David Cayley, the moderator, opens with the question that always gets asked of any media critic and that is almost always meant to neutralise the critic on the spot. You have just argued that the media argue for and defend the established institutions of society, that any deviation from that defence is dismissed or even suppressed, and that views which dissent from the overwhelming consensus cannot get a hearing. So how is it that you yourself are on the government-owned national radio network, at the country's most prestigious journalism school, addressing an approving audience as part of its most prestigious lecture series? It is a good question, in fact the only question worth asking if you intend to leave the propaganda thesis in pieces. Its force depends on a pun that conflates "platform" with "system": if you can be heard the system must be open, if the system is open your description of it is wrong, therefore you are wrong because we let you in. The figure-four leglock of liberal-democratic self-congratulation.

Chomsky's answer is among the most deceptively useful contributions to any methodology of dissent that exists in the public record. He simply observes that Canada is open in this respect because Canada does not matter. What people think about International Affairs in Canada just doesn't matter that much to established power. He goes one better: If it did matter that much Canada would close up too. The implication, delivered without raising his voice, is that the very fact that he is being broadcast is data about Canada's geopolitical irrelevance, not about the openness of the system whose American operations he has spent the lecture describing. He reminds the room that the United States analogue is listener-sponsored radio in a small community, not the major network. He notes he can talk like this in Belgium, Israel, Latin America. He cannot talk like this on national radio and television in the United States. The reason is institutional importance, not institutional virtue.

This is, structurally, the trick of any half-decent ideology critique: take what the question presupposes as evidence for the system and show that it is in fact evidence about the system but not in the direction the questioner wanted. The openness of any given platform is information about its irrelevance to power rather than about the openness of the surrounding apparatus, and once you have absorbed this you stop being impressed by appearances on prestigious shows that "let the dissident speak" and start asking how much the show actually matters. In the years since 1988 the rule has only become sharper. Long-form podcasts hosted by people the political class does not read can run hours of unfiltered radical critique, and the same critique cannot be aired on the network morning shows, not because the podcasters are braver but because the podcasters do not yet matter enough to be governed.

Margaret Daly, of the CBC, raises the more elegant version of the same trap. Suppose the dissidents are right. Suppose the information is publicly available, gatherable by intellectuals, foreign-affairs buffs, minorities, anyone who cares to look. Then what difference does it make, since it doesn't seem to make any. This is, perhaps, the most refined liberal disarming move available, because it concedes everything and then asks why anyone should bother.

Chomsky's answer is, by his standards, optimistic and historically precise. The information makes a great deal of difference. The United States is a different country than it was 20 or 30 years ago. The elites are about as indoctrinated as they always were, perhaps more so, but the general population is not what it was. He gives the example of the early Reagan administration, which by his reading intended to do to Central America what Kennedy and Johnson had done to South Vietnam, complete with a white paper in February 1981 modeled on the white papers of the early 1960s, more or less a declaration of war. The media bought the white paper, more or less without criticism. The population did not. Letters poured into Washington, churches mobilised, protests began to appear without central organisation, and the administration backed off the inflammatory rhetoric and was forced underground. That, Chomsky says, is what the Iran-Contra hearings were about. The administration was driven underground. The domestic population would not tolerate the activities they wanted to carry out and they had to turn to illegal clandestine activities. Then comes the line of the entire panel:

clandestine activities are a pretty good measure of popular dissidence. If there isn't any popular dissidence you don't have to carry out clandestine activities. You can carry out overt international terrorism and violence which is much more efficient.

This is one of the most under-cited passages in Chomsky's late-1980s work, and it inverts the standard reading of the Iran-Contra scandal in a way that is still worth ruminating over. The existence of large-scale state secrecy is a measure of democratic vitality rather than its absence, since a government with full popular acquiescence does not need black sites and can do its violence in front of the cameras, on the front page, with the press secretary briefing on the lethality data. The growth of the classification system is, in this view, a measure of the growth of popular resistance, even when that resistance does not yet know what it is preventing. Read forwards into 2026, when overclassification has reached the level that even officials charged with declassification cannot keep up, when whistleblowers are routinely framed as enemies of the state, and when great masses of the actual conduct of foreign and domestic policy occur outside any public record, this line is the only honest source of optimism I know how to extract from the post-Snowden record. The state has had to hide more and more, more and more carefully, because it has been forced underground by the very citizens it pretends to inform.

Gene Allen, foreign editor of The Globe and Mail, contributes the most sophisticated counter on the panel. He concedes, as a working journalist, that elite American services like AP, Reuters, and the New York Times News Service do carry a recognisable American bias into the Canadian newsroom, and that part of the daily craft of being a Canadian foreign desk is finding ways around it. Stringers, local correspondents, sources who do not all wire in from Manhattan. Then he proposes that what Chomsky describes might be reduced to the American press playing cheerleader for the home team, the way a "homer" sportswriter cannot bring himself to find fault with the local franchise. Less ominous than the propaganda thesis, more tractable, solvable by editorial discipline.

