No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

If there is a single, overarching lesson to be drawn from the foul mood rising around the world, it may be this: we should never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the appeal of wielding power over “the other,” be they migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, women, the other in any form. Especially during times of economic hardship, when a great many people have good reason to fear that the jobs that can support a decent life are disappearing for good.

Much of the rage directed at Hillary Clinton during the campaign came from a similarly primal place. Here was not just a female candidate, but a woman who identifies with and is a product of the movement for women’s liberation, and who did not package her quest for power in either cuteness or coyness.

One of the most chilling details about the men who surround Trump, and who support him most publicly in the media, is the number of them who have been accused of beating, harassing, or sexually abusing women.

Many of Trump’s voters were not primarily driven by “whitelash” or “malelash” sentiments. Plenty of them said they voted for Trump because they liked what he said about trade and jobs, or because they wanted to stick it to the “swamp” of DC elites. But there’s a problem with these stories. You cannot cast a ballot for a person who is openly riling up hatred based on race, gender, or physical ability unless, on some level, you think those issues aren’t important.

What really won it for Trump was how those losses in social status were layered on top of losses in basic economic security.

It’s also important to note that Trump’s base wasn’t mostly poor; it was solidly middle-income, with most of his voters earning between $50,000 and $200,000 a year (with a concentration at the lower end of that range). Since so many Trump voters are not destitute, some argue that their vote can’t be motivated by economic stress. But that misses an important factor. A CNN analysis of exit polls found that Trump won 77 percent of the vote among those who said that their financial situation was “worse today” than it had been four years earlier.

This is reflected in a marked rise in deaths among white, middle-aged Americans without college degrees, mainly from suicide, prescription drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses. And this is particular to whites: mortality rates for Black and Hispanic Americans in similar demographic brackets are falling.

On top of those losses, there are also the ground-shifting uncertainties associated with living in a changing country, a nation rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse, and where women are gaining more access to power. That’s part of progress toward equality, the result of hard-fought battles, but it does mean that white men are losing economic security (which everyone has a right to) and their sense of a superior status (which they never had a right to) at the same time.

In a decent society, people should feel entitled to those things. That’s human privilege. And yet those sorts of entitlements have been under vicious attack by the Right for four decades, to the extent that the word entitlements—referring to pensions and health care—is a slur in Washington, DC.

In other words, he would put white men safely back on top once again.

The power of that promise is part of why Trump’s election win was like a Bat-Signal for hatemongers of all kinds.

Which is why it’s short-sighted, not to mention dangerous, to call for liberals and progressives to abandon their focus on “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics and class—as if these factors could in any way be pried apart.

Except this is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw from the 2016 elections. Clinton’s failure was not one of messaging but of track record. Specifically, it was the stupid economics of neoliberalism, fully embraced by her, her husband, and her party’s establishment, that left Clinton without a credible offer to make to those white workers who had voted for Obama (twice) and decided, this time, to vote Trump. True, Trump’s plans weren’t credible, but at least they were different.

Clinton mocked her opponent’s “Trumped-up trickle-down economics,” but her own philosophy is what we might call “trickle-down identity politics”: tweak the system just enough to change the genders, colors, and sexual orientation of some of the people at the top, and wait for the justice to trickle down to everyone else. And it turns out that trickle-down works about as well in the identity sphere as it does in the economic one.

And yet this top-down approach to change, if it is not accompanied by bottom-up policies that address systemic issues such as crumbling schools and lack of access to decent housing, is not going to lead to real equality. Not even close.

According to the Urban Institute, between 2007 and 2010 the average wealth of white families fell by 11 percent (a huge amount), but Black families saw their wealth fall by 31 percent. In other words, Blacks and whites became more unequal during a period of tremendous symbolic advancements, not less.

“The Black political establishment, led by President Barack Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping Black children alive. The young people would have to do it themselves.” Similarly, while there are a great many women in positions of power—not enough, but substantially more than a generation ago—low-income women are working longer hours, often at multiple jobs, without security, just to pay the bills. (Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the States are women.) In the World Economic Forum’s annual global rankings on the economic gender gap, the US fell from the 28th spot in 2015 all the way down to 45th place in 2016.

In crucial states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Clinton drew 15 to 20 percent fewer Democratic voters than Barack Obama had in 2012. And that depressed progressive turnout is a big part of how Trump managed to eke out an electoral win (despite losing the popular vote).

So perhaps this is another lesson to draw from 2016. Fear of “the other” may be an animating force for many supporters of far-right parties, but “inclusion” of the other within an inherently unjust system will not be powerful enough to defeat those forces.

Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state–sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively “unseen” by European explorers—visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land—and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd “finders keepers” basis.

In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States—so why would it suddenly be today?

Every time these multiethnic coalitions have become powerful enough to threaten corporate power, white workers have been convinced that their real enemies are darker-skinned people stealing “their” jobs or threatening their neighborhoods.

And Trump was no small player in this hysteria. In 1989, after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park, he bought full-page ads in several New York daily papers calling for the return of the death penalty. The Central Park Five were later exonerated by DNA evidence, and their sentences were vacated. Trump refused to apologize or retract his claims.

White supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia have been the elite’s most potent defenses against genuine democracy.

We also know from history that white supremacist and fascist movements—though they may always burn in the background—are far more likely to turn into wildfires during periods of sustained economic hardship and national decline.

Western powers embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking for scapegoats or extreme ideologies.

irony here, because the IMF was created after World War II with the express mandate of preventing the kinds of economic punishment that fueled so much resentment in Germany after World War I. And yet it was an active part of the process that helped create the conditions for neo-fascist parties to gain ground in Greece, Belgium, France, Hungary, Slovakia, and so many other countries.

