left media eco-system has become like the Fox News right used to be (and still is), an argument Matt Taibbi makes in Fear Inc. One would expect the author of Manufacturing Consent to keep abreast of the continuing ways that consent is manufactured by major news sources.
Maybe he's less psychologically enigmatic than we think? Is he just an opportunist, but a very intellectually sophisticated one? I'm not sure if that's a critique that's been leveled at him before but the more I come across him these days the more I think it's right.
For these reasons and others that you articulate in the article it's hard for me to take him seriously anymore. I suppose I should be more skeptical of myself as you counsel, but it's hard not to leave him pinioned to that mat.
I don't feel like I've followed him closely enough to track any kinds of subtle shifts in his stands. In general, he strikes me less as an opportunist than just someone who has a hard time genuinely taking in new information (like your point about the rise of the left wing echo chamber). But I could be wrong about him.
It may be that what I need to do, vis a vis Chomsky, isn't so much to pay a lot of attention to him but to find more sophisticated articulators of the America-skeptic world view and pay attention to them instead.
Fair points. Regarding a more sophisticated articulator of the America-skeptic, I'm perhaps predictably skeptical. It's hard for me to take too seriously arguments that do not assess America's transgressions honestly alongside the crimes of other global regimes, from the Syrian Civil War to the Uyghurs in China (a situation that could actually credibly be described as genocide). That said, I would be willing to look at authors/scholars.
I worry, though, that it would be like the situation with scholars and writers who specialize in the history of race in America. In my reading, even when they are more thoughtful (like, say, Leslie Harris) their arguments and conclusions are often still underpinned and/or infused with a critical social justice ideology that I fundamentally reject.
At a minimum there are plenty of non-left critics of American empire, off the top of my head someone like Robert Wright, who is center left but not at all a lefty. Or Daniel McCarthy, who is a Buchananite. Or someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I like Wright and follow Bloggingheads. He's better than most, but even he occasionally falls into the trap of speaking about Israel/Palestine through the (IMHO) false framing of colonialism.
I appreciate your willingness to show your own vulnerabilities, doubts, filters, and ideas you struggle with. I find many public intellectuals form their critique as if it's generated directly from Truth, not from a changing, imperfect human. I don't know if it's because they are paid to be declarative rather than introspective, or because they lack the self awareness to overcome confirmation bias and adherence to personal brand built around a certain political side. Your posts read more like a private diary, shared publicly. And so it makes sense that you'd have this critique of Chomsky.
I wonder how much he or his popularity is the product of a world where blunt arguments of public debate--even in a pre-social media world--just don't lend themselves to nuance, and doubt. The world needed a figurehead to go against the Vietnam war. There wasn't room for an anti-war champion to love the country, hate the war. I felt the same way when George W Bush made the great, "you're either with us or against us" proclamation. If that's the default framing of the debate, then it's about picking sides, not about challenging the framing itself. Maybe Chomsky became the opposition the left needed him to be. Fine, but for those of us who wish the nature of important contemporary debates could be more nuanced, I agree that he can be off-putting. His analysis is obviously much deeper than my own (it's silly to even make this qualification), but the nature of his certainty reminds me of an earlier version of myself that saw things in black and white. I was proved wrong too many times and try to be skeptical by temperament now.
Yeah there's definitely a much bigger market for certainty than ambivalence. I think Chomsky was always going to be the guy he is, market for his ideas notwithstanding, but no doubt he's bigger than he would otherwise be if he were less of a hammer.
As I grow older the flaws of orthodox leftism become more apparent to me and more ineradicable, and a flawed but stable liberal incrementalism comes to seem more desirable than I once thought. Yet I still find a sort of offensive and depressing failure of imagination in the liberal worldview, the idea that the political road we can walk is so narrow that just a few degrees of divergence in either direction sends you to the death camps on one end and the gulag on another. And that this fact makes America's crimes somehow "mistakes" in the way that Germany's or Belgium's crimes are not. Post-Vietnam America has done a good job farming out the really dirty business in its foreign policy to groups that we "merely" train and fund and sell weapons to and provide information for. But I wonder how much that makes a difference in the moral accounting at the end of the day.