Chomsky agrees there is something to the description and then performs the reframe that makes the answer worth quoting. You have to be careful about what's the home team. The home team that the American press defends is not the population of the United States but the elite elements within it. He reaches for the Vietnam datum that he uses repeatedly in this period: roughly 70% of the American public, asked in 1988 and forwards, says the Vietnam War was fundamentally wrong and immoral rather than a mistake [cite:@chomsky-1989-necess-illus, ch. 2]; among "opinion leaders" the figure drops to about 40%; among the actual intellectual elite, picked by whatever standard you like, it is essentially zero. Even at the peak of opposition, around 1970, when Wall Street had quietly rotated against the war for cost reasons, the intellectual class was opposed on pragmatic grounds, not moral ones. The position that the war was an actual atrocity, held by the population, is barely expressed in the ideological apparatus.

The home team, then, is power. The press, even at its most well-intentioned, plays the team that owns the franchise rather than the team that lives around the stadium. Once you absorb this, you stop being able to read the standard professional defence of the press, the cheerleader-for-the-home-team alibi, as anything but an admission of the charge. The press cheers, it cheers for a team, the interesting question is which team, and Chomsky's whole career consists, to a first approximation, of demonstrating that the team is not the one the alibi names. The home team trick survives in 2026 in the form of every editor's earnest insistence that they "give voice to American values" — whose values, and against whose interests, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Peter Worthington, a famous right-wing Canadian journalist with a Cold War résumé, tries the third trap, which by tradition is the meanest of the three. He accuses Chomsky of selective indignation. A Palestinian corpse weighs heavily on your conscience and yet a Kurdish corpse does not. The implication, of course, is that any critic of US foreign policy who fails to maintain a perfect ledger of every atrocity in every theatre is not a moralist but a partisan. The accusation is so frequent in the genre that it is almost a stock character: the right-of-centre interviewer who, in lieu of an argument, totals corpses on the other side and demands an accounting.

Chomsky declines to be drawn into the accountancy and instead pulls out the ethical formulation that, more than anything else, organises his entire political life:

We should be responsible for our own actions, primarily.

He calls it the principle that we rightly expect Soviet dissidents to follow. The exemplar is Sakharov. Sakharov has nothing in particular to say about American atrocities; when asked, he says he doesn't know about them and doesn't care. What he addresses is Soviet atrocities, and that is what makes him a moral person, because those are the ones he is responsible for. Soviet commissars, by contrast, attack Sakharov for not talking about American crimes. We see that for what it is: hypocrisy, cynicism, the manoeuvre of a state propagandist who cannot defend the conduct of his own regime and so demands moral parity with another. The clarity available to us in Moscow vanishes the moment the same script is performed at home.

The principle Chomsky names is not exotic but the standard ethical principle of agency: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your own actions, not for the predictable consequences of somebody else's. The application to political speech in a democracy is direct. A citizen of the United States is responsible, in the first instance, for the conduct of the United States, since by his taxes, his vote, his employment, and his everyday consent he has contributed to that conduct and can affect it, in however small a way, while he has not contributed to and cannot easily affect the conduct of regimes he does not live under. The natural distribution of his moral attention is therefore asymmetric, weighted toward the things his hands have been holding. What Worthington misreads, performatively or sincerely, as bias is in fact the structure of moral life.

I want to dwell on this for a moment because it is the part of the panel that I think survives intact, in 2026, and that anyone who intends to do any political writing in any decade that follows had better have memorised. Whenever a sufficiently uncomfortable critique of one's own regime appears in print, the sponsored response will involve a list of competing atrocities, presented in the rhetorical posture of moral seriousness. The list is usually not wrong on the facts. The atrocities are real. The function of the list, however, is not moral. The function is to demand parity, and to extract parity by way of demanding that the critic also catalogue the atrocities of regimes the critic cannot influence, on pain of being dismissed as a partisan if he/she does not. The trap is rigged: there is no list long enough to satisfy the questioner, because the questioner has no interest in atrocities, only in adjudicating the moral status of the speaker. Chomsky's reply is the only correct one. Of course every corpse is a corpse. There are some you can affect and there are others you can't do much about. I can be worried about things that happened in the 18th century, but I can't do much about them.

I would extend the principle one further notch, to where I think the panel does not quite go. The question which corpses are mine to be responsible for is not exhausted by national membership. In the era after 1988, with global supply chains, transnational platforms, and software capital that crosses borders without paying tax, a software worker employed by an American firm is responsible, by Chomsky's logic, for the conduct of that firm wherever it operates and against whomever its products are deployed. The form the principle takes in the present, then, is not "do not enumerate, on cue, the corpses that are not yours" so much as: enumerate, in detail, the ones that are, and notice how they got there through the things you and people like you went on building.

