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No Is Not Enough
Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Naomi Klein
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No Is Not Enough
Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Naomi Klein
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About This Book
A road map to resistance in the Trump era from internationally acclaimed activist and bestselling author Naomi Klein.
"This book is a toolkit to help understand how we arrived at this surreal political moment, how to keep it from getting a lot worse, and how, if we keep our heads, we can flip the script and seize the opportunity to make things a whole lot better in a time of urgent need. A toolkit for shock-resistance." --Naomi Klein, from the Preface
The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump's vision--a radical deregulation of the U.S. economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on "radical Islamic terrorism," and a sweeping aside of climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy--will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks, to the economy, to national security, to the environment.
In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein explains that Trump, extreme as he is, is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half-century. In exposing the malignant forces behind Trump's rise, she puts forward a bold vision for a mass movement to counter rising militarism, nationalism, and corporatism in the U.S. and around the world.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and most recently This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In 2017 she joined The Intercept as Senior Correspondent.
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PART I
HOW WE GOT HERE: RISE OF THE SUPERBRANDS
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.âMARTIN LUTHER KING JR.âBeyond Vietnam,â 1967
CHAPTER ONE
HOW TRUMP WON BY BECOMING THE ULTIMATE BRAND
The night Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 election and forty-fifth president of the United States was particularly disorienting for me because it wasnât a night at all. I was in Sydney, Australia, on a lecture tour, and because of the time difference, it was late morning on Wednesday, November 9, where I was. For almost everyone in my life, it was Tuesday night, and friends were sending texts from drunken election-night viewing parties. But for Australians, it was the start of a normal workday, which for me just contributed to the overall feeling of vertigo when the results started coming in.
At the time, I was in a meeting with around fifteen heads of various Australian environmental, labor, and social justice organizations. We were having a discussion that circled around a key insight. Up to now, the fights against global warming, racism, inequality, violations of Indigenous, migrant and womenâs rights, as well as many other progressive battles, have often been broken up into their own boxes or silos. But we had been asking, as so many movements are today: how do they intersect? What root causes connect them? How can these issues be tackled in tandem, at the same time? What values would govern such a movement? And how could it translate into political power? With a group of colleagues, I had been working on how to build that kind of cross-movement âpeopleâs platformâ in North America through a project called the Leap Manifestoâwhich Iâll come back to in the final chapterâand there were many Australian groups who were interested in exploring a similar approach.
For the first hour or so, it was a pretty upbeat meeting, with lots of excitement about what was possible. People were feeling totally relaxed about the US elections. Like many progressives and liberals, and even many traditional conservatives, we were sure Trump would lose.
Then everyoneâs phones started to buzz. And the room grew quieter and quieter, and everyone around the light-filled boardroom began to look increasingly panicked. All of a sudden, the reason for gatheringâthe idea that we could help spark an integrated leap forward on climate action, racial justice, decent jobs, and moreâfelt utterly absurd. It was as if everyone instantly understood, without even having to speak, that we were about to be blasted backward by a gale-force wind and all we could do now was try to hold our ground. The idea of forward momentum on any one of the pressing crises on the table seemed to evaporate before our eyes.
Then, without anyone calling it to a close, the meeting dispersed, with colleagues barely saying goodbye to one another. CNN was calling out like some sort of irresistible homing device and we all silently went in search of bigger screens.
Most US voters did not cast a ballot for Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton received nearly 2.9 million more votes, a fact that continues to torment the sitting president. That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners. And on the rest of the planet, overwhelming majorities of people told pollsters that if they had been magically able to vote in this pivotal election, they would have cast a ballot for Clinton. (A notable exception to this global trend was Russia, where Trump enjoyed strong support.)
Within this very large anti-Trump camp, we all have different stories about how we felt on that night/day. For many, the defining emotion was shock that this could happen in the United States. For a great many others, it was grief at seeing long-held knowledge about the depth of US racism and misogyny so vividly confirmed. For others, the feeling was one of loss at watching the first female candidate for United States president lose her chance to become a role model for their children. Still others were flooded with feelings of rage that such a compromised candidate was ever put forward against Trump in the first place. And for millions inside the US and out, the primary emotion was fearâa raw bodily knowledge that Trumpâs presidency would act as a catalyst to unleash extreme acts of racism, violence, and oppression. Many people experienced a mixture of these emotions, and more.
And many also understood that this election result was not only about one man in one country. Trump is but one strand of a seemingly global contagion. We are seeing a surge of authoritarian, xenophobic, far-right politicsâfrom Marine Le Pen in France, to Narendra Modi in India, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to the UK Independence Party, to Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan in Turkey and all of their counterparts (some explicitly neo-fascist) threatening to take power around the world.
