Book Review: The Myth of American Idealism

The Mafia Doctrine and the Goons of Globalization

T his article originally appeared in Modern Times Review on December 1, 2025.

Of the estimated 150 books Noam Chomsky has written, around 40% are collaborations, especially with political economist C.J. Polychroniou, who has edited several volumes of Chomsky's interviews over the decades. Collaborations allow academics and activists to run the sage's words through the lens of their own aligned projects. At the end of 2024, for instance, Noam Chomsky and C.J. Polychroniou put out a volume, A Livable Future is Possible (Haymarket, 2024), which addresses the future in general and the rising AI phenomenon in particular. In this article, I am reviewing the collaboration between Chomsky and Nathan Robinson, titled The Myth of American Idealism, which was published last October.

We Lefties, particularly those of us who have been around for a long time, admire Noam for his tireless efforts in educating the propagandized masses, awakening them to their plight, and inspiring them to fight. (We like Ralph Nader's longevity and integrity for the same reason.) Bev Stohl, Chomsky's office manager for 25 years at MIT, put out a memoir of her years with the genius, Chomsky and Me (OR Books, 2023), which is a story of sweet collaboration. Hell, I used Stohls memoir to begin writing a sitcom (Im up to five episodes) that fleshes out the humorous human side of Noam, Larry David style. We Lefties hate having to let go of the fighters who made the decades of Deep State abuse of democracy and the tiresome MIC shtick more bearable. Argh!Give me all you've got! Which makes you so goddamn angry you want to beat the stuffing out of the Thanksgiving turkey and give it a right fist-f*cking, like in prison, where it belongs, like G. Gordon Liddy, Nixon goon, hoiked into his spittoon. We Lefties are persevering despite the challenges we face.

The Myth of American Idealism is a solid compilation and distillation of Chomsky's voluminous interviews, articles, prefaces, introductions, written correspondence, debates, and books. Robinson writes in the preface of his Chomsky lens:

I have always wished that some of Chomskys ideas could be presented more systematically in a single volume I explained to [Chomsky] that I would like to compile some of his most useful observations on how U.S. power is wielded around the world, and how our countrys violence is obscured through self-aggrandizing mythology.

It is essentially Chomsky's last book and also an excellent place to begin reading his political philosophy for the first time. Chomsky's debilitating health issueshe has not been a public figure since suffering a stroke in June 2023prevented him from completing the collaboration with Robinson (Valeria Chomsky owns the copyright to the volume).

Many lefties have expressed regret over not hearing Chomsky's voice among the many Gaza genocide protests heard around the world. Regrettably, the absence of Chomsky has left us to lament the loss of his influence in the public sphere. But Robinson has a whole chapter devoted to Chomsky's critique of Israel and its Gazan politics. Phew! (What are we going to do when Chomsky carks it?) I am already considering setting up a Chomsky AI Agent to talk to in sance mode. Maybe a cameo in my sitcom.

The Myth of American Idealism dismantles the notion that noble intentions guide America's global actions, presenting a powerful critique of U.S. foreign policy. (See Valenzuela.) Instead, Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson argue that the U.S. operates under what they call Mafia Logic: a ruthless pursuit of dominance masked by claims of moral idealism. The book is divided into two major parts: The Record of Idealism in Action and Understanding the Power System. In Part 1, Robinson chooses a decent array of issues (all of them insufficiently resolved), including Disciplining the Global South, The War on Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel and Palestine, China and Russia, and Nuclear Threats and Climate Catastrophe. These are all living topics in Current Affairs, the left-wing progressive magazine that Robinson founded in 2015 and edits today.

One of Robinson's key theses is that the US government operates in the world with what he calls a Mafia Doctrine, which the author describes as a totalitarian principle in which America's deep state elites push the selfish ethos described by 18th-century political economist Adam Smith: All for ourselves and nothing for other people. To ensure that the reader isn't dealing with mere hyperbole, as some writers will engage in, Robinson describes the actions of American foreign policy thusly:

The Godfathers word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement. If some small storekeeper fails to pay protection money, the Godfather sends his goons, not just to collect the money, which he wouldnt even notice, but to beat him to a pulp so that others do not get the idea that disobedience is permissible.