Halfway through the panel, in response to a question about the day-to-day experience of a journalist trying to cover the world, Chomsky drifts into one of his sharpest peripheral observations. He frames it as a downstream effect of what the elites of the 1970s, in the famous Trilateral Commission report, called the crisis of democracy (Crozier 1975), the alarming discovery that the young, the women, the minorities, and the working poor had begun to want to participate in the political life of their own societies, with a corresponding excess of democracy that needed to be dialed back. The 1970s, accordingly, were declared a me generation by people whose job it was to declare such things. Where did that come from? What was the evidence? I'll bet you that was invented in advertising offices and such places, and it was targeted against young people. Teenagers had to be indoctrinated, by being told repeatedly that they lived in a culture of narcissism, until they began to live in one. The 1970s, far from being more selfish than the 1960s, in fact gave us the feminist movement at scale, the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the broad spectrum of solidarity work that produced the cultural shift that Chomsky points to as the reason Reagan could not repeat Kennedy's playbook. A generation that produced more cooperative political action than its predecessors was nonetheless told it was selfish, and a sufficient portion of it came to believe what it was told.

He then says the line that justifies the entire detour:

There is something very significant about capitalism. It has to eliminate human feelings. Capitalism is based on the idea that the only human value is greed.

Notions like solidarity and community and concern, on this account, are not neutral with respect to a capitalist order; they are obstacles to it. The structural pressure of the system is to subordinate them, render them subsidiary, push them out into the family or the church and out of the workplace, the market, and the polity. The system has not achieved total success — the family still loves and the picnic still picnics — but the trajectory is consistent, and the work of advertising and entertainment is to assist the trajectory. The me generation trope was, on this reading, not a journalistic observation but a piece of work, a behavioural intervention dressed up as a sociological discovery, aimed at adolescents at the moment in their lives when their sense of who they are is most plastic, in order to produce in them the kind of self-centred, atomised disposition that a system based on greed can absorb without difficulty.

If this was true in 1988, in the era of broadcast television and direct-mail catalogues, the contemporary version is bleaker by an order of magnitude. The architecture of attention now is, in Zuboff's terms, surveillance capitalist (Zuboff 2019), built to identify the affective parts of a developing personality and to sell back to that personality intensified versions of its own self-concern, on a feedback loop calibrated by hundreds of millions of rounds of A/B testing. The teenager Chomsky imagines, vulnerable to suggestion at a delicate stage of life, is now the target population of an industry whose product is that vulnerability. The rebellion against this, when it surfaces, is met with the same charge as the me generation accusation: you are too sensitive, too political, too earnest, you are taking life too seriously, you should focus on yourself. The grammar is unchanged from 1988, only the budget has grown.

Worthington presses Chomsky on Reagan's electoral popularity. And they all go vote Reagan and now it look like you're going to vote Bush. The implication is that the propaganda thesis cannot survive the basic fact that the population keeps electing the politicians the propaganda thesis claims it would not elect if it knew what was being done in its name. Chomsky's answer is, again, the methodologically interesting one. He distinguishes between Reagan's rated popularity, which tracks rather closely (within a few points) public perception of the economy, and Reagan's policy support, which exit polls in 1984 showed to be roughly 3-to-2 against. The Gallup question who runs the government? returns "a few big interests looking out for themselves" from a small majority. Voting, in this picture, is not an act of programme selection. It is more like saluting the flag, or applauding when the Queen of England opens Parliament: you do it as a patriotic gesture, you understand the speech is somebody else's, you do not particularly hope she believes any of it. The Queen of England may open Parliament by reading a speech but nobody cares whether she believes it.

The 1984 example is delicious. The two parties had quietly swapped their traditional positions: the Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth on debt, the Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism, and the swap was unembarrassing because the parties did not stand for anything in particular. They reflected different sectors of the business community. The population was offered a choice between damn-the-consequences jingoist Keynesianism and we agree with you but we are afraid of the consequences fiscal conservatism. The population voted for the upbeat option. This is a one-party state with a seasonal product line.

Chomsky calls this the foretaste of where capitalist democracy is going. The United States, he says, is just more advanced. Other industrial democracies will get there too. Britain still had, in 1988, the residue of a labour-based press; the Daily Herald had recently outsold the Times and the Guardian, and the social-democratic press was a real cultural infrastructure of the kind that allowed alternative visions of how a society could be organised to circulate. The market killed it. The market is designed so that dissidents are excluded naturally. This is not an editorial complaint about lazy editors but a structural diagnosis of how a market in attention selects for the politics it can monetise.

