The Chomsky Moment And the Cracks in Cultural Hegemony

 

The end of moral asymmetry in American intellectual life. 

My latest on American Thinker.

In 2023, newly disclosed documents related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein revealed meetings and financial interactions between Epstein and the eminent linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky. The disclosures did not accuse Chomsky of criminal conduct. But they confirmed that, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor, Chomsky met with him multiple times and discussed financial matters.

Chomsky’s response was characteristically blunt: his meetings with Epstein, he said, were “none of your business.” The tone may have been legally defensible. Culturally and symbolically, it was something else.

Because Chomsky is not merely a professor emeritus at MIT. For over half a century, he has been one of the central intellectual pillars of the American Left — a figure whose authority extends far beyond linguistics into foreign policy, media criticism, and moral judgment on American power. His 1988 book Manufacturing Consent shaped generations of students’ understanding of media, propaganda, and elite influence. To admirers, he has represented intellectual courage against empire; to critics, an implacable critic of Western liberal democracies.

But in either case, he has stood as a moral voice.

And that is precisely why the Epstein association matters — not as a criminal allegation, but as a symbolic rupture.

From the 1960s to Cultural Hegemony

To understand the magnitude of that rupture, one must place Chomsky within the broader intellectual ecosystem that reshaped American academia after the 1960s. While not formally a member of the Frankfurt School, his work converged with its critique of capitalist modernity, mass culture, and liberal-democratic institutions. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno helped institutionalize a style of critical theory that viewed Western society as structurally oppressive beneath its democratic veneer.

Overlay that with the influence of Antonio Gramsci and his theory of cultural hegemony: the idea that ruling classes maintain dominance not only through economic power but by shaping cultural norms, education, and moral language. Change the culture, and you change the political order.

The American New Left absorbed this framework. Over decades, it migrated from street protest to faculty lounges, from counterculture to curriculum committees. The result is what we now call Critical Theory’s progeny: identity-centered scholarship, postcolonial critique, and ultimately the framework popularly labeled CRT. While Chomsky himself has often criticized certain excesses of identity politics and has not endorsed every development in “woke” culture, his lifelong assault on American institutions provided intellectual scaffolding for the suspicion of Western norms that now permeates large sectors of academia.

The point is not that Chomsky caused CRT. It is that he helped legitimize a moral architecture in which America is presumptively guilty, power is presumptively corrupt, and Western institutions are structurally suspect.

For decades, that critique carried a tacit moral asymmetry: the critics stood above the system they condemned.

  

The Weberian Problem

Here is where the scandal intersects with political theory.

Max Weber famously distinguished between the “ethic of conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility.” The former acts from purity of principle; the latter accounts for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions in the public sphere.

Chomsky’s career embodies the ethic of conviction. He has consistently argued from first principles against war, imperialism, and elite hypocrisy. But when a public intellectual of such stature maintains a relationship — however defined — with a convicted sex offender embedded in elite financial networks, the question shifts from private intention to public consequence.

Even if the meetings were purely intellectual.

Even if the financial discussions were routine.

The symbolic impact is unavoidable.

A figure who built his reputation exposing the moral compromises of power was, at minimum, socially entangled with a man whose entire operation depended on elite protection.

That tension does not prove corruption. It exposes fragility.

The Collapse of Moral Asymmetry

For many on the Right, the Epstein scandal has become shorthand for elite decadence across party lines. But for the American Left, it strikes deeper. The post-1960s intellectual project has relied not only on critique, but on moral differentiation — the implicit claim that progressive institutions and thinkers occupy higher ethical ground than the corporate, military, or conservative establishments they oppose.

The Chomsky episode does not invalidate every argument he has ever made. It does something subtler: it undermines the aura of moral insulation.

If even the most relentless critic of American elite corruption can be found in the appointment book of one of the most notorious financiers in recent memory, then the narrative of unilateral moral superiority begins to erode.

And once moral asymmetry collapses, the logic of cultural hegemony weakens.

Because Gramscian influence depends on credibility. Cultural authority must appear ethically elevated to justify reshaping curricula, institutions, and norms. If the intellectual class is perceived as subject to the same gravitational pull of wealth, access, and prestige as everyone else, its claim to exceptional moral insight diminishes.

A Myth from the Sixties Meets the Twenty-First Century

The myth born in the 1960s was that radical critique purified the critic. That standing outside “the system” conferred immunity from its temptations. Over time, that myth helped fuel a worldview in which America’s sins were magnified, while the critic’s own milieu was presumed enlightened.

