'It's fertile territory for demagogues to arise'

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[Noam Chomsky:] Forty years of the neoliberal assault on the general population which has been extremely harmful almost everywhere. It's led to anger, resentment, contempt for institutions. And when you have a period of unfocused anger, resentment and so on, it's fertile territory for demagogues to arise, and try to mobilize it, and blame it, not on its sources. So, like not on the international financial institutions that are lying behind it to a substantial extent. But to focus it on scapegoats. Typically, people even more vulnerable than you are, immigrants, Muslims, Afro-Americans. This goes way back to Ronald Reagan's "Welfare queens" and so on and many other demagogues in the past. So yes, that's rising. There are also counter-forces that are rising. Now they're very significant. It's pretty common these days to quote Gramsci's famous -

[Mehdi Hasan:] Interregnum.

[Noam Chomsky:] Yeah, Interregnum with morbid symptoms, but there are morbid symptoms and there are positive symptoms. And it's a real question which will prevail.

source: 'Deconstructed special: the Noam Chomsky interview'; Deconstructed with Mehdi Hasan; theintercept.com/2019/10/31/deconstructed-special-the-noam-chomsky-interview/; The Intercept_; 31 October 2019