In 2026 we live, more or less completely, inside the foretaste. Voting now bears even less programmatic relation to the conduct of state policy than it did in 1984; the conduct of policy is, increasingly, transacted underground in the manner Chomsky described above; the parties remain shifting alignments of business interests with two distinct flag designs; and the public has noticed. Pollsters who still ask do you think the country is on the right track get the same answer Chomsky's Gallup citation gave him: no, and we don't think this system has anything to do with us. Yet the symbolic act of voting is undertaken, by those who still bother, in roughly the spirit Chomsky described: a patriotic gesture, performed without illusion, on behalf of a flag-figure whose actual programme is widely understood to be a matter of business.

—-

What I take from rewatching this transcript, against the democracy of the present, is a certain restoration of nerve. The journalists on the panel are not stupid; they are accomplished, well-prepared, deploying the moves their training has equipped them to deploy. The trick of you are on the air, therefore you are wrong, the trick of it makes no difference, therefore you should stop, the trick of the press is just cheering, therefore there is no problem, the trick of you have not enumerated the right corpses, therefore you are a partisan, the trick of the public votes the way it does, therefore you are wrong about the public — each move has a long pedigree, each is still in service, and each is recognisable almost word for word in the encounters between elite anchors and serious critics that occur, on whatever the year's analogue of the Massey Lectures is, every season.

What is unusual about Chomsky in this panel is not that he answers the questions; anyone can answer them. The unusual thing is that he does not concede the social premise from which they are deployed. He does not behave as though the panel is a court whose authority he has come to acknowledge, but treats the questions as objects, considers them, and where they need to be reversed he reverses them, without anxiety and without pleading, having by my reading a slightly mischievous time. If it did matter that much Canada would close up too is not the line of a man who needs to be invited back, but of a man who has located the lever and is enjoying its travel. This is the part of the recording that I think requires the most careful attention from anyone who intends to do anything difficult in public, because the modal failure of the contemporary critic is not analytical but social: the critic flinches, softens, qualifies, and apologises in front of interlocutors he/she has internalised as his/her superiors, and the substantive argument dies in the manners. Chomsky does not have this problem because he does not consider the panel his peers in the relevant sense, nor does he think they have anything to teach him about morality. They are tactically intelligent, they have institutional power, he extends them ordinary courtesy, and that is the extent of the relation. The work he came to do, he does.

The propaganda thesis (Chomsky 2008)(Chomsky 1997) continues to be debated, refined, criticised, and ignored in the usual proportions, and many of its details have aged in interesting ways under platform conditions (Zuboff 2019). But the panel is not really an exhibit of the propaganda thesis so much as an exhibit of how to behave under interrogation by the people whose institutional job is to discipline you. The five reusable moves I have listed — "you're on the air, therefore", "it makes no difference, therefore", "you're cheering for the home team, therefore", "you haven't counted the right corpses, therefore", "the public votes for it, therefore" — are neither Canadian nor 1988-vintage; they are the standard equipment of mild-mannered authoritarian liberalism, available in any country that maintains a polite intellectual class to mediate between power and the public. Anyone who intends to write seriously about propaganda, politics, or the conditions under which speech is produced, ought to know how the moves run and have a stock of replies ready that do not consist of pre-emptive surrender.

To put it more strongly: in the present period, when the principal pressure on dissent is not visible repression but the gentle, professionalised social discipline of being treated as embarrassing by people one has been trained to want approval from (Mills 2000), the most useful thing the 1988 transcript transmits is a tone — the tone of a man who has decided that being correct, in a small careful way, is more interesting than being respected, in a large vague one. The Sakharov principle (Chomsky 1989) is an ethical formulation but also an emotional one, since it tells you whom you owe: you owe the people your hands have been touching, and you do not owe the panel, which can take care of itself.

A footnote on hope. Chomsky in 1988 is, by his standards, hopeful: the Reagan administration has been driven underground, the population has shifted, the churches have shifted, the audiences he speaks to in Iowa and eastern Kentucky understand him in a way they did not in 1965 (Chomsky 1967), and he has stopped cutting corners. None of that is gone in 2026. Some of it is in worse shape, some of it is in better, the platforms have absorbed the sticks, the church basements are organised by recommendation engines, and the market continues to do what Chomsky in 1988 said the market does, which is to exclude dissidents naturally. But the population still tells pollsters, in numbers that have grown rather than shrunk, that the system has nothing to do with them and is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves; the state's reliance on the underground continues to grow; the Sakharov principle continues to apply; the home team continues to be power; the corpses continue to be ours to count in the order of who put them there. And the importance of not mattering, as a methodology, remains worth defending, since it is what permits any of this to be said at all, in whatever venues are still small enough that saying it is allowed. #Politics #Chomsky #Democracy Criticism