Honestly I love being American. I love the country and the people, the mythology, the culture, Walt Whitman, Miles Davis, Yosemite, Buc-ees, all of it. I wouldn't trade it for better healthcare and the cuckoo clock. But I also wonder if giving yourself permission to think in that way is giving yourself license to forgive the unforgiveable. It's good to have Chomsky around to vex us.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I’m not sure where I land on the rationales for American empire, which I think in the end are basically arguments that if it’s not us blundering around wielding force, inevitably crudely, that it will either be someone else worse who’s on top or just a lot of small fires everywhere that add up to more death overall. I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but it also doesn’t feel nearly as open and shut as we tend to treat it. Like, maybe it’s wrong and the world would be a better place or not a worse place if we just didn’t act like we had the right to determine everyone else’s fate. Certainly a lot of the founders were on that side of things, I think.
But then, yeah, I can’t take seriously the orthodox left for all sorts of reasons, even if they have worthwhile points to make on this front.
Yes and it's distressing that (I assume) most people in the foreign policy establishment subscribe to that rationale, because it's basically giving yourself a license to do anything.
When push came to shove he always either tacitly, or in some cases pro actively, supported the big moves of those he purported to oppose. An an example I have from personal life is some anti activist I knew as kid approached him (he used to be around Cambridge and fairly accessible) just after Powell's UN speech with the then open but not reported and thus secret publicly available specs of the US militaries helicopter rockets aluminum tubes spec grades which proved he had lied on that (it was big element of it too) but he just through out platitudes; he a big mic back then but he wouldn't use it. On the proactive side, he played a role in getting people in Uni/intellectual/activist circles to not really oppose all the national and international centralizations that they were wam bam rolling out, telling people it was inevitable and it was for the best to roll with and the changes can later be used for good and blah blah blah; but they were'nt inevitable, they'd destroyed the old democratic governance structures by then and the press had been hyper centralized and captured and so those circles were the only big means left to propagate info and expose lies they were telling to conceal what they were doing, it may have had an effect. There's much more than that stuff too, the list is actually pretty long
I don’t think Chomsky is on the spectrum, and I think he actually is very guilty of doublethink. It’s just not directed at rationalizing commitment to the US, but commitment to himself and his ideas personally. This is based largely on my experience with him as a linguist, however. I would guess narcissism spectrum not autism.
An example: he usually claims his linguistics is not and was never about creating a science that could be applied to computer engineering, yet we can find multiple instances of him saying that it is a very important goal to apply his linguistics to computer engineering. Similarly, activist Chomsky says we must ruthlessly interrogate all media (“propaganda”) based on its funding sources… all media except his linguistics apparently, because linguist Chomsky owes his entire academic career to a cash infusion from the US military (trying to develop computers with his work… which never worked…).
That may be the case. I think there's something to be said for identifying an autistic style of reasoning, maybe, but I wasn't making the diagnosis with much confidence. I'm probably bending over backwards for Chomsky in part because he's the avatar of a broader critique that I find troubling if not always persuasive.
I wish you had some quotes or from Chomsky to shore up your view that this his view is anti-American. I see him as quintessentially American. What he says and does seems entirely grounded by American idealism, an ideal of the United States as the kind of country that should not have an empire. His work seems on a continuum with other American critics of war, such as Mark Twain—whose writing is the opposite of what bugs you about Chomsky, as he understood motivations wonderfully. Chomsky can get things very wrong, but if he weren’t grabbed by central American values, I don’t think any of his writing would even make sense. I never see him doubt the fundamental value of the individual, nor of individual rights, or any of the most basic principles of our system. His two most basic views are that US citizens should have substantial political power, and the US government should not to use its power for military domination of other people. What makes him a leftist is nothing Marxist, but egalitarianism, which is also an American value, even if it is the most contested. He gets the facts wrong in some spectacular ways but aren’t these basic views reasonable and principled? The country went in another direction than that—but there’s nothing in the DNA of the United States that is opposed to those two hopes.
