Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 1)

"Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to 'a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,' quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.

The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of 'spectators' (rather than 'participants') assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”

In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from 'the American insurgency' to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington 'was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.' Indeed, he 'might have actually done so' had France not massively intervened and 'saved the Revolution,' which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call 'terrorists' — while Washington’s British-style army 'was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.'

A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the 'dirty and nasty people' who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for 'the lower class of these people' has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience ('moderation in democracy') by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s."

Link here.