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

by Naomi Klein

Perhaps the only person who would have more to gain from this kind of instability is Vladimir Putin, head of a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and its second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia).

According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; Russia’s currency, the ruble, depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.

Trump has surrounded himself with masters of chaos—from Tillerson to Mnuchin.

So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.

Dodd–Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.

Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008.

There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming,

What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income—precisely

California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves about a billion dollars a year through this program—a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.

But this misses the point: what everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come.

What matters is that not one of them appears to be worried about climate change. The early catastrophic events are playing out mostly in poor parts of the world, where the people are not white. And when disasters do strike wealthy Western nations, there are growing numbers of ways for the wealthy to buy their relative safety.

In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity.

But the government shrugs. After all, they don’t run the camps—private, for-profit contractors do (of course).

The irony is particularly acute because many of the conflicts driving migration today have already been exacerbated by climate change.

The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has mapped the targets of Western drone strikes and found an “astounding coincidence.” The strikes are intensely concentrated in regions with an average of just 200 millimeters (7.8 inches) of rainfall per year—so little that even slight climate disruption can push them into drought. In other words, we are bombing the driest places on the planet, which also happen to be the most destabilized.

The only way to justify such untenable levels of inequality is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate,

So the problem after 9/11 was not that the United States had no experience of how shocking events can be harnessed to attack democracy and human rights. The problem, rather, was that these past traumatic events, while very well understood within the communities impacted, were insufficiently understood more broadly: they are not part of a shared national narrative that could have helped all Americans see the difference between reasonable security measures and leaders taking advantage of fear to advance opportunistic agendas.

Though Trump and his supporters have tried their best to use fear—of Muslims, of Mexicans, of violent “ghettos”—to control and divide the population, the tactic has backfired repeatedly.

Then, the next day, came the women’s marches: with some six hundred cities participating, this appears to have been the largest coordinated protest in US history, with an estimated 4.2 million people on the streets.

On a larger scale, hundreds of cities and counties (joined by schools, campuses, churches, and restaurants) have stepped forward to declare themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants the Trump administration would seek to deport.

That’s why the American Civil Liberties Union, which raised nearly $80 million through online donations in the first three months after election day,

Day Without Immigrants,

With key scientific research mysteriously disappearing from government websites, there’s been a concerted international effort to save it from the memory hole.

What has stood out in this wave of early resistance is how the barriers defining who is and who is not an “activist” or an “organizer” are completely breaking down. People are organizing mass events who have never organized anything political before. A great many are discovering that, whatever their field of expertise, whether they are lawyers or restaurant workers, they have crucial skills to share in this emerging network of resistance.

So, in addition to the highly visible campaigns and demonstrations, there has also been a surge of popular education. For many, a first step is relearning how democracy works.

Planned Parenthood reported an astonishing 260,000 donors in the month after the election,

All of these acts of solidarity and expressions of unity reflect the fact that, after decades of “siloed” politics, more and more people understand that we can only beat Trumpism in cooperation with one another—no one movement can win on its own.

Thousands of Greeks opened their homes to refugees, millions of home-cooked meals were delivered to refugee camps, free health care was provided in community-run clinics,

But in the vast majority of cases, it wasn’t enough—the economic punishments kept coming.

But the failures in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash were starkest in the United States, because of the remarkable number of factors that seemed aligned in favor of transformative, rather than incremental, change.

Obama had the electoral mandate for real change, he had a virtual blank check to design a stimulus package, and he had an opportunity to impose much-needed changes on two failing sectors of the US economy—the banks and the auto companies.

Even after all their failures, the attitude in Washington was still: the banks know best, the auto companies know best, our job is just to get these industries on their feet as quickly as possible so they can get back to a gently tweaked version of business as usual.

The fact that this moment passed Americans by is not a failure that can be pinned on the Democrats alone. During Obama’s first years in office, most progressive organizations—relieved to finally be rid of Bush and flattered to have the ear of the governing party for the first time in a decade—confused access with power. As a result, the kind of outside pressure that has leveraged major policy victories in the past was largely MIA during Obama’s first term.

In the United States, after the carnage of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Blacks and their radical allies pushed for economic justice and greater social rights.

Most significantly, it was only thanks to the collective response from below to the Great Crash of 1929 that the New Deal became possible.

In 1969, there was an oil spill in Santa Barbara, which coated California’s beautiful beaches, and it was something like a Great Crash for the environment—a shock millions responded to by demanding fundamental change.

They were responses to crises that unfolded in times when people dared to dream big, out loud, in public—explosions of utopian imagination.

The New Deal, it is always worth remembering, was adopted by President Roosevelt at a time of such progressive and Left militancy that its programs—radical by today’s standards—appeared at the time to be the only way to prevent full-scale revolution.

(If you didn’t learn this in history class, it may not be a coincidence. As the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously observed, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”)

It is this imaginative capacity, the ability to envision a world radically different from the present, that has been largely missing since the cry of No first began echoing around the world in 2008. In the West, there is little popular memory of any other kind of economic system.

But what was too often missing was a clear and captivating vision of the world beyond that no.

According to a report from the human rights watchdog Global Witness, “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries…. Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” About 40 percent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.

So many of the crises we are facing are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable.

it’s time to unite around a common agenda that can directly battle the political poison spreading through our countries. No is not enough—it’s time for some big, bold yeses to rally around.

After all, there couldn’t be a clearer indication that our current system is failing: if business as usual is allowed to continue, ever-larger expanses of our planet will cease to be hospitable to human life.

The urgency of the climate crisis also gives us something that can be very helpful for getting big things done: a firm, unyielding science-based deadline.

With the exception of increasingly common monster storms, it’s slow and grinding, making the warming dangerously easy to push away into our subconscious, behind more obvious daily emergencies.

What we need are integrated solutions, concrete ideas for how to radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.

Many of the groups and people in the room talked about how, while they had formed coalitions before, most had been coalitions of “no”—no to a lousy pro-corporate trade deal, no to a punishing austerity agenda, no to a particularly egregious politician, no to oil pipelines or fracking.

One such theme was that we have a system based on limitless taking and extracting, on maximum grabbing.