It’s not Chomsky particularly I want to defend but why shouldn’t a free country that’s also the global hegemon have a gadfly like this? Should we continually wage war without criticism? Few other prominent people have had the inclination—and you can see why. Few people would be willing or able to withstand the ferocity of the pushback he gets. It takes an odd kind of person to weather it. He gotten the same relentless scorn when he’s correct as when he’s wrong. I doubt it is likely or even possible for anyone with the prestige and professional security of Chomsky to do what he did in the future, even if they always batted 1000. When he goes, he’s not going to be replaced.
It's definitely a fair point, editorially, to ask me for more textual evidence of my assertions vis a vis Chomsky. I'm sure if I had written this for a magazine, they would have asked for that.
I think my sense of Chomsky is that he shares what you and I think of as American values, but doesn't feel a super strong attachment to America as the source or grounding of those values, or even as an appealing embodiment of them. He's a universalist. If I were to make a more thoroughgoing case that he's anti-American, it would involve demonstrating that he cherrypicks evidence of our evildoing and isn't very interested in mitigating or complicating factors. At some point, if someone does that often enough, you begin to suspect that they just don't like you very much.
As to the gadfly question, I probably agree with you, which is in some sense why I wrote the piece. He may be valuable even if he's flawed in all these ways. Certainly we would benefit from more gadflies, not fewer. It's why I still read people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, etc. I mostly think they're wrong headed, but it's valuable to have that outsider critical perspective to keep you honest and introduce ideas that you aren't going to get from within the mainstream.
That's very interesting that you don't see American values as universal values. I can't see your face right now but your avatar makes you look younger than I was. Maybe they aren't lately. But they certainly were during the postwar era of the liberal consensus--so up until very recently.
I'm younger than Chomsky but American values, as presented to us back in the day, were 100% universal values. Everything that made America great was based on general (and universalizable) moral principles --the value of the individual, the rights of the person, freedom, equality, and democracy. The whole Cold War was based on that. This is *why* the government lied to us so frequently (almost every time) about what we were doing in other countries--because Americans believe in these values. So they will reject other reasons when they do not comport with these American values.
We had to be told that we were saving 'the freedom loving people of S. Vietnam' and saving the Iraqis from the tyrant Hussein, and that that every military action we performed was to liberate the populations of each country from tyranny. What could be more universal than this?
All that Chomsky does, is show that in all of these events that lead to mass killing, and destruction of these societies, this is not the case. And he has been correct much more often than not. But not always-- he seems to have developed a singular principle that every military adventure or involvement must be spuriously grounded. That's usually when he gets things wrong. He believes false accounts because he's so unwilling to believe the US government.
For most of these actions though, there aren't true mitigating factors if one believes in universal moral values of any kind, such as human rights, because these are direct violations, and no justification of these actions by any conceivable just war or humanitarian principle. And there are also extremely shady domestic politics going along with these, if one believes the US should be a democracy. So this is a second issue--our imperialism messes with our democracy. It's not very controversial among historians that most of these interventions by the US Chomsky focuses on are indefensible for reasons of national security, or on the faux moral grounds offered to the public, or even on the theories that were internally held, like the 'Domino Theory' or whatever.
To put myself into Chomsky's head, I'd say that it was much more shocking for people of Chomsky's age to find out this was happening--especially during the Vietnam War. And this is why the secrecy was much harder to violate, and the secrets were more explosive, and the political reaction was so intense. I don't know how to explain any of that if people aren't reacting on the basis of universal ideals that Americans either held about their country or hoped was true about their country. It's not the reaction someone has to another country doing it, and it's not the reaction anyone would have to a private actor, like a corporation doing it. It's a sense of involvement and personal responsibility .
Below I link to a pretty typical speech of his. To me, it seems SO American, and so much a product of a genuine American idealism. The outrage by people like Chomsky--an outrage I share, I suppose, though not always about the same things, since I know he's got his facts wrong sometimes--is that we can't get over that *we* would do this. We can't become completely cynical about America. If we thought America was nothing but a sham, or if we were completely internationalist, we wouldn't have this reaction. He's honestly talking about the perversion of other values, not held completely but which are real to him and that come from the American value system, though it might not seem like that on first glance.
https://chomsky.info/19850319/
I’ll have to give this a good read later but both the hate and love for him have always puzzled me.