The reason I am sharing my own experience of election day/night in Sydney is that I canât shake the feeling that there is something important to learn from the way Trumpâs win was able to cut short our conversation, how it severed plans for a forward-looking agenda without so much as a debate. It was perfectly understandable that we all felt that way on election day. But if we accept the premise that, from here on in, the battles are all defense, all about holding our ground against Trump-style regressive attacks, then we will end up in a very dangerous place indeed. Because the ground we were on before Trump was elected is the ground that produced Trump. Ground many of us understood to constitute a social and ecological emergency, even without this latest round of setbacks.
Of course the attacks coming from Trump and his kindred demagogues around the world need resisting fiercely. But we cannot spend the next four years only playing defense. The crises are all so urgent, they wonât allow us that lost time. On one issue I know a fair amount about, climate change, humanity has a finite window in which to act, after which protecting anything like a stable climate becomes impossible. And as weâll see in Chapter 4, that window is closing fast.
So we need, somehow, to fight defense and offense simultaneouslyâto resist the attacks of the present day and to find space to build the future we need. To say no and yes at the same time.
But before we can get to what we want instead of Trump and all that he and his administration represent, we need to take an unflinching look at where we are and how we got here, as well as how things will likely get a lot worse in the short term. And, with respect to the latter, be advised: the doom is pretty persuasive. But we canât let it be debilitating. Mapping this territory is tough, but itâs the only way to avoid repeating past mistakes and arrive at lasting solutions.
Not a Transition, but a Corporate Coup
What Donald Trumpâs cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planetâs wealth, and whose share grows greater year after yearâthe latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the worldâare determined to grab still more.
According to NBC News in December 2016, Trumpâs picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including âspecial adviserâ Carl Icahn, whoâs worth more than $15 billion on his own). Moreover, the key figures who populate Trumpâs cabinet are more than just a representative sample of the ultrarich. To an alarming extent, he has collected a team of individuals who made their personal fortunes by knowingly causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and to the planet itself, often in the midst of crisis. It almost appears to be some sort of job requirement.
Thereâs junk banker Steve Mnuchin, Trumpâs Treasury secretary, once chairman and lead investor in âforeclosure machineâ OneWest, which kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial collapse. Thereâs Trumpâs secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest private oil company in the world. The company he headed bankrolled and amplified junk climate science for decades, and lobbied fiercely, behind the scenes, against meaningful international climate action, all while figuring out how Exxon could profit from a warming world. And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trumpâs defense and Homeland Security appointments.
We Were on a Roll
It can be easy to forget, but before Trumpâs election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sandersâs surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans. By 2016, no major sporting or cultural eventâfrom the Oscars to the Super Bowlâcould take place without some recognition of how the conversation about race and state violence had changed. Womenâs movements were turning sexual violence into a front-page issue, shining a spotlight on ârape culture,â changing the conversation about high-profile men accused of sexual crimes like Bill Cosby, and helping force the ouster of Roger Ailes from the top job at Fox News, where he was accused of sexually harassing more than two dozen women (allegations he denies).
The climate movement was also on a roll, winning victory after victory against oil pipelines, natural gas fracking, and Arctic drilling, very often with resurgent Indigenous communities in the lead. And more victories were on the way: the climate accord negotiated in Paris in 2015 contained commitments to keep temperatures at a level that would require trillions of dollarsâ worth of extremely profitable fossil fuel assets to stay in the ground. For a company like ExxonMobil, a realization of those goals was an existential threat.
And as the meeting I attended in Sydney suggested, there was a growing understanding, in the United States and beyond, that the pressing task ahead was to connect the dots among these movements in order to build a common agenda, and with it a winning progressive coalitionâone grounded in an ethic of deep social inclusion and planetary care.
The Trump administration, far from being the story of one dangerous and outrageous figure, should be understood partly in this contextâas a ferocious backlash against the rising power of overlapping social and political movements demanding a more just and safer world. Rather than risk the possibility of further progress (and further lost profits), this gang of predatory lenders, planet-destabilizing polluters, war and âsecurityâ profiteers joined forces to take over the government and protect their ill-gotten wealth. After decades of seeing the public sphere privatized in bits and pieces, Trump and his appointees have now seized control of the government itself. The takeover is complete.
Granting the Corporate Wish List
In the face of his total lack of government experience, Trump sold himself to voters with a somewhat novel two-pronged pitch. First: Iâm so rich that I donât need to be bought off. And second: You can trust me to fix this corrupt system because I know it from the insideâI gamed it as a businessman, I bought politicians, I dodged taxes, I outsourced production. So who better than me and my equally rich friends to drain the swamp?
Not surprisingly, something else has occurred. Trump and his cabinet of former executives are remaking government at a startling pace to serve the interests of their own businesses, their former businesses, and their tax bracket as a whole. Within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15 percent (down from 35 percent), and pledged to slash regulations by 75 percent. His tax plan includes a range of other breaks and loopholes for very wealthy people like the ones inhabiting his c...