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by
Naomi Klein
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November 4 - December 20, 2019
Back when I published No Logo, we used to call it “culture jamming,” and the trick was always the same: identify the big bold idea a company is selling and then expose the dirty reality behind the shine.
Since Trump’s personal brand is being “the boss” who does what he wants, one way to mess with it is to make him look like a puppet. It doesn’t really matter who is yanking the strings. Once they’re exposed, Trump’s carefully nurtured image begins to slip. And this tactic clearly works: Trump was driven so mad by the persistent jokes about #PresidentBannon that he took to Twitter to proclaim himself the supreme decider, and the status of his once all-powerful chief strategist seemed to rapidly decline.
And what if developers come under so much public pressure that they decide having Trump’s name on their façade is actually costing them revenue? Already, in New York City, tenants of Trump Place demanded that their building manager take the Trump name off their home. As one resident said, she was tired of feeling “disgust” each time she walked into her building. The manager complied and Trump’s name was removed.
If any of this seems unfair, consider this: The whole reason we expect politicians to divest their financial holdings, or put them in a real blind trust, is that having active business holdings while serving in office creates all kinds of opportunities for conflicts of interest and backdoor influence. Trump has chosen not to divest. His adviser-daughter has made the same choice. Which is why it’s perfectly legitimate to use those choices to try to influence the hell out of them.
The first season of Survivor—so wildly successful that it spawned an army of imitators—was in 2000. That was two decades after the “free-market revolution” had been kicked into high gear by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with its veneration of greed, individualism, and competition as the governing principles of society.
Every week, to millions of viewers, The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer. That’s how you help the economy and, more importantly, yourself.
What’s interesting about this particular piece of televised class warfare, which aired in 2007, is that the pretense sold to a previous generation—capitalism was going to create the best of all possible worlds—is completely absent. No: this is a system that generates a few big winners and hordes of losers, so you’d better make damn sure you are on the winning team.
In 2016, Credit Suisse estimated that there is roughly $256 trillion in total global wealth—with a staggeringly unequal distribution: “While the bottom half collectively own less than 1 percent of total wealth, the wealthiest top 10 percent own 89 percent of all global assets.” Which is why there just aren’t many serious people left who are willing to argue, with a straight face, that giving more to the wealthy is the best way to help the poor.
Trump first started selling the notion that he held the ticket to joining the top one percent of income earners at the precise moment when many of the ladders that provided social mobility between classes—like free quality public education—were being kicked away, and just as the social safety net was being shredded.
After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Donald Trump understands exactly how little needs to be behind the promise—whether on renegotiating trade deals or bringing back manufacturing—if the desperation is great enough.
Since the election, we’ve heard a few mea culpas from media executives acknowledging that they helped Trump’s electoral rise by giving him such an outsized portion of their coverage. And that’s true, they helped enormously, but the hand-wringing doesn’t go nearly far enough. They are also responsible because the biggest gift to Trump was not just airtime but the entire infotainment model of covering elections, which endlessly plays up interpersonal dramas between the candidates while largely abandoning the traditional journalistic task of delving into policy specifics and explaining how
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The Tyndall Report found that, through the entire election, the three major nightly network news shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on “issues coverage”—down from an already paltry 220 minutes in the 2008 election. The rest was the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll where.
This is worth underlining: Trump didn’t create the problem—he exploited it.
As with The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience—in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be largely invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but WWE generates close to a billion dollars in annual revenue.
Trump knows as well as anyone that the idea of American corporations returning to 1970s-style manufacturing is a cruel joke. He knows this because, as his own business practices attest, a great many US companies are no longer manufacturers at all, but hollow shells, buying their own products from a web of cheap contractors.
He will claim credit for a relatively small number of jobs—most of which would have been created anyway—and then market the hell out of those supposed success stories. It won’t matter one bit whether the job numbers support his claims. He’ll edit reality to fit his narrative,
And so far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized upon this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created—the
conservatives aren’t the only ones capable of confusing engaged citizenship with brand loyalty.
These two trends—the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture—have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.
It means that, while our branded world can exploit the unmet need to be part of something larger than ourselves, it can’t fill it in any sustained way: you make a purchase to be part of a tribe, a big idea, a revolution, and it feels good for a moment, but the satisfaction wears off almost before you’ve thrown out the packaging
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES BALDWIN Notes of a Native Son, 1955
You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it.
Because of record-breaking temperatures, more than 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been impacted by what’s known as a “mass bleaching event.”
This time, they hadn’t gone back down—so almost a quarter of the Reef has died.
It’s worth underlining how little warming it took to bring about such a radical change. Ocean temperatures went up just one degree Celsius higher than the levels to which these incredible species are adapted, and that was enough for a massive die-off. Unlike many other climate change—related events, this wasn’t some dramatic storm or wildfire—just silent, watery death.
including the fact that roughly one billion people around the world rely on the fish sustained by coral reefs for food and income.
They are the ones growing up amidst a mass extinction, robbed of so much beauty and so much of the companionship that comes from being surrounded by other life forms.
According to a groundbreaking investigation by InsideClimate News (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Exxon did its own cutting-edge empirical research, taking CO2 samples off its oil tankers and building state-of-the art climate models that predicted the coming changes such as sea-level rise. It also received warnings from its own senior scientists, including James Black who was categorical in his reports to his employer about the “general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of
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Despite this, ExxonMobil has since then lavished more than $30 million on think tanks that systematically spread doubt through the press about the reality of climate science.