The reader paused momentarily, realizing the magnitude of the situation. Most places are closer to being mafiaocracies than you would want to know. And when you catch a glimpse of the horror, the horror beneath the surface of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree ice, you are no longer an idealist, and you lose your religion in a hurry.

The book has two parts. In the first, The Record of Idealism in Action, the authors demonstrate the difference between the rhetoric of America's shining light delusions and what the nation gets up to in reality as imperialists. The second part, Understanding the Power System, sees the authors delineating the various means by which power takes hold of minds, principally through propaganda and through the traps of authoritative reasoning (with its myriad hidden agendas).

9/11

In the chapter, 9/11 and the Wrecking of Afghanistan, Chomsky and Robinson begin by recalling the 1997 CNN interview with Osama bin Laden during which he condemned Israel's massacre of civilians in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996. The attack took place on a UN compound where 800 civilians had taken shelter after being driven from their homes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The IDF fired artillery shells into the peacekeepers' compound: 106 were killed, 120 were wounded, and half of the total were children. The authors tell us:

[Seven-year-old] Linas sister was killed, with shreds of her pajamas all that was left. Lina herself underwent six months of treatment for a shrapnel wound in the head, and would never recover the full use of her limbs. According to her mother, she would wake up at night shaking, lost and hallucinating, sometimes wetting herself.

Israel was not sanctioned. They were just chasing a bunch of Arabs. The United Nations General Assembly took the modest step of voting to charge Israel for the financial costs of the damage to the UN base, were told.

Such hands-off treatment of the nation-state filled with humans who had suffered tremendous atrocities in death camps or who were part of the age-old Jewish diaspora was disgusting. The international community's moral leeway for Israel, granted out of respect for their suffering, has created an insufferable sense of entitlement to violence and displays of swaggering impunity.

The Arab world, especially the Sunni Sharia-driven sectors, was infuriated by such brassy postures of Will to Power and astonishing hypocrisy. Osama bin Laden publicly stated that he had assisted the CIA in provoking the Russians in Afghanistan. Chomsky and Robinson quote his CNN response to the idea that his war was with the American Way:

[Osama] bin Laden said that his jihad was because the U.S. governmenthas committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, both directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The mention of the U.S., he says, reminds us before everything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in the recent explosion that took place in Qana.

The bin Laden position was contained and further elaborated in his controversial Letter to the American People, originally published in The Observer on November 24, 2002. Why are we fighting and opposing you? begins bin Laden's rhetorical question. The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us [and] (2) You attacked us in Palestine. Who attacked this poor man in Palestine? The US either directly or through their regional hegemon, Israel.

So, we have witnessed retaliation in an ongoing eye-for-an-eye saga, with Israel, even in 2025, continuing to slaughter civilians indiscriminately in Gaza while preparing for a Final Solution that would either force the remaining Gazan population into internment camps or drive them to leave the region. Although Israeli media have occasionally criticized the actions of the IDF, raised important questions about the events of October 7, and critiqued Netanyahu's ultra-Zionist agenda, the Israeli government continues to erase Palestinians. Recently, Aharon Haliva, a senior officer in the IDF, stated that Israel would kill 50 Gazans for every Israeli killed on October 7 (a figure that may have been reached already) and said, It does not matter if they are children. This sounds like the words delivered by Heinrich Himmler at Poznan in October 1943:

For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the menin other words, killing them or having them killedand then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth. [see The Exterminationist Mindset]

Some Israelis seem smitten with such depravity, opening up a vision of the death camp (Gaza) as a New Jerusalem of horror. This statement bears a resemblance to Buuel's portrayal of The Exterminating Angel. Jawohl?