Well he has a kind of monomaniacal charisma, maybe like Bernie in a way. There’s a profound force to his character. So even if you think he’s full of it, it’s hard not to be affected by him in some way, even if it’s a negative one.
chomsky is a god for those of us the heard him lecture.
i think i will write a play about him, foucault, and the incident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE
Well I've gotta say, you've captured my own ambivalence to Chomsky perfectly. Bravo!
As a student, when I came across his fierce takedown of postmodernism (https://libcom.org/article/noam-chomsky-postmodernism) he became an intellectual hero of sorts for articulating the critiques I wanted to make but couldn't quite put so directly and eloquently. Yet not too long ago I heard him interviewed on Yascha Mounk's podcast (https://www.persuasion.community/p/chomsky#details) where he sounded like a CRT proponent, using terms like "white supremacy" in ways that are consistent with postmodern principles.
So when it was intellectually fashionable (as it was back then) he ripped on it? But now that it has been embraced broadly by the left he supports it, or at least doesn't challenge it?
I would also be surprised if he'd said anything recently about the way the left media eco-system has become like the Fox News right used to be (and still is), an argument Matt Taibbi makes in Fear Inc. One would expect the author of Manufacturing Consent to keep abreast of the continuing ways that consent is manufactured by major news sources.
Maybe he's less psychologically enigmatic than we think? Is he just an opportunist, but a very intellectually sophisticated one? I'm not sure if that's a critique that's been leveled at him before but the more I come across him these days the more I think it's right.
For these reasons and others that you articulate in the article it's hard for me to take him seriously anymore. I suppose I should be more skeptical of myself as you counsel, but it's hard not to leave him pinioned to that mat.
I don't feel like I've followed him closely enough to track any kinds of subtle shifts in his stands. In general, he strikes me less as an opportunist than just someone who has a hard time genuinely taking in new information (like your point about the rise of the left wing echo chamber). But I could be wrong about him.
It may be that what I need to do, vis a vis Chomsky, isn't so much to pay a lot of attention to him but to find more sophisticated articulators of the America-skeptic world view and pay attention to them instead.
Fair points. Regarding a more sophisticated articulator of the America-skeptic, I'm perhaps predictably skeptical. It's hard for me to take too seriously arguments that do not assess America's transgressions honestly alongside the crimes of other global regimes, from the Syrian Civil War to the Uyghurs in China (a situation that could actually credibly be described as genocide). That said, I would be willing to look at authors/scholars.
I worry, though, that it would be like the situation with scholars and writers who specialize in the history of race in America. In my reading, even when they are more thoughtful (like, say, Leslie Harris) their arguments and conclusions are often still underpinned and/or infused with a critical social justice ideology that I fundamentally reject.
At a minimum there are plenty of non-left critics of American empire, off the top of my head someone like Robert Wright, who is center left but not at all a lefty. Or Daniel McCarthy, who is a Buchananite. Or someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I like Wright and follow Bloggingheads. He's better than most, but even he occasionally falls into the trap of speaking about Israel/Palestine through the (IMHO) false framing of colonialism.
I'll check out the other two.
I appreciate your willingness to show your own vulnerabilities, doubts, filters, and ideas you struggle with. I find many public intellectuals form their critique as if it's generated directly from Truth, not from a changing, imperfect human. I don't know if it's because they are paid to be declarative rather than introspective, or because they lack the self awareness to overcome confirmation bias and adherence to personal brand built around a certain political side. Your posts read more like a private diary, shared publicly. And so it makes sense that you'd have this critique of Chomsky.
I wonder how much he or his popularity is the product of a world where blunt arguments of public debate--even in a pre-social media world--just don't lend themselves to nuance, and doubt. The world needed a figurehead to go against the Vietnam war. There wasn't room for an anti-war champion to love the country, hate the war. I felt the same way when George W Bush made the great, "you're either with us or against us" proclamation. If that's the default framing of the debate, then it's about picking sides, not about challenging the framing itself. Maybe Chomsky became the opposition the left needed him to be. Fine, but for those of us who wish the nature of important contemporary debates could be more nuanced, I agree that he can be off-putting. His analysis is obviously much deeper than my own (it's silly to even make this qualification), but the nature of his certainty reminds me of an earlier version of myself that saw things in black and white. I was proved wrong too many times and try to be skeptical by temperament now.
