According to new Readers Digest poll, Noam Chomsky is the 20th most trusted person in America.
Michelle Obama ranks 19th. Tom Hanks tops the list, while Judge Judy ranks above all the justices of the Supreme Court. Chomsky ranks ahead of Madeline Albright and Anderson Cooper.
I know little about statistics so I can’t judge the accuracy of the poll, which surveyed a supposedly representative sample of 1,009 Americans in January.
If it’s true, then Americans have a great degree of trust in America’s most prominent anarchist. In a new interview, Chomsky describes what anarchism is and why he believes in it:
Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying… it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but [anarcho-syndicalism] is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level.
At 84, he’s probably one one of the oldest guys on the Readers Digest list. But he’s still chugging along. Chomsky recently lobbied Stephen Hawking to boycott an Israeli conference over its occupation of the Palestinian territories, and signed on to a public letter calling on the New York Times to rectify its biased coverage of Central America.
Barack Obama languishes in 65th place in the poll—one place behind Adam Sandler.