Palestine

In a later chapter, The United States, Israel, and Palestine, Chomsky and Robinson further examine the history of the existential tensions between Israel and Palestine and how the various American administrations since the 1950s have failed to effect a two-state solution. Indeed, it is as if the region has limped along on a one-step-forward-two-steps-backward approach, a Nobel Peace Prize followed by episodes of mowing the lawn and Intifadas that led to an eventual catastrophic breaking point. Instead, the Holy Land seamlessly aligns with longstanding US plans for global hegemony, and Israel, particularly as a nuclear power and a regional hegemonist nation-state with acquisitional ambitions for neighboring states like Syria and Lebanon, aligns with these US plans.

The authors were working on the background to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict when October 7 exploded the fantasy of coexistence, but Chomsky was too ill to collaborate with Robinson on the ensuing events. However, Robinson provides the reader a succinct rendering of the thinker's take on it all:

Chomsky has previously quoted a placard held by an old man that reads: You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.

That's about the size of it, you may find yourself thinking. Robinson follows with Chomsky's take on next steps, also pithily put:

Chomsky argued long before October 7 that a civilized reaction to the Israel Palestine conflict would be: The U.S. and Israel could end the merciless unremitting assault and open the borders, and provide for reconstructionand if it were imaginable, reparations for decades of violence and repression.

Well, that's not happening. As of this writing, the IDF is planning on assaulting Gaza City, with Himmlerian fatalism, and US president DJ Trump is engaged in fantasies of turning Gazas waterfront into a new Riviera and procuring a Nobel Peace Prize.

Chomsky and Robinson do a good job connecting the actions and policies of the Israelis to those of their rich benefactors, the Americans. For instance, they like to freeze assets and supply lines. US governments have used it as a cruel tool for their hegemonic global expansion, particularly in situations where they cannot easily carry out a coup or bombing. Israel follows this pattern with its frenemies and the Palestinians. They write,

In 2006, for instance, Gazans committed a terrible crime: they voted the wrong way in an election, choosing Hamas as their governing party. The United States immediately began plotting a military coup. With constant U.S. backing, Israel increased its violence in Gaza, withheld funds that it was legally obligated to transmit to the Palestinian Authority, tightened its siege, and in a gratuitous act of cruelty, even cut off the flow of water. Israel and the U.S. made sure that Hamas would not have a chance to govern.

Cutting off funds means cutting off food, water, and critical medical supplies. The pressure this brings to local governance is enormous. It also functions as a form of warfare. While deprivation often works effectively on relatively defenseless countries, it can create dangerous animosity when applied to superpowers such as the US, which has repeatedly imposed sanctions on Russia and China. When thrust upon Palestinians, it effected a situation that some described as apart-hate. Chomsky and Robinson roll in Archbishop Desmond Tutu to provide a description of what he saw in Gaza during a visit there in 2006:

I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.

Today, you could describe the IDF (and Pentagon) onslaught, combined with a blockade of aid or the risk of being gunned down getting food and water at sites set up seemingly like honey pots for flies, like scenes out of the science fiction film District 9. It seemed odd and ironic to me, at first, that South Africa would be the first to apply to the Hague to stop Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But now it makes sense. Unless Israel undergoes the process of a Truth Commission, nothing will likely save its "soul" after the flames of hell cool down.

The USThe Godfather has made Israel its chief Middle Eastern enforcer. This support manifests in both significant and minor ways. Chomsky and Robinson tell us that the US gifts Israel billions of dollars a year. Citing the Congressional Research Service, the authors write that the amount of aid is staggering total military, economic, and missile defense funding has amounted to $236 billion in 2018 dollars, making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. assistance since World War II. American taxpayer dollars are being used to prosecute an illegal war. As the authors continue:

U.S. law formally prohibits aid to human rights violators; nevertheless, there has been little support for a bill in Congress designed to ensure that U.S. funding is not used for Israels ill treatment of Palestinian children in its military judicial system, forced displacement of Palestinians through home demolitions and evictions, and illegal annexations of Palestinian land.

