[wahern]

> Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population.

The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies.

The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.

[yrimaxi]

So you’re just going to whine about tone? Not even try to argue for or against what I have put forth?