What is "Coercion"?

From the May, 2004 interview with Noam Chomsky at The Progressive:

Q: Why do so many people in the United States just go along with U.S. policy?

Chomsky: What's striking is that this view is accepted without coercion. If you're living in a dictatorship or under kings and princes or in a place run by murderous bishops, you'd better take that view or you're in deep trouble. You get burned at the stake or thrown into the gulag or something.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

What is the thing that Chomsky is looking for? What is the psychological malady that prevents people from "thinking the truth" even though nobody is forcing them not to think it?

Might it not be... oh, I dunno... applied reason?

Aside for the presence of personal liberty, life in America is just like living under a totalitarian regime!

As a political thinker, Chomsky mashes together too many critical and separate issues. Humans should reason the truth for themselves, but the failure of so many humans to reach the truth through their reason shows a grave social epidemic. Only the power of persuasion can break the lock of coercion. But the power of persuasion spoken from a materially self-interested position somehow transcends the logic of suasion and coerces its audience rather than convinces. Chomsky's politics are an ideologically inchoate form of political intuitionism. They may seem compelling, but the notion that the structure of society degrades the autonomy of all individauls save the Chomskyian analyst, who somehow is blessed with or earns the power to transcend the corrosive biasing effects of social power legitimates an analytic exceptionalism that no political thinker can afford to embrace.