Climate change isn’t more important than any of these other issues, but it does have a different relationship to time. When the politics of climate change go wrong—and they are very, very wrong right now—we don’t get to try again in four years.
Nearly everything is moving faster than the climate change modeling projected, including Arctic sea-ice loss, ice-sheet collapse, ocean warming, sea-level rise, and coral bleaching.
A paper from Oxford University that came out during the campaign, published in the Applied Energy journal, concluded that for humanity to have a fifty-fifty chance of meeting the temperature targets set in the climate accord negotiated in Paris at the end of 2015, every new power plant would have to be zero-carbon starting in 2018. That’s the second year of the Trump presidency.
If we continue on our current pollution trajectory, we are set to warm the planet by four to six degrees Celsius. The climate scientist and emissions expert Kevin Anderson says that four degrees of warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.”
The problem is, even before Trump, no major economy was doing what was required. They were all still trying to have it all ways—introducing some solid green policies but then approving expanded fossil fuel extraction and new pipelines. It’s like eating lots of salad and a whole lot of junk food at the same time, and expecting to lose weight.
Trump’s collusion with the fossil fuel sector is the conspiracy hiding in plain sight. Within days of taking office, he pushed through the Dakota Access pipeline, cutting off an environmental review and against the powerful opposition of the Standing Rock Sioux. He’s cleared the way to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, which Obama rejected in part because of the climate impacts. He has issued an executive order to roll back Obama’s moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, and has already announced plans to expand oil and gas drilling on the Gulf Coast. He’s also killing
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That prospect strikes terror in the hearts of fossil fuel executives and in the governments of petro-states (like Russia), because it means that trillions of dollars’ worth of proven reserves—currently propping up share prices—could become worthless overnight.
So Trump’s rescue plan for the fossil fuel sector is multipronged: bury the evidence that climate change is happening by stopping research and gagging agencies; cut the programs that are tasked with coping with the real-world impacts of climate disruption; and remove all barriers to an acceleration of the very activities that are fueling the crisis—drilling for more oil and gas, mining and burning more coal.
There is one thing above all that is currently restraining fossil fuel companies from launching large new extraction projects, and it’s not a piece of legislation that Obama introduced and Trump can reverse. What’s holding them back is the price of oil and gas. As I write this in 2017, the price is much lower than when Obama took office, because there’s an oversupply—more oil and gas is available than consumers want. The reason price is such an issue for new projects is that the cheap and easy-to-access fossil fuels have been steadily running out, particularly in the US. So what’s left? Stuff
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As a result, we’ve seen a lot of companies pulling back from extreme energy projects. Fracking for oil and gas in the United States has cooled off, with devastating human costs: an estimated 170,000 oil and gas workers have lost their jobs after the 2014 price collapse. Investment in the Alberta tar sands dropped by an estimated 37 percent in the year following, and continues to fall. Shell pulled back from the Arctic and has sold most of its tar sands reserves. The French oil company Total has retreated from the tar sands as well. Even ExxonMobil has been forced to write off nearly 3.5
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So a very big question that needs answering is this: what is the Trump administration—aka Team ExxonMobil—going to do to achieve that? We are already seeing some policies that appear designed to drive up oil prices. For instance, Trump moved to eliminate the Obama-era requirement that vehicles become more fuel-efficient—which means more trips to the gas station for consumers. Trump’s budget plan, meanwhile, aimed to completely eliminate funding for new public transit projects, and kill funding for long-distance train services.
What I found is that when hard-core conservatives deny climate change, they are not just protecting the trillions in wealth that are threatened by climate action. They are also defending something even more precious to them: an entire ideological project—neoliberalism—which holds that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.
Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world’s elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US Right.
Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top—eventually. If it doesn’t work, and stubborn inequalities remain or worsen (as they invariably do), then according to this worldview, that must be the personal failing of the individuals and communities that are suffering.
The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall was interpreted as the signal to take the campaign global. With socialism in decline, there was seemingly no longer any need to soften capitalism’s edges anywhere.
Neoliberalism is a very profitable set of ideas, which is why I am always a little hesitant to describe it as an ideology. What it really is, at its core, is a rationale for greed. That’s what the American billionaire Warren Buffett meant when he made headlines a few years ago by telling CNN that “there’s been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won…the rich class.”
Because climate change, especially at this late date, can only be dealt with through collective action that sharply curtails the behavior of corporations such as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. It demands investments in the public sphere—in new energy grids, public transit and light rail, and energy efficiency—on a scale not seen since the Second World War. And that can only happen by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, the very people Trump is determined to shower with the most generous tax cuts, loopholes and regulatory breaks.
In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project.
What mainstream liberals have been saying for decades, by contrast, is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But the challenge is much more fundamental than that. It requires throwing out the neoliberal rulebook, and confronting the centrality of ever-expanding consumption in how we measure economic progress.
A great many conservatives are dealing with their fears about a changing and destabilizing world by attempting to force back the clock.
we also need to avoid repeating the same mistakes that have created the conditions for the rise of Trumpism and its counterparts around the world. And unfortunately, there’s some evidence that the only lesson a lot of establishment Democrats are learning is: don’t let Russians hack your e-mail.
