What was keeping the Greens?

IN an interview published in the socialist Jacobin magazine, the legendary intellectual Noam Chomsky recently described Trump as “the worst criminal in history, undeniably”.

A high bar, to be sure.

But apart from the fact that Trump has “killed tens of thousands of Americans”, Chomsky reasons that “there has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organised human life on earth in the near future”.

Which is fair enough, especially as Trump isn’t even finished yet as a “tinpot dictator” enabled by Republicans who in their abject obedience are “worse than the old Communist Party”.

Chomsky feels that whatever about America emerging from Covid-19, none of us are going to emerge from Trump’s other crimes in the area of climate change — “the worst of it is coming”, he says, reasonably enough.

But Chomsky has also said something that really surprised me, something that gives a true sense of the scale of the disasters which he believes are on the way — he is going to vote for

Joe Biden.

In another interview with Mehdi Hasan, he explained that the issue of greatest urgency is to “get rid of the malignancy in the White

House — if we don’t do that, everything else pales into insignificance.”

At which point I thought of our Greens — and about how they agonised over the choices which were presented to them. Were they aware that even Noam Chomsky — a man of iron principle, one of the great thinkers of the left of the last century — had decided in the desperate circumstances in which we find ourselves, to make the best of a bad lot?

Yes, eventually, they did a Chomsky on it — but Lord, it was a strange old struggle to behold.

Certainly the vast majority of us who voted for them, had assumed in our simple way that a significant Green presence in the next government would make that government more Green, in the environmental sense, as distinct from more green in the Sinn Fein sense — “and if we don’t do that, everything else pales into insignificance”.

I’m quoting old Chomsky again there. Because while part of me still can’t quite believe that such a towering man of the left will be voting for Biden, no part of me has been able to believe the governmental gymnastics of the Greens in recent weeks — even as the clock has been ticking down to the end of organised human life.

Noam Chomsky himself has decided that this is a time for putting aside his higher principles and indulging in the sin of pragmatism — meanwhile there was Saoirse McHugh telling Dion Fanning that she’d have a problem with her party going into Government if it meant losing their commitment to things such as the Occupied Territories Bill.

That would be the Occupied Territories Bill, and the mention of it was also the moment when I felt for the first time that Saoirse perhaps hadn’t entirely thought this through.

The Diary has been Saoirse’s number one fan, just as we hailed the arrival of Alexandria OcasioCortez as a breakout star

— speaking of whom, do you know who else apart from Noam Chomsky is going to vote for Joe Biden?

Only Alexandria OcasioCortez, that’s who.

Only AOC herself, voting for Joe the ultimate soft “centrist”, the soft centrist that all the other soft centrists call Mr Marshmallow — and as far as I know, she’s not holding out for a few more specifics in relation to old Joe’s position on the Occupied Territories.

Not that the great Saoirse isn’t right to distrust the parties of the Irish ruling class — or to want as much as the Green Party could possibly get, and more.

And yet, the value they place on being right has long been a great failing of right-thinking people.

Like Allen Ginsberg, I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, because they thought the main thing in politics is to correctly diagnose the problems in society, to provide solutions that are intelligent, compassionate and workable.

Which is nice.

Meanwhile, the other side keeps winning.

Indeed one of the odd aspects of the campaign against Trump is the fact that the best ads are coming from anti-Trump Republicans, not just because they are clever, but because they are savage — they just want to win.

At the age of 91, Noam Chomsky seems to be going in that direction, though a while back you could still see the more ferocious supporters of Bernie

Sanders scoffing at the mere idea of voting for Joe Biden — and they were right about that, up to a point.

Indeed, it’s amazing how right they are, about everything, up to a point. Likewise the dissenting Greens had really tremendous arguments to make about the need to change the system, not just the climate.

But being right is the easy part — given that it took them so long even to count their few PFG votes, you feel that the Greens are going to make this much harder than it needs to be.

‘The value the Greens place on being right has long been a failing of right-thinking people...’