>What is the point of quoting this 1985 essay?
Because he was asking for it by citing FDR's trick, and because he's on the wrong side of most of the faults he detected in the anti-Chomskyists:
>Never was an open society better insulated from dissent.
>The tactic is not to circulate a part-untruth so much as it is to
>associate the victim with an unpardonable out-group, against which
>preexisting revulsion and contempt can be mobilized.
You know, those people who find Ashcroft a greater danger than OBL?
>The contemporary United States expresses the greatest of all
>paradoxes. It is at one and the same time a democracy -- at any rate
>a pluralist open society -- and an empire. No other country has ever
>been, or had, both things at once. Or not for long. And there must
>be some question about the durability of this present coexistence,
>too.
etc