Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files. TV.

This week we're here at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts to interview world-renowned linguist and philosopher Nome Chomsky.

Someone who's authored over 100 books on everything from war to propaganda, I wanted to get

his take on democracy and elections within the context of American Empire.

As extreme as the political spectrum is right now in the U.S., there's still almost complete

uniformity on the war on terror, the stance toward Latin

America, sanctions on Iran. And there's really no anti-war candidate, despite popular

opinion agreeing on that. Why can no candidate touch that?

The spectrum is broad, but in an odd sense. The spectrum is basically from center to extreme right, extreme right, way off the spectrum.

So the Republican Party about 20 years ago basically abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party.

In fact, distinguished, respected conservative commentators

from the American Enterprise Institute, right-wing think tank, like Norman Ornstein,

describe the Republican Party as a radical insurgency, which is abandoned parliamentary politics.

They just don't want anything to happen.

Their only policies don't do anything or bomb.

That's not a political party.

What happened is that the party, during the whole neoliberal period, both parties shifted

to the right as everywhere in the world, and the Republicans just went off the spectrum. They

became so dedicated to the interests of the extreme wealthy and powerful, that they couldn't get votes.

So they had to turn to other constituencies, which are there, but were never politically mobilized.

Christian evangelicals, nativists who are afraid they're taking our country away from us, people

who are so terrified that they have to carry a gun into a coffee shop, and that's their base,

...