The Epstein revelations do not topple Chomsky’s scholarly contributions to linguistics. They do not erase his influence. But they puncture the myth that critique equals virtue.

And that puncture comes at a moment when the intellectual descendants of the New Left are facing growing resistance from parents, voters, and lawmakers who question the premises of CRT and institutionalized “wokeness.”

The Chomsky moment, then, is not about scandal in the tabloid sense. It is about the exposure of a structural paradox: those who claimed to unmask power were not immune to its proximity.

Cultural hegemony depends on the perception of moral altitude. When that altitude drops, even slightly, the entire architecture wobbles.

The collapse is not judicial.

It is symbolic.

And symbols, in politics, often matter more than verdicts.

Italy Prevails

 

Italy today is not a success story -- but neither is it the failure it is often portrayed to be. 

My latest on American Thinker.

Much of the current commentary on Europe’s economic malaise follows a familiar pattern. Brussels’ central planning, green industrial policy, and debt-fueled stimulus are blamed -- often correctly -- for masking stagnation and delaying an inevitable reckoning. Southern Europe, in particular, is frequently portrayed as a collection of artificially sustained economies, kept afloat by EU subsidies, creative accounting, and bureaucratic redistribution.

There is truth in this diagnosis. But it is also incomplete. And in one crucial case -- Italy -- it risks obscuring a more complex and revealing reality.

Italy is often lumped together with Spain, Greece, or Portugal as a “problem economy”: high public debt, low growth, rigid institutions. Yet when one looks beyond headline GDP figures and focuses instead on production, exports, and global competitiveness, a different picture emerges -- one that complicates the prevailing narrative about Europe’s decline.

Over the past several years, Italy has remained among the world’s leading exporters of manufactured goods. In absolute terms, Italian exports of goods have hovered between $650 and $700 billion annually, placing the country consistently among the top global exporters -- alongside Germany and, in some periods, Japan. This is not a statistical artifact of EU transfers. It is the result of private-sector industrial capacity operating on global markets.

This distinction matters. Much of the criticism leveled at Europe focuses on growth that exists only on paper: GDP inflated by public spending, debt mutualization, or multinational profit shifting. Ireland is the textbook example. Its GDP figures are famously distorted by the accounting practices of multinational corporations, with little connection to domestic production or employment. Spain’s recent growth, too, has relied heavily on credit expansion, subsidies, and public-sector absorption, while youth unemployment remains structurally high.

Italy’s export performance, by contrast, tells a different story. It is rooted in domestic manufacturing, not financial engineering. Italian firms compete globally in machinery, industrial equipment, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food processing, and high-end consumer goods. These are sectors that require engineering skill, supply-chain integration, and long-term capital investment. They cannot be sustained by subsidies alone.

This does not mean Italy has been immune to the distortions created by EU policy. On the contrary, Italian industry operates under some of the least favorable conditions in the developed world: high taxation, complex regulation, elevated energy costs, and constant interference from both national and European authorities. That exports have remained strong despite these constraints is not a testament to Brussels’ wisdom, but to the resilience of Italy’s productive base.

Here lies the paradox that much commentary misses: Italy’s relative economic strength exists not because of EU central planning, but despite it.

For American readers, this distinction should sound familiar. It mirrors the difference between financialized growth driven by leverage and asset inflation, and growth grounded in production, trade, and competitive enterprise. Italy, for all its flaws, still belongs to the latter category.

None of this is meant to deny Europe’s broader structural problems. Centralized industrial policy, green mandates detached from market realities, and the politicization of credit allocation are all real threats. Germany’s industrial slowdown, particularly in automotive and heavy machinery, underscores how destructive these policies can be when imposed at scale. The EU’s model increasingly resembles a technocratic command economy layered on top of nominally free markets.

But Italy’s case suggests that Europe’s crisis is not one of lost productive capacity. It is a crisis of governance.

Where production survives, value creation survives. Where institutions interfere less -- or simply fail to crush existing structures -- private enterprise continues to function. Italy’s export sector shows that the European economy is not hollowed out across the board. It is constrained, mismanaged, and increasingly overregulated, but not yet exhausted.

This distinction has important implications. If Italy were merely another subsidy-dependent economy propped up by EU transfers, its export performance would have collapsed alongside the waning effects of stimulus. Instead, Italian exports have held up even as broader European growth slows. That suggests a floor beneath the economy that many commentators overlook.

The danger, however, is that this residual strength will not last indefinitely. Central planning does not merely fail to generate growth; over time, it actively erodes the conditions that allow private industry to function. Italy’s manufacturing base has survived decades of institutional neglect. Whether it can survive an additional decade of ideological regulation, green mandates, and fiscal extraction is an open question.

