Of course, neither the Berkeley hippies nor the New Right seek out reality: Both stay snugly inside the bosom of the liberal capitalism they claim to despise, rarely venturing to their idealized Havana or Moscow. Certainly, they don’t choose to live there.
In another striking parallel with the New Right, the Berkeley hippie thought that every political event that happened anywhere in Latin America or the global South, from Chile to Nicaragua, was a masterfully executed CIA plot for which an American administration (probably Reagan) was directly responsible. The thought that events unfolding in Chile (or Ukraine, for that matter) might reflect another society’s complex inner workings in which the U.S. was but one factor never even occurred. This is the supreme narcissism of the American activist class, left or right, thinking the entire world is downstream of domestic U.S. politics.
Likewise, with Ukraine we’ve got a swirl of uninformed chatter about supposed biolabs, the Orange Revolution (which happened almost two decades ago), and this or that U.S. official and his phone calls. All are quite irrelevant to the on-the-ground reality of the war right now. The New Right going on and on about State Department official Victoria Nuland and her famous phone call is exactly like a Chomsky-ite lefty going on and on about Kissinger’s overtures to Pinochet, as if the world simply dances to the tune of State Department phone calls.
This schizophrenia of the New Right is a strange mix of oikophobia—that is, hatred for one’s own country—and self-absorption.
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