Americans, prodded by a lately concerned press, now know their government is complicit in the annihilation of another human group. The Never Again motif apparently doesn't apply to anyone but Jews. One wonders how much of that largesse makes its way back to the coffers of American politicians running for officea query that raises alarm about the extent to which Israelis have corrupted the American democratic system.

The US assists in smaller ways, too. For instance, while Gaza has seen tremendous violence, the West Bank, too, has been the subject of atrocities brought about by the seemingly endless stream of settlement construction, displacing Palestinians there in the process. One of the more cynical activities, underreported and not seriously considered, is the leasing or renting of settlement properties by American Jews, some of whom advertise their properties as Airbnb sites. Some American Jews were incensed when moral outrage led to the sites being delisted and sued Airbnb. The chutzpah.

Countless times over the years, when voices of reason or dissent have been raised against the tyranny of Israel's atrocities or questioned its religio-historico right to exclusive ownership of Palestine (and the Holy Land), those individuals have been labeled anti-Semites. Even the term "anti-Semitism" has been co-opted by Israel, to cite bin Laden's aforementioned letter.

Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact [that Israel has a historical right to Palestine] is accused of anti-Semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites.

The grievances listed in the letter do not justify the subsequent acts of terrorism, such as 9/11 and 10/7, but they do highlight critical moments and the long-standing "need" for retaliation.

China

The American Ideal would see US supremacy in all the competing spheres of human endeavor. If the ostensible value of capitalism is movement, energy, opportunity, and choice, then America has achieved astounding success on its terms. The collapse of the Soviet Union, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, brought about a peace dividend that sparked a gold rushthis time, eastward. However, greed hindered fair competition in the marketplace of ideas and material goods. As Chomsky and Robinson told us,

How is China endangering the way of life we have here? Wray explained that the scope of the Chinese governments ambition is nothing less than to surpass our country in economic and technological leadershipThis is the true nature of the China threat: that the United States will no longer rule the world. A basic premise of our foreign policy is that we are fully entitled to do so indefinitely.

The authors discuss the competition between presidential candidates Trump and Biden to outdo each other in their efforts against China. They write,

An Atlantic commentary said that voters who want to punish China in 2024 should choose Biden, not Trump, because Biden has hit China harder than Trump ever did and inflicted acute damage on the countrys economy and geopolitical ambitions.

This make-the-economy-scream motif, a Kissinger favorite, goes back at least as far as Nixon and was the modus operandi of the 1973 Chile coup. Squeezing economies can be construed as akin to a declaration of war.

Chomsky and Robinson discuss the fantastical reasons provided by American hegemonists, who cite human rights violations while exploiting developing countries by imposing onerous debts and seizing infrastructure as collateral when foreclosure inevitably occurs. A favorite reference point for critics of Chinas human rights violations is the plight of the Uyghurs. The authors dont dispute the horrendous repression of Uyghurs, but they question how it makes China dangerous to the US and how the repression can withstand the scrutiny of the mirror that must quickly and severely reveal American hypocrisy around the world the invocation of human rights arguments is entirely based on the arguments' usefulness to US power, the authors tell us.

More mystifying is the American charge of neo-colonial debt-enslavement. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in developing countries in Africa. Loans, especially microloans, are an American specialty in Africa. More importantly, America is the greatest debtor nation in the history of the world. About 43 million Americans owe 1.6 trillion dollars in student loan debt alone. Estimates suggest that the national debt consumed more than 1.2 trillion dollars in interest payments in 2025. China has frequently told Americans that they live beyond their means, that the middle class relies on credit, and that this usurious credit is a privilege of belonging to a country that controls the global reserve currency. The authors write,

As the Associated Press notes, to charge China with intellectual property theft is to condemn the very sort of illicit practices that helped America leapfrog European rivals two centuries ago and emerge as an industrial giant.

