Noam Chomsky: Obama Like an Old 'Moderate Republican'

On January 30, professor Noam Chomsky, famed linguistic scholar and long-time anti-American activist, said on Current TV that if President Obama were in office a few decades ago, he would have “basically” been considered a “moderate Republican.”

Chomsky made his comments on Cenk Uygur’s Current TV show The Young Turks.

The MIT professor’s main point was that the Democrats have moved rightward toward “moderate” positions while the GOP has moved even further right to the point of being extremists. This move, Chomsky said, has essentially eliminated “moderate Republicans.”

“The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it’s hardly a traditional political party anymore,” Chomsky said.

Chomsky also said that Obama has no particular principles. As far as he was concerned, Obama was “kind of a mainstream centrist with some concerns for liberal ideas and conceptions, but not much in the way of principal or commitment.”

Chomsky warmed to the left’s favorite theme of the evils of money in politics, claiming that the “concentration of political power” is but a result of the “concentration of wealth.” The big money means a political win, Chomsky seemed to claim, and this is a self-perpetuating evil as politicians, “climb deeper and deeper into the pockets of those who were funding them.”

“So as the political system gets shredded, wealth gets concentrated, other policies change … you get a natural drift of the parties to the right,” he said.