His concern was with the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and with the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. Chomsky's appeal was published in The New York Review of Books, which is itself a liberal establishment gatekeeper that cannot, for example, abide the likes of Kurt Vonnegut. That article, however, was enough to ensure that, like diverse dissenters from folk singer Phil Ochs in the 1960s to Harper's editor Louis Lapham in the 1990s, Chomsky would win North American television time mostly on such government-owned networks as the CBC and TVOntario, both in Canada. To the left wing, his opinions about the genetic basis of grammar and his unfortunate attachment to the name of Ren Descartes have separated him from many of his natural political allies. There is, after all, a pervasive preference on the left for notions that humanity can change for the better.
Malleability is thought preferable to original sin.
So, hope lies with cultural relativism, the social construction of knowledge, and sometimes even a romantic connection with the dregs of Lamarckian evolutionary theory that even the insanity of Lysenko's Stalinist biology has not quite extinguished. Steven Pinker is clear on this point. It is hard for liberal minds to admit that much more than hair color and the human capacity to make two kidneys rests in our genes. Malleability is certainly politically preferable to the guff of eugenics. Chomsky's assertion of an immutable and innate capacity for language challenged that easy opinion a generation ago, and Steven Pinker has delivered to the current generation a splendid book that rescues the best of Chomsky's insights while adding not a few of his own.