The credit trap comment is all propaganda. China took to a form of capitalism that suits them: They did what Americans ought to be doing in reverse, tweaking the current capitalist system with permanent socialist tendencies. The Chinese, thanks to a tremendous sense of humor and in the spirit of global bonhomie, put Mao Zedong's image on their money. How about that for chutzpah? Wah? But US elites are, as Chomsky and Robinson point out, at heart forms of mafiosi adventurists. They dislike competition; it certainly doesn't warm their hearts. Like an errant criminal family out of The Godfather, China was stepping over the line and was now a problem that had to be dealt with. When capitalism breaks bad, it breaks criminal. It's a different vibe than with the communists, who still have plenty of corruption but know that too much of it leads to chaos and many-faceted indicators of collapse and tearful recriminations. China listens patiently to US high-horsedness blather. Chomsky and Robinson write,

One reason China is disinclined to listen to the United States pious pronouncements on military aggression, human rights, and international law, then, is that so much U.S. history is a history of military aggression, human rights abuse, and brazen violations of international law.

The US cannot point to parallel expansions of might and conquest by the Chinese. If the Great Wall is useful for anything anymore, it is a reminder that China is staying home and intends to keep out the barbarians at the many gates. The US has to fabricate bellicose intentions from China for Taiwan, which is where the corrupt figures of the former Chinese regime fled after the Communists came to power. But they aren't coming back to power. And rescuing their meager interests is not worth risking WW3 over. As Chomsky and Robinson suggest,

To ensure the self-determination of Taiwan, we should avoid taking steps that make it more likely that Beijing would decide to try to pursue unification through force. We should do our best to preserve the peaceful status quo, because if China did decide to seize Taiwan, it is not clear the United States could successfully defend the island, and any U.S.-China war would be a humanitarian and economic catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude, especially for the people of Taiwan.

But the status quo isn't what America wants, it seems, as it makes its Asian pivot and engages an otherwise non-hostile Australia (China is its number one trading partner) in a military alliance between the UK, Australia, and the USA (AUKUS) that is leading to the militarization of the Australian budget, and, given that the island nation is isolated from the West, could be eventually left abandoned by the US, as so many partners have been before.

Chomsky has pointed out often in the past that even in a world that is less than ideally organized around justice and fair play, relations with China might have gone differently with somewhat more cosmopolitan circumspection. We could have been partners bringing our power for positive change to the world, helping solve the various crises that may doom us. One even recalls how close we came to rapprochement with the Chinese back in 1972 when Richard Nixon visited with Mao in China and said, among many delightful things:

You believe deeply in your system, and we believe just as deeply in our system. It is not our common beliefs that have brought us together here, but our common interests and our common hopes, the interest that each of us has to maintain our independence and the security of our peoples and the hope that each of us has to build a new world order in which nations and peoples with different systems and different values can live together in peace, respecting one another while disagreeing with one another, letting history rather than the battlefield be the judge of their different ideas.

Excuse me, dear reader, I tear up when I read such noble, thoughtful words from an American leader. (Of course, we found out later, through Daniel Ellsberg, that Nixon had contemplated nuking North Vietnam, China's client state. Despite winning reelection in a landslide in 1972, Nixon stepped into a puddle of chaos and found himself exiting office the following year, with everyone weeping during his televised resignation and losing their faith in American idealism.

The Chinese have proven so proficient at gaming the capitalist system that it has overtaken the United States as the world's largest economy, according to the scorekeepers at the International Monetary Fund. China is ahead of the US in purchasing power parity (PPP), while the US remains number one when measured by GDP. However, GDP has limited reliability in terms of well-being indexes. In 1968, presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy was on the road preaching alternatives to measuring progress by means of the GDP. The measurement is flawed, even cynical.

