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

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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investors, who generally have good and clear reasons for investing to
control the state . . . Blocs of major investors define the core of political
parties and are responsible for most of the signals the party sends to the
electorate.” Periods of political compromise reflect consensus among
major blocs of investors, as in the “era of good feeling” after the War of
1812, when “Quite like Mexican elites a hundred years later, American
investors for a time enjoyed the luxury of ruling an essentially one-party
state under the banner of revolutionary democracy” as “party
competition (and voter turnout) virtually disappeared”; one of many such
periods, including the present to a significant degree. Party
realignments, he argues, reflect basic changes “in the core investment
blocs which constitute parties.” This “investment theory of politics,”
which explains a good deal of American political history, regards political
parties as “blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance
candidates representing their interests,” interpreted not as special
interests but as the general interest, while “on all issues affecting the
vital interests that major investors have in common no party competition
will take place.” One aspect of the process is “the interaction of high
business figures and the press,” which “has frequently been pivotal for
American politics.” 28
The New Deal period represented a limited departure from this
system: “for the first time in American history, masses of ordinary voters
organized themselves and succeeded in pooling resources to become
major independent investors in a Party System.” But even in this case,
at the center of Roosevelt’s new political coalition “are not the workers,
blacks, and poor that have preoccupied liberal commentators, but
something else: a new ‘historical bloc’ (in Gramsci’s phrase) of hightechnology
industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented
commercial banks.” 29 The Reagan program is often described as
instituting a “revolution” that may overturn the New Deal. The purpose