And you have to ask, compared to what? Average Americans live immeasurably better lives than when Chomsky first start squawking about "evil capitalists" many decades ago. Did socialism accomplish that? Hardly.
How about unions? Again, with only about ten percent of the total workforce unionized, average Americans live far better than they did during the heyday of unionism which lasted about twenty-twenty-five years or so after WWII.
This will not impede the efforts of Chomsky and his ilk to denounce capitalism as evil. Facts mean nothing to Chomskyites...only the narrative matters, to wit: evil capitalists, the one percent, oppress the vast majority of Americans who are helpless pawns in the grasp of the greedheads. They'll believe this to their deaths.
"....New Left progressives—including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee—were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers. We did this then—just as progressives still do now—in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.
As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you." Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.
There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists—and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today....."