Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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dedicated efforts to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—a fearsome
plague that spread during the terrible sixties, with such symptoms as
insight into the real world and accompanying feelings of sympathy and
concern for the victims of aggression and massacre. The Vietnam
syndrome, along with the incipient attempts of large parts of the
population to enter the political system, to organize, to act to achieve
social goals—these were the various forms of insubordination that
constituted the Crisis of Democracy.
These intolerable departures from the approved moral code were not
the first to evoke the fear of democracy at home. The rise of Populism in
the Midwest and South in the late 19th century was another case. Long
depicted in scholarship as a primitive, proto-fascist and anti-Semitic
movement, Populism is more accurately construed as “the most truly
libertarian social force relative to both the regions in which it temporarily
emerged as a factor . . .,” Gabriel Kolko writes, as more recent work has
shown. Populism was quickly suppressed, leading to a huge migration to
Canada from the states with large agrarian radical movements, “an
important strand in the Canadian social democratic movement,” absent
here. 3 The quick demise of Populism under assault from a small
component of business shows that “The largest, best-organized, and
most cohesive mass political movement in American history could not
compete with even a part of the business community.” 4 These events
provide some insight into the limitations upon democracy (in other than
a formal sense) when real power is narrowly concentrated.
Similar concerns arose after World War I. Exploiting his doctrine that
the recent great wave of immigration had brought people “who have
poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life,”
President Wilson turned to direct state repression, including mass
expulsion of those whom Attorney-General Palmer, a liberal and
progressive, called “alien filth.” 5 Wilson’s Red Scare, which established