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> They need a theory to explain why their radicalism isnt popular

Actually what Chomsky notes is how the idea of "radical" laws such as that a person can't be kicked off their health plan if they develop cancer are not unpopular, but wildly popular with the public in polls. Nonetheless in the decades prior to Obamacare, despite its popularity, due to institutional reasons it did not become law.

> the existence of Trump in the first place: his base chose him

Chomsky said early on Trump support came mostly from the base, and the power structure did not want him.

You're knocking down a straw man - inventing things Chomsky did not say, attributing them to him, then condemning him for words you put in his mouth, when he often said the opposite.

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I dont think we have a way to determine popularity as easily as you suggest. Brexit was popular: 52% said yes, but of those many would not pay any money at all to see it through. So, its popular if its free. Many things are.

This is often the implied context around this polling: do you want better services and lower taxes? Yes. Yes, of course.

The issue for america, in the case of universal healthcare, is that it would dramatically increase the tax burden and worsen healthcare for the middle/upper-middle. How many are so noble when it comes to this double-whammy? Few.

On paper, people will spend other people's money with glee. In practice, politics expresses something ideologues can never really tolerate: that society is often getting what it wants.

Or, more precisely, that the social ecology is both healthy and imperfect. That society may not get what it wants in some sense, but not for any malignant reason.

The ideologue always has to locate the failure to reach the ideal with some flaw in people, in the system. They cannot brook that through ordinary, indeed healthy, political process can come non-ideal outocmes.

A close look at the political system here in the U.S. exposes many significant ways in which policy is protected from voter intent: Electoral college, gerrymandered districting, a first-past-the-post system that is hostile to third parties (the main parties control the national debate process, for example). It is indeed possible for a policy to be widely popular with the voting public, but NOT on the ballot in any meaningful way. This is without even dipping into the fear-mongering toward more egalitarian policies in healthcare, taxation, workers rights, etc.

Yes, but can you make the defence of the converse?

Suppose that (democratic) minorities need a little extra weight -- then you'd need an electoral college?

Suppose the 'dripping fear-mongering' is a dislocation of a certain other emotion: discontent, pershaps? disagreement?

Suppose you make a defence that the situation is indeed a healthy one. What would you say then?

I am not saying it is -- but to get beyond this ideological analysis we need to engage with, say, 'the horror of the health of policitics' -- that the thing we most dispise may well be a symptom of what we, ourselves, prescribe

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