But the clincher, the union heads were clear, was that here, finally, was a president who had their backs on free trade.

Trump has made trade deals a signature issue for two reasons. The first, on full display that day at the White House, is that it’s a great way to steal votes from the Democrats.

The second reason is that Trump—who we know believes his own super-negotiator PR—has said he can negotiate better deals than his predecessors. But here’s the catch: by “better,” he doesn’t mean better for unionized workers, and certainly not better for the environment. He means better in the same way he always means better—better for him and his corporate empire, better for the bankers and oil executives who make up his administration.

He chose Andrew Puzder—a nomination that ultimately failed, but one so egregious that it’s worth recalling as a marker of Trump’s intentions. Puzder is the CEO of a restaurant empire that includes the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., and he is widely considered to be among the most abusive employers in the country.

As Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, put it, “for those who trusted Trump’s pledge to make NAFTA ‘much better’ for working people, it’s a punch in the face.”

Putting a CEO like Ross in charge of trade is just one more example of the corporate coup—cutting out any pretense of a neutral government mediator and instead placing corporations directly in charge of the final stage of the decimation of the public sphere and the public interest.

And yet the earlier question remains: how could Trump’s transparently absurd posture as a champion of the working man find a ready audience with a not-insubstantial part of the US labor movement in the first place? A large part of the answer has to do with the fact that much of this political battleground has been ceded by liberals to the Right.

At its core, the movement was about deep democracy, from local to global, and it stood in opposition to what we used to call “corporate rule”—a frame more relevant today than ever. Our objection was obviously not to trade; cultures have always traded goods across borders, and always will. We objected to the way transnational institutions were using trade deals to globalize pro-corporate policies that were extremely profitable for a small group of players but which were steadily devouring so much of what used to be public and commonly held: seeds, water rights, public health care, and much more.

We were arguing for a model of trade that would start with the imperative to protect people and the planet. That was crucial then—it’s urgent now.

After September 11, 2001, we suddenly found ourselves under attack from politicians and media commentators equating rowdy anticorporate street demonstrations (and yes, there had been battles with the police and broken store windows) with the deranged forces that had staged the attacks on the World Trade Center. It was a vile comparison, entirely without basis. But it didn’t matter.

But after September 11, large parts of the coalition got spooked by the “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric. The nonprofits who rely on large foundations feared losing their funding and withdrew, as did some key unions. Almost overnight, people went back to their single-issue silos, and this remarkable (if imperfect) cross-sectoral alliance, which had brought together such a diversity of people under a pro-democracy umbrella, virtually disappeared.

This is important to remember because there’s a real risk today of repeating those mistakes—of coming together around lowest-common-denominator demands such as “Impeach Trump” or “Elect Democrats” and, in the process, losing our focus on the conditions and politics that allowed Trump’s rise and are fueling the growth of far-right parties around the world. One

A 2017 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that Mexico’s poverty rate has risen since the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, with 20 million additional people now living in poverty—a major factor pushing Mexican migration to the United States. Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, white workers grew progressively more pissed off at having their voices ignored. This opened the space for demagogues like Trump to step in and direct workers’ rage away from plutocrats like him, who had profited so lavishly from the outsourcing opportunities enabled by these deals, and at Mexican migrants instead, victims of the same policies that were hollowing out their communities, the very same bad deals.

offering an illusion of control through bashing immigrants, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women.

But the hard truth is that after September 11, large parts of the progressive side of the political spectrum got spooked, and that left the economic-populist space open to abuse. Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

The good news is that the progressive anti-free-trade coalition has finally started to revive in the past couple of years.

If Sanders had run against Trump on that message, he might well have peeled away some of the white and Latino workers who ended up voting Republican in 2016.

This phenomenon was most evident in the United States, in the 2016 elections, when despite unprecedented wall-to-wall coverage, despite the presence of a flamboyant and dangerous demagogue in the race, and despite the chance to make history by voting in the first woman president, approximately 90 million eligible voting-age Americans shrugged and decided to stay home instead. Far more would-be voters chose not to vote—roughly 40 percent—than chose to cast a ballot for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, who each got roughly 25 percent of total eligible voters. That is a staggering level of disengagement in a democracy.

For two decades now, elite liberals have been looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems we used to address with collective action and a strong public sector—a phenomenon sometimes called “philanthrocapitalism.”

The Gates Foundation alone is worth $40 billion, making it the largest charitable organization in the world.

And it’s worth remembering that Gates was not always seen as a world savior. Indeed, in the 1990s, Gates was widely regarded as a corporate villain, known for exploitative employment practices and for building what looked like a predatory software monopoly. Then, with Flash-like speed, he reinvented himself as a global superhero,

The power of the Davos class exploded in the 1990s, with US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair as charter members. Once out of office, both Blair and Clinton continued their involvement. The Clinton Foundation established the annual Clinton Global Initiative, a kind of “Davos on the Hudson” featuring a continuous parade of oligarchs who, rather than pay their taxes at a fair rate, publicly shared their plans to fix the world out of the goodness of their hearts.

Trump didn’t run with the Davos crowd (indeed, he tapped into the rage against it). And many from that glamorous, liberal-leaning world are horrified by the Trump presidency. Yet the precedents set by mountaintop do-gooderism are part of the reason it became fathomable for Trump to run in the first place, and for millions of Americans to vote to hand over their government directly to a man whose sole qualification for the job was his wealth.