p. 43 on erasing culture and disempowered communities

« To some linguists, the Chomskyan revolution represents the greatest disaster that had happened to the study of language in nearly two hundred years. Despite Chomsky's overt leftist politics, Chomsky's effect on linguistics was to take a field that had been especially aware of cultural difference and the political situations of disempowered groups and, in some ways, to simply dismiss out of hand the question of whether their practices might have much to offer intellectual investigation. One of Chomsky's earliest and most devoted followers, who went on to become one of his most ardent critics, Paul Postal, recalls that his early 1960s attempt to apply generative principles to Mohawk in his dissertation, which might have been thought especially interesting since it would demonstrate the applicability of generative grammar to a language that does not, on the surface, look much like English, was "considered slightly comic for some reason" by other generativists. In other words, Chomsky took one of the few actually leftward-leaning academic fields in U.S. culture and, arguably, swung it far to the right. By arguing strenuously that linguistic phenomena could be separable into form and content, essentially out of his own intuitions rather than any particular empirical demonstration, Chomsky fit linguistics into the rationalist tradition from which it had spent nearly a hundred years extricating itself. »