But in measuring the monetary value of economic activity, GDP can incorporate many of the bads that detract from our quality of life. War, pollution, crime, prostitution, traffic congestion, disasters like wildfires, and the destruction of nature all can have a positive impact on GDP. Yet they cannot really be construed as components of economic success. [Allin et al, Beyond GDP: changing how we measure progress is key to tackling a world in crisisthree leading experts, The Conversation, August 19, 2022]

Consider how America's endless wars contribute to the nation's economic prosperity.

To counter the might the US brings with stewardship of the global reserve currency and its accidental privileges (not earned), the Chinese have developed an alternative currency system that skirts the often whimsical and imperial implementation of economic sanctions on other nations meant to soften support for the target country's leadership and lead to a soft coup. That alternative system is a partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). It is an expanding network that also includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.

According to the International Bar Association, BRICS expansion into payment systems poses a threat to the dominance of the US dollar. Will this aggression persist? American selfishness, delusion, and imperialism are being gradually replaced with ways around having one's assets frozen because of disagreements with US policy. As the former Singapore ambassador to the UN and president of the UN Security Council from 2001 to 2002, Kishore Mahbubani noted in his book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (2020):

The world has been happy to use the US dollar as the global reserve currency because they trusted the US government to make the right decisions on the US dollar that would take into consideration the economic interests not only of the 330 million American people but also of the remaining 7.2 billion people outside America who also rely on the US dollar to fund their international transactions.

But the US has been arrogant at times in its curation of a system meant to benefit all. China, through the inclusion of Africans and South Americans in its expansion, has presented a viable alternative to the citizens of these two continents, who have endured a significant amount of colonial fervor and coup-driven politics, with their futures determined by their access to the SWIFT system of monetary transactions. BRICS is one example of providing an alternative to the traditional capitalist system. Wah! And it is expanding. Still, further corroding friction could be avoided. The United States needs to stop needlessly stoking conflict, the authors write, think about how things look from the Chinese perspective, and work sincerely to understand and collaborate with a country of 1.4 billion people we have to share a planet with. The United States should refrain from engaging in unnecessary confrontations.

Russia

Russia has always been the special nemesis of the United States. Each has brought to the world competing revolutions that are bound to come to loggerheads one day. The conflict between communism and capitalism has been a recurring theme. The conflict revolves around the modes of production, ownership of production, and the distribution of wealth within a nation. In an ideal scenario, communism equally distributes wealth and ensures the state's care for all citizens. Capitalism, on the other hand, requires competition and loose regulations, if any, and provides for unlimited acquisition of material goods, especially by those with privilege and the means to secure property and hold ownership exclusively.

If China represents a serious threat to America's global economic hegemony, then Russia, despite having a relatively small economy and a deconstructed empire, continues to be the number one military threat in the world.

The Cold War never truly ended, as Chomsky and Robinson demonstrate. The U.S. has systematically provoked Russia since World War II, most recently orchestrating regime change in Ukraine and expanding NATO eastward despite promises to the contrary. The destruction of Nord Stream2, arguablyan act of war, exemplifies America's willingness to sabotage even allied economies to maintain hegemonic control.

Chomsky and Robinson reveal how this antagonism serves the Mafia Doctrine: The fundamental principle of foreign policy is that we own the world, by right, and we are therefore entitled to intervene anywhere we choose to defend our interests, which are by definition the interests of mankind. Russia's mere existence as a nuclear superpower challenges this presumption of ownership.

The authors expose the cynical nature of American provocations, noting how expansion of NATO to the Russian border represents a deliberate policy of encirclement designed to weaken Russian sovereignty. When Russia inevitably responds to these provocations, American media frames it as unprovoked aggressionclassic victim-blaming from the global Godfather.

This endless antagonism toward Russia serves no rational American interest beyond maintaining elite control. As the authors suggest, genuine cooperation between nuclear superpowers could address humanity's existential crises. Instead, we continue to follow the same old imperial strategy of provoking, escalating, and then blaming the target nation for self-defense. The Godfather tolerates no equals, even when mutual destruction looms.

