“Cultures unfortunately can be swept by craziness,” Noam Chomsky wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018, in response to one of many missives from his friend complaining of mistreatment at the hands of a sensationalist media. “Nazism for example. Or the Great Awakening.” A few weeks earlier, Chomsky had advised Epstein not to reply to the “disgusting” smears against him. “To 99% of people, who will never look into the matter, the conclusion is that where there’s smoke there’s fire.” What really counted, Chomsky reassured Epstein, was not the judgment of the masses but “real friendship, deep and sincere and everlasting.”

That Chomsky bore such fervent admiration for one of history’s most accomplished sex criminals does not automatically discredit any of his myriad intellectual contributions to left-wing political causes, any more than photographic evidence of Mick Jagger in Epstein’s presence should compel us to pretend that “Gimme Shelter” actually endorses war, rape, and murder. But Chomsky’s correspondence with Epstein reveals an impulse that is harder to compartmentalize: a fundamental condescension toward ordinary people, a skepticism and even outright despair about their ability to accurately understand and fruitfully resist the social structures under which they live. This attitude is not at odds with, but rather inseparable from, the lessons that Chomsky and some of his admirers have taken from his most influential contribution to the American left’s understanding of our degraded public sphere: his theory of propaganda. 

Chomsky’s best-known work on propaganda remains his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with (in fact, mainly written by) his friend and collaborator Edward S. Herman. This book bears a regrettable title, given that it has very little to do with the extent to which people actively agree to the conditions to which they are subject, and why. It instead provides an explanation for why the output of mass media organizations is so factually incomplete and politically anodyne, a question it answers, as the subtitle suggests, in terms of political economy: Chomsky and Herman assert that media corporations, which are increasingly consolidated, are accountable to investors and advertisers and powerful bureaucracies that give them access to information, and this dependence constrains what they feel comfortable publishing. Hard to argue with that. 

But the title smuggles in an additional argument: that the public is more or less alright with a social order that causes immense harm to regular people and the world more broadly. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman were careful to bracket the degree to which people truly absorbed the propagandistic messages with which they were bombarded. “The propaganda model is about how the media work, not how effective they are,” Herman later wrote. Nevertheless, throughout his career Chomsky has frequently affirmed his belief in what he once described as “the extreme success of indoctrination in American society.” In Chomsky’s work, the masses most typically appear in a condition of helpless passivity. “The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know,” he wrote in 1993 — one of many Chomsky quotes to this effect that have become a staple of edgy Facebook infographics. 

The slippery category of the “general population” allows Chomsky to reconcile his left-wing commitment to popular struggle in principle with his pessimism about actually existing people. It is possible to wake up, learn the truth, start to resist — but then one is no longer part of the general population, whose capacity for critical thinking Chomsky is safe to impugn without appearing elitist. Chomsky has often recognized that this dire assessment of the masses is one he shares with the reactionary defenders of hierarchy he has otherwise devoted himself to combatting. Herman and Chomsky adopted the phrase “manufacturing consent” from Walter Lippmann’s “the manufacture of consent,” which he describes in his 1922 book Public Opinion, published in the liberal journalist’s most stridently antidemocratic period. Chomsky is fond of quoting Lippmann’s characterization of the public as a body of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who ought to be made “spectators” rather than participants in governance. Chomsky, of course, does not agree with Lippmann’s prescription, but he echoes the diagnosis. “The American system of ‘brainwashing under freedom,’” Chomsky said in 1988, the year Manufacturing Consent came out, is “remarkably effective.”

If mass media manipulation has rendered most people brainwashed stooges, it is not obvious why it was wrong for Lippmann to advise we preclude such people from running the country in the first place. Latent sheeple are sheeple nevertheless. The dominant intellectual tradition on the left since Marx has, without denying the reality of popular acquiescence in particular places and historical periods, attempted to formulate an account of the ebb and flow of mass resistance that keeps the rationality and ingenuity of ordinary people squarely in view. Antonio Gramsci, for example, argued that the establishment of intellectual and moral “hegemony” by the ruling class does not end but necessarily evokes a “war of position” by the working class and its own “organic intellectuals.”

In a great irony of left-wing intellectual history, the Gramscian sociologist Michael Burawoy made his own attempt to explain popular demobilization without exaggerating the efficacy of propaganda in a book also titled Manufacturing Consent — and published nearly a decade before Herman and Chomsky’s. Informed by ten months of participant observation as a machine operator in a Chicago factory, Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent showed how the then-recent attrition of working-class militancy could be understood at least in part as the outcome of workers’ highly rational attempts to defend their interests in response to changes in the way the plant organized their labor. On the shop floor, Burawoy found compliance, but not stupidity: it was the inhuman rationality of capital itself, not elite propagandists, that outmaneuvered his subjects. 

Faith in the abilities of ordinary people always carries the risk of romanticism. Leftist thinkers who imagine that the masses already agree with them about everything are often guilty of their own kind of condescension. And it is unquestionably the case that corporate journalism, for all the political-economic reasons Herman and Chomsky elaborated, rarely comes to the aid of movements of people seeking to better understand and contest their oppression. Chomsky’s devotion to Epstein, however, shows that the risk of excessive pessimism is far more severe. During #MeToo, at a moment when countless women around the world, in a remarkably organic and uncoordinated fashion, were coming to recognize, articulate, and struggle against the sexual violence they had long suffered in silence — despite the specter of lawsuits against accusers and the pronouncements in prestigious outlets that the movement had become a moral panic or a witch hunt — Chomsky was incapable of glimpsing anything but media brainwashing stirring up the irrationality of the masses against his friend. In “the public domain,” Chomsky told Epstein, “innuendo and suspicion and accusation reign.” Perhaps. But every so often the truth fights its way into view, and with it people make their own history. These are crucial moments, and we must never let ourselves grow too cynical to recognize them.