Radical in Rhetoric, Moderate in Politics: Noam Chomsky’s Limited Leftism, by John Foster – 13 February 2026

What would the left be without Noam Chomsky?

After the extent of his personal and financial connections to Jeffrey Epstein became apparent, the progressive internet exploded.

For some, the revelation proved that Chomsky had always been morally compromised; for others, it demanded an immediate closing of ranks. The heated debate underscored his importance as a political thinker, prompting closer examination of his legacy.

It also demonstrated, yet again, that people would rather talk about anything other than the victims of Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring, whose voluminously documented horrors make the fate of a ninety-seven-year-old millionaire inconsequential.

Although it’s ridiculous to worry about an old man’s reputation in the face of such depravity, the fact that so many of his fans continue to do so reveals a lot about the state of the left, particularly in Anglophone countries. For half a century, Noam Chomsky has occupied a peculiar position in their world, less a theorist than a civic weather system.

The pattern is familiar. A crisis erupts, the mainstream press harmonises, and then Chomsky appears to remind everyone that power lies. This ritual comforts people who would like, simultaneously, to distrust institutions and to believe that the basic coordinates of liberal society are still intact. He is the dissident one can assign on a syllabus without alarming the dean.

Until the Epstein files were made public, anyway.

In the 2016 film Captain Fantastic, about an anarchist family that has spent years living off the grid, we learn the children have been taught to celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday instead of Christmas. Absurd as that may sound, it neatly communicates the reverence in which the celebrated thinker was held.

The revelations in the Epstein files have already brought this longtime icon down to earth. But an analysis of Chomsky’s significance should not be led astray by this morality play. Even if he ends up getting “cancelled” by most, his impact cannot be wished away.

The real question is why his politics have remained, for decades, so strangely compatible with the ideological atmosphere he is credited with exposing.

Chomsky’s enduring reputation rests above all on Manufacturing Consent, co-written with Edward S. Herman, which has given generations of readers a language for understanding how media systems filter reality. When the book was published in 1988, his argument—roughly, that corporate ownership, advertising dependence, sourcing routines, and elite consensus structure what counts as news—felt revelatory because it punctured the civic catechism taught in high school civics classes.

Journalists were not independent truth-seekers but professionals embedded in a hierarchy of institutions. Wars were not unfortunate mistakes but predictable outcomes of informational choreography. The book’s great achievement was pedagogical: it taught people to notice patterns.

But the model’s very clarity has produced a peculiar intellectual afterlife. Readers often treat the “propaganda model” as an adequate explanation unto itself, rather than a description of surface mechanisms. Media distortion appears as a set of technical biases—filters, incentives, professional habits—rather than as an expression of deeper social relations.

Ownership matters, but ownership is not interrogated beyond the level of corporations behaving badly. The economy is shown mainly in the background, like weather conditions affecting a sporting event.

The result is a politics that is radical in rhetoric and curiously moderate in ontology. Chomsky’s analysis encourages scepticism toward state violence while preserving a generally optimistic picture of society, in which otherwise neutral institutions are occasionally captured by malign interests.

Although Chomsky does not deny structural inequality, he treats it as one item in a list of abuses rather than a constitutive feature of the entire system. From his perspective, the media misleads because elites are manipulative, not because ideological production is an ordinary requirement of social reproduction in a stratified economy.

This distinction sounds pedantic until we notice its consequences. If propaganda results from the bad behaviour of identifiable actors—state officials, corporate executives, pliant editors—then reform remains conceivable within existing arrangements.

All we need, presumably, are better journalists, stricter regulations, and a more vigilant citizenry. The public sphere can still function the way it should if we repair the damage done to it by malign individuals.

The implication is comforting: democracy is fundamentally healthy but periodically hijacked.

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Radical in Rhetoric, Moderate in Politics: Noam Chomsky’s Limited Leftism, by John Foster – 13 February 2026

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