How Foreign Policy derives from Domestic Illusions

Part Two of the book deep-dives into one of Chomsky's favorite subject zones: propaganda and how it can be used by powerful elites to control the thinking of subordinate fellow citizens.

The authors amply demonstrate how the structures of our work are philosophical and political and how the wishes and wants of the elite are translated into social policy that others must obey. This connection between elites, power control, and global capitalism serves as the driving force in the world. The world's leading superpower, armed with thousands of nuclear weapons, backs it up with its invincibility and impunity.

It can be difficult for many mainstream Americans to understand and accept the bitter truth that the power differences that exist in America, though not explicitly a caste system, serve elite materialists who do not care about the masses except as forces of labor. But this has been the reality since the founders cobbled together the Constitution of the United States. Elites and property owners carefully crafted the sacrosanct document. It is very telling that the human rights component of the Constitution, which is to say the Bill of Rights, which Americans are most proud to project to the world as special and unique, had to be forced upon the founders, who originally did not see the need for guarantees of free expression, religious worship, gun ownership, voting rights, and the host of other rights taken for granted today. The original Constitution did not acknowledge the rights of women to vote. It did not acknowledge the Black man as anything but three-fifths of a human being, codified right there in the Constitution. It is unsurprising that the eviscerating forces of the elite today are primarily targeting the Bill of Rights.

Chomsky and Robinson's examination of these domestic power structures sheds light on why the MAGA phenomenon resonated so strongly with ordinary Americans. Their critique reveals that U.S. foreign policy is most heavily and consistently influenced by internationally oriented business leaders, while public opinion has an insignificant effect on government officials. This systematic exclusion of popular will creates the very conditions that fuel populist rage.

The MAGA movement, for all its misdirected anger, represents the waking nightmare of citizens suddenly realizing they've been hoodwinked by what they call The Deep State Chomsky'srepresentatives of major corporations, banks, investment firms, the few law firms that cater to corporate interests, and the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals who do the bidding of those who Trump skillfully channeled this legitimate fury, diverting it from its true originsthe corporate elites he represents.

Chomsky's decades-long critique anticipated this backlash. He showed how there is essentially one political party, the business party, with two factions, leaving voters with the illusion of choice while real power remains concentrated. When people finally sense this manipulation, their rage becomes politically combustible and misdirected toward scapegoats rather than systems.

The solution Chomsky offers is both simple and radical: authentic democracy. As he notes, from what we know of public preferences, we could expect a radically different set of policies, foreign and domestic, if authentic democracy existed in the United States. The tragedy is that MAGA voters, correctly sensing their disenfranchisement, chose a billionaire demagogue as their champion rather than demanding the genuine democratic participation that might actually address their grievances.

The Mafia Doctrine thrives on this kind of misdirection, keeping the bewildered herd frustrated at phantoms while the real operators continue their work undisturbed.

Should we choose hegemony or survival? That's the question that Chomsky and Robinson pose to the reader at the book's end. Chomsky and Robinson agree on the plight of the human project. Chomsky has long identified the three main crises facing humanity: impending climate catastrophe, the continued threat of nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Robinson often publishes articles that think about these issues in Current Affairs, the magazine he edits. They leave the reader with a thoughtful, actionable consideration:

We dont know that honest and dedicated effort will be enough to solve or even mitigate the problems we face. Still, we can be quite confident that the lack of such efforts will spell disaster. Freedom and democracy are by now not merely values to be treasured, but are quite possibly the prerequisite to survival. We therefore have only two choices. One is to say, Its hopeless. Lets give up. This guarantees that the worst will happen. The other is to say, We want to make things better, so we will try. Given the urgency of the crises we face, there is no time to lose.

The Myth of American Idealism is a solid introduction to the voluminous and luminous thought put into the complex and myriad facets of the human project by the world's leading public philosopher. It is a compact volume, accessible but scholarly, and promotes constructive thinking about the way forward for human beings.