Yeah there's definitely a much bigger market for certainty than ambivalence. I think Chomsky was always going to be the guy he is, market for his ideas notwithstanding, but no doubt he's bigger than he would otherwise be if he were less of a hammer.
As I grow older the flaws of orthodox leftism become more apparent to me and more ineradicable, and a flawed but stable liberal incrementalism comes to seem more desirable than I once thought. Yet I still find a sort of offensive and depressing failure of imagination in the liberal worldview, the idea that the political road we can walk is so narrow that just a few degrees of divergence in either direction sends you to the death camps on one end and the gulag on another. And that this fact makes America's crimes somehow "mistakes" in the way that Germany's or Belgium's crimes are not. Post-Vietnam America has done a good job farming out the really dirty business in its foreign policy to groups that we "merely" train and fund and sell weapons to and provide information for. But I wonder how much that makes a difference in the moral accounting at the end of the day.
Honestly I love being American. I love the country and the people, the mythology, the culture, Walt Whitman, Miles Davis, Yosemite, Buc-ees, all of it. I wouldn't trade it for better healthcare and the cuckoo clock. But I also wonder if giving yourself permission to think in that way is giving yourself license to forgive the unforgiveable. It's good to have Chomsky around to vex us.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I’m not sure where I land on the rationales for American empire, which I think in the end are basically arguments that if it’s not us blundering around wielding force, inevitably crudely, that it will either be someone else worse who’s on top or just a lot of small fires everywhere that add up to more death overall. I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but it also doesn’t feel nearly as open and shut as we tend to treat it. Like, maybe it’s wrong and the world would be a better place or not a worse place if we just didn’t act like we had the right to determine everyone else’s fate. Certainly a lot of the founders were on that side of things, I think.
But then, yeah, I can’t take seriously the orthodox left for all sorts of reasons, even if they have worthwhile points to make on this front.
Yes and it's distressing that (I assume) most people in the foreign policy establishment subscribe to that rationale, because it's basically giving yourself a license to do anything.
My problem is less that they subscribe to it per se than that it seems so often taken for granted as *obviously* the right framework.
When push came to shove he always either tacitly, or in some cases pro actively, supported the big moves of those he purported to oppose. An an example I have from personal life is some anti activist I knew as kid approached him (he used to be around Cambridge and fairly accessible) just after Powell's UN speech with the then open but not reported and thus secret publicly available specs of the US militaries helicopter rockets aluminum tubes spec grades which proved he had lied on that (it was big element of it too) but he just through out platitudes; he a big mic back then but he wouldn't use it. On the proactive side, he played a role in getting people in Uni/intellectual/activist circles to not really oppose all the national and international centralizations that they were wam bam rolling out, telling people it was inevitable and it was for the best to roll with and the changes can later be used for good and blah blah blah; but they were'nt inevitable, they'd destroyed the old democratic governance structures by then and the press had been hyper centralized and captured and so those circles were the only big means left to propagate info and expose lies they were telling to conceal what they were doing, it may have had an effect. There's much more than that stuff too, the list is actually pretty long
I don’t think Chomsky is on the spectrum, and I think he actually is very guilty of doublethink. It’s just not directed at rationalizing commitment to the US, but commitment to himself and his ideas personally. This is based largely on my experience with him as a linguist, however. I would guess narcissism spectrum not autism.
An example: he usually claims his linguistics is not and was never about creating a science that could be applied to computer engineering, yet we can find multiple instances of him saying that it is a very important goal to apply his linguistics to computer engineering. Similarly, activist Chomsky says we must ruthlessly interrogate all media (“propaganda”) based on its funding sources… all media except his linguistics apparently, because linguist Chomsky owes his entire academic career to a cash infusion from the US military (trying to develop computers with his work… which never worked…).
That may be the case. I think there's something to be said for identifying an autistic style of reasoning, maybe, but I wasn't making the diagnosis with much confidence. I'm probably bending over backwards for Chomsky in part because he's the avatar of a broader critique that I find troubling if not always persuasive.