Reading Noam Chomsky’s “America in Decline” (2011)
Reading Noam Chomsky’s “America in Decline” (2011)
Note for readers: all quotations from Noam Chomsky, “America in Decline,” Truthout, August 5, 2011; reproduced at CHOMSKY.INFO.
Chomsky wrote in 2011 against the background of the debt‑ceiling standoff. He framed “decline” as a long process rather than a sudden break. He tied it to domestic choices. He stressed power, not mood.
“decline has proceeded since the high point”
That line sets his ledger. The essay traces a slow weakening driven less by foreign rivals than by institutional design at home. Public aims and policy outputs diverge. Money reorganizes the state’s priorities. Finance sets the tempo.
“Corporate power’s ascendancy”
Chomsky marks this as the central lever. He describes parties as machines tuned to donors. He notes how committee posts are priced. He argues that message discipline follows investor preference, not public judgment. He calls this politics without a public.
He then walks through policy cases that display the gap. Fiscal debate centers on deficits because finance prefers it that way. Employment stands as the public’s top concern but receives less energy. Health costs drive the red ink, yet structural remedies stay off the table. Regulation shrinks when fraud grows.
“the public favored deep cuts in defense spending”
He presents that finding to show misalignment. Spending rises anyway. He reads the “compromise” of 2011 as not a compromise at all, but an inversion of public preference. He predicts slower growth and a tilt toward asset holders. He does not expect self‑correction.
The essay locates the break in the 1970s. It highlights two shifts: financialization and the relocation of production. It underscores new governance rules that reward short‑term profit at the firm level and concentrate political money at the system level. It treats these as policy choices and as ideology.
“self‑inflicted blows”
This phrase names the through‑line. The blows are not episodic. They stem from incentives that channel talent and capital into extraction rather than broad growth. They also stem from parties that treat voters as audiences, not principals.
Chomsky cites Robert Solow’s suspicion that modern finance adds little to real‑economy efficiency when set against its crises. He also notes the side effect: crisis response that socializes losses and hardens private gains. He judges the net result as a transfer, not a cure.
Read in 2025, the piece shows how structural forces—corporate dominance in policy, the drift of finance away from production, and a political class insulated from public preference—can generate decline without a foreign defeat or a sudden shock; the argument turns on mechanics, not sentiment or nostalgia. It asks us to look at pipelines of influence, not the rhetoric that runs over them.
The argument invites plain questions.
What do we mean by “decline.” Do we mean relative position among states, absolute welfare for most people, or the state’s capacity to secure public goods. Precision here matters because different metrics yield different diagnoses and cures. Without clarity, debate collapses into mood and metaphor.
Where does representation fail. If majorities ask for one mix of taxes and spending and policy supplies another, is the failure in electoral design, party finance, legislative procedure, or the administrative state. Diagnosis at the level of mechanism allows remedy at the level of rule.
What is the countervailing power. Chomsky shows how organized capital aggregates preference and acts with coherence. He leaves open what organizational forms might aggregate diffuse public aims with comparable force. If the gap is structural, reform must be structural as well.
How should we score finance. We need a real ledger: allocative gains, risk management, and innovation on one side; crisis frequency, opacity, and rent extraction on the other. If net social product is small or negative, what institutional redesign follows.
What makes “self‑inflicted.” The answer is rules, not virtues. Tax, campaign finance, antitrust, corporate governance, budget process, administrative capacity: these are the joints where incentives bite. If decline is built there, repair must start there.
Which indicators would falsify or confirm the thesis. Pick a small set: median income growth, labor share, effective tax rates at the top, concentration across sectors, policy‑preference congruence, regulatory capacity. Track them over time. Let trend, not anecdote, decide.
Chomsky writes as a structuralist. He does not plead for better leaders. He asks for better rules. He writes as an institutional realist. He treats outcomes as the expected product of the system’s current settings. He urges readers to follow power, not talk.
For those of us thinking about 2011 from 2025, a final prompt: if the core of the case is institutional misalignment between public preference and policy output, which single reform would most narrow that gap in the next decade, and what coalition could carry it.