How the Far Left Helped Make America Great Again

Noam Chomsky Cleared the Way for Donald Trump

As Noam Chomsky wrote in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Source: Wikimedia Commons

I’m old enough to remember the end of history, when American hyperpower fueled a “rules-based international order.” Flush from its victory in the Cold War, the United States both represented and promoted ascendant liberal values like democracy, free trade, and human rights. “Liberal” here meant a broad consensus shared by center-left and center-right alike. In his 2005 second inaugural address, Republican President George W. Bush declared, “[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” But he was merely following in the rhetorical footsteps of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who entered America into World War I in 1917 by arguing that “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.” Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, but it had been negotiated by his Republican predecessor, George H.W. Bush. During the 2011 Arab Spring, Democratic President Barack Obama led a multinational coalition to topple Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, justifying military action with reference to “our support for a set of universal rights.” Earlier still, Republican President Gerald Ford signed the 1975 Helsinki Accords with the Soviet bloc, whose human-rights provisions empowered dissidents to challenge their governments.¹

But this bipartisan consensus didn’t extend to the far left.² The “peace movement” of the 1960s, which opposed American intervention in Vietnam, catalyzed a deeper cynicism about America’s role in the world and even its legitimacy as a country. In brief, the far left viewed America’s “liberal values”—imperfectly realized as they were—as a hypocritical front for imperialism abroad and oppression (especially of its black population) at home. But following the malaise of the 1970s—a period marked by stagflation, political disillusionment, and a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam—Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a promise of renewed American confidence. Liberal capitalism won the Cold War, while the far left seemed safely quarantined on college campuses, only emerging from the slumber of theory for futile anti-globalization protests. Bush’s 2003 Iraq invasion reinvigorated skepticism toward interventionist foreign policy. Yet the 2008 election of Obama, the country’s first black President, seemingly put a lie to the trope of incorrigible American racism. Then, in the 2020 Summer of Floyd, it returned with a vengeance. Reagan, referencing a 1630 sermon by Puritan John Winthrop, called America a “shining city on a hill.” For the social justice left, it’s a settler-colonial project built on the backs of slaves.

Yet despite its cynicism, the far left is ultimately rooted in hopeless idealism. It theoretically accepts liberal values like democracy and human rights (though not so much free trade). Yet it redefines the terms so that they’re unrealizable except through illiberal methods, which in turn renders them meaningless. For example, Noam Chomsky, éminence grise of academic radicalism, once said that “I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. . . . until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.” In other words, real democracy is only possible when the state, in the name of the people, has seized total economic and social control.³ And indeed, the official name of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was Democratic Kampuchea. The Cambodian Maoists killed over 2 million of their own countrymen in a genocide that Chomsky downplayed. Other undemocratic democracies in the objectively Chomskyan sense include the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, better known as North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.⁴ From these and other real-world examples, we can conclude that for Chomsky, it’s pointless to talk about democracy until doing so will get you executed.

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But what if you keep the far left’s skepticism about liberalism, yet discard its naivety about socialism? What if you accept that the rules-based international order is a sham, but also think that progressive solidarity is a farce? You might then oppose the Iraq War not because it was an immoral “war for oil,” but because America stupidly didn’t even take Iraq’s oil.⁵ You might then oppose free trade, not because it exploits other countries, but because it limits America’s ability to exploit them. You might then oppose “human rights imperialism,” not because you’re against imperialism as such, but because you prefer straightforward land grabs. You might then agree that big business has too much power, but view state capitalism, not collectivization, as the solution. You might then agree that the media “manufactures consent,” but for a radical woke agenda of gender ideology and critical race theory, not for the American interest. You might then agree that the US is morally equivalent to dictatorships, but see that as good reason to seek closer ties with them. You might then be President Donald J. Trump, who made anti-globalization great again by rebranding it as anti-globalism. The Bernie bros who went MAGA certainly see the appeal.

For the far left, there’s no real difference between any politician to the right of Rosa Luxemburg. In Chomsky’s words, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” Communists once claimed that social democrats were “social fascists,” so equivalent to the actual fascists on the rise in Europe. The Democratic Socialists of America refused to endorse Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in the last two presidential elections, arguing that a second Biden term would be the same as a second Trump term. Democratic Socialists like New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani aren’t all communists. (Though Mamdani has called for “seizing the means of production” and extolled “the warmth of collectivism.”) Nor is Trump a fascist. (Though he’s arguably a Peronist.) Nevertheless, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does run out of new ideas. The radical left has a long track record of delegitimizing both the established political order and any relative moderates on its own putative side. In doing so, it empowers the radical right, which accepts the underlying diagnosis (“the system is broken”) but offers a more popular—call it populist—cure. Far leftists, by virtue of being insufferable, also provide the perfect foil for the right to rally against.⁶ To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, what the far left produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

Of course, the Democratic Socialists of America, due in no small part to their own fecklessness, hold little direct political power. But the far left brandishes outsized cultural power. And as the knowledge class is educated, so society is influenced, however diffusely. The young may not be reading books anymore, but they can absorb the anti-establishment vibes. Surveys show that in the early 1980s, 67% of high-school seniors agreed that the US system was the best. By 2022, that number had fallen to 27%. Three out of four Gen Zers also agree that the government’s “fundamental design and structure” need “significant changes”—higher than for any other generation. The left may think that skepticism toward American exceptionalism and hunger for sweeping reform are to its benefit. But youth have been shifting to the right instead. After all, if America is unexceptional, why not act out of self-interest instead of pretending to be a beacon of democracy? And if the status quo is woke, then doesn’t radical change mean overthrowing the radicals in charge? Leftists don’t deserve full credit for the twilight of the American century. The establishment has been undercut by its own failures, from wars of choice abroad to hollowed-out factories at home. But insofar as the far left helped erode America’s liberal (or neoliberal) consensus, Trump’s electoral success stands as its greatest political achievement.

Who’s getting the last laugh? Source: Estate of Jeffrey Epstein

1. For a right-wing populist interpretation of this history, see Republican Senator Eric Schmitt’s speech at the 2025 National Conservatism conference: “For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy.’ They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.”

2. Nor did it extend to paleoconservatives on the right, but they were much less influential than the far left.

3. Chomsky technically calls himself a “libertarian socialist,” which is about as applicable to practical politics as anarcho-monarchism.

4. Though from a Chomsykan perspective, by embracing a socialist market economy, China has actually become less democratic.

5. And later seek to take Venezuela’s oil.

6. Or Schmittian enemy.