From an American perspective, the lesson is twofold. First, Europe should not be analyzed as a monolith. Beneath the bureaucratic superstructure lies a diverse set of economies with very different productive realities. Second, the real cost of Europe’s current trajectory is not immediately visible in GDP statistics. It lies in the slow suffocation of those sectors that still create real value.

Italy today is not a success story -- but neither is it the failure it is often portrayed to be. It is a stress test. Its ability to export, compete, and produce under adverse conditions reveals both the latent strength of European industry and the scale of the damage inflicted by centralized governance.

If even Italy’s industrial core begins to falter, the illusion of Europe’s economic sustainability will finally collapse. Until then, Italy remains an inconvenient counterexample -- one that challenges easy narratives about artificial economies and forces a more serious examination of what, exactly, is still holding Europe together.

When Seeing Is No Longer Enough: Mantegna and the Silent Gaze of the Magi

Adoration of the Magi (about 1495–1505), Andrea Mantegna – Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A Meditation on Faith, Vision, and the Limits of the Human Gaze*

There is a moment, when standing before a great painting, in which time seems to loosen its grip. Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi creates precisely such a moment. Nothing in the scene is loud or dramatic. The colors are restrained, the gestures measured, the space dense with silence. And yet, the longer one looks, the more the painting begins to resist easy interpretation.

The Magi are there. They have arrived at the end of a long journey. They kneel, they bow, they offer their gifts. Everything appears to be in place—except for one quietly unsettling detail. Their eyes do not meet the Child’s. In a scene built around revelation, recognition, and divine encounter, the expected exchange of gazes never happens.

It is in this absence, in what is not shown, that Mantegna asks us to pause—and to reflect on what it truly means to see.

In most traditional representations of the Adoration, vision structures the entire composition. Lines of sight converge toward the infant Christ, guiding the viewer’s eye and confirming the moment of recognition. To look is to believe. Mantegna deliberately disrupts this visual logic. The Magi are physically close to the Child, humbly positioned before Him, yet their gazes drift downward or away. The act of seeing, so central to Renaissance painting, is withheld at the very moment when it seems most necessary.

This is no compositional accident. It is the key to the painting.

The Magi are not portrayed as distracted or uncertain figures. They are scholars, astronomers, interpreters of signs. Their journey did not begin with a vision, but with understanding: a star observed, its meaning deciphered, a truth inferred rather than revealed. Long before they reached Bethlehem, they had already recognized who this Child was. Their arrival is not a discovery, but a confirmation.

Now, standing before the Incarnation itself, sight proves insufficient. The divine mystery cannot be possessed by the eyes. To stare would imply mastery, comprehension, even control. Instead, the Magi lower their gaze. Reverence replaces curiosity. The body bows where the eyes withdraw.

In this quiet gesture, Mantegna articulates a profound theological intuition: God, even when fully present in human form, remains ultimately invisible. The Christ Child can be seen as a body, but not grasped as a mystery. The Magi’s averted eyes acknowledge the limits of human perception. They know that what matters most cannot be captured by vision alone.

There is also a distinctly classical resonance in this choice. Mantegna, deeply immersed in ancient art and philosophy, draws on a visual language older than Christianity itself. In the classical world, the divine is often approached indirectly. Gods are honored through posture, restraint, and silence rather than direct confrontation. To lower one’s gaze is to recognize a higher order. Here, the Magi—foreign kings and learned men—behave like ancient worshippers standing before something that exceeds them.

Yet perhaps the most radical aspect of the painting lies not within the figures themselves, but in what the painting asks of us.

By refusing to let the Magi guide our eyes, Mantegna transfers responsibility to the viewer. If they do not look at the Child, we must. The visual path no longer remains enclosed within the painting; it extends outward, toward us. We are no longer passive observers following prescribed lines of sight. We are participants, drawn into the act of contemplation.

In this sense, Adoration of the Magi functions less as a narrative illustration than as a meditation. It does not instruct; it invites. The silence of the Magi’s gaze opens a silence within the viewer. We are left alone with the Child, without intermediaries, without visual certainty, without reassurance.

And that, perhaps, is Mantegna’s deepest insight. Faith does not arise from spectacle. It is not born from what dazzles the eyes, but from what challenges the mind and stills the heart. The Magi have already completed their journey. They have seen the sign, followed it, and understood it.

Now, standing before the mystery itself, they kneel.

In Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna does not show us figures who fail to see Christ. He shows us figures who have seen enough—and who understand that, at a certain point, seeing must give way to reverence.

* Italian version