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

by Naomi Klein

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 White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing first family free of major scandals for eight years. And these were all good things. But, too often, these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians, or the deportations of roughly 2.5 million immigrants without documents during Obama’s term, or his broken promises to close Guantanamo or shut down George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”

Acknowledging that Trump’s presidency is being produced like a reality show in no way diminishes the danger it represents—quite the opposite. People have already died in this show—in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in the United States—and many more will meet the same fate before it goes off the air. In March alone, a UK-based monitoring group recorded allegations of more than 1,500 civilian deaths from US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, higher than ever recorded under Obama. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show. Blood-sport reality TV is, after all, a science-fiction cliché. Think of The Hunger Games, with its reality TV spectacle in which all the players die but one. Or The Running Man, another film about a televised event where the stakes are life or death. (Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, reportedly described the bombing of Syria as Mar-a-Lago’s “after-dinner entertainment.”)

If there is one real aspect to the festival of fakery that is the Trump presidency, it’s the hunger at the heart of it. The sheer insatiability. Trump likes to talk about how he doesn’t need more money—he has more than enough. Yet he just can’t help selling his products at every opportunity, can’t stop working every angle. It’s as if he suffers from some obscure modern illness—let’s call it a brand personality disorder—that causes him to slip into brand promotion almost involuntarily. He’ll be giving a political speech and then, suddenly, he’s talking about how beautiful and expensive the marble is at a Trump hotel, or gratuitously telling his interviewer, when discussing how he ordered a lethal bombing of Syria, that the chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago is “the most beautiful…you’ve ever seen.” That unquenchable hunger, that hollowness at the center, does speak to something real—to a profound emptiness at the heart of the very culture that spawned Donald Trump. And that hollowness is intimately connected to the rise of lifestyle brands, the shift that gave Trump an ever-expanding platform. The rise of the hollow brands—selling everything, owning next to nothing—happened over decades when the key institutions that used to provide individuals with a sense of community and shared identity were in sharp decline: tightly knit neighborhoods where people looked out for one another; large workplaces that held out the promise of a job for life; space and time for ordinary people to ma...

it’s always worth remembering: at the heart of this cycle is that very powerful force—the human longing for community and connection, which simply refuses to die. And that means there is still hope: if we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we’re at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

As parents, we can sometimes make the mistake of exposing kids too early to all the threats and dangers facing the natural world. The first book about nature that a lot of children read is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, which is all about pollution and beautiful places being turned into garbage and all the animals dying and disappearing and choking. It’s really scary. I read it to Toma when he was two and watched the terror cross his face. And I thought, “No, this is completely wrong.” Now we read stories about fast-talking squirrels and books that celebrate nature’s beauty and wonder. Even if I know these books are about species that are on the brink of extinction, Toma doesn’t need to worry about that yet. I figure that my job is to try to create as many positive experiences as possible that will attach him to the natural world. You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it.

These parts of the Reef, the ones that are neither bleached nor dead, are only a fraction of the whole, but they are still glorious—a riot of life, of electric-colored coral and fish, sea turtles and sharks swimming by. We didn’t take Toma on the boat when we filmed the dead and bleached parts of the Reef. And it was a graveyard. It was as if a cosmic switch had been flipped and suddenly one of the most beautiful places on earth had been turned into one of the ugliest. The coral bones were covered in a goo of decaying life—a brown goo. You just wanted to get away from there. Our wetsuits stank of death.

I wanted to try to show the disaster through Toma’s eyes too. Because one of the most unjust aspects of climate disruption (and there are many) is that our actions as adults today will have their most severe impact on the lives of generations yet to come, as well as kids alive today who are too young to impact policy—kids like Toma and his friends, and their generation the world over. These children have done nothing to create the crisis, but they are the ones who will deal with the most extreme weather—the storms and droughts and fires and rising seas—and all the social and economic stresses that will flow as a result. 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. It is a form of theft, of violence—what the author and theorist Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” A clean, vibrant planet is the birthright of all living beings. That’s why the Great Barrier Reef is classified as a World Heritage Site. It belongs to the world, and it is dying on our watch. I realized that the story I wanted to tell is about intergenerational theft and intergenerational justice. That’s why I decided to put Toma on camera for the first time; I was reluctant, but I just couldn’t tell that story without him. By the end of the day, we were all completely wiped out. We had seen so much death, so much loss, but my son had also had this special experience. That night, tucking him into ...

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 fossil fuels.” He also wrote that “man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” That was in 1978.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a powerful idea that sadly doesn’t work for the climate crisis. The wealthy governments of the world have procrastinated for so long, and made the problem so much worse in the meantime, that the arc has to bend very, very fast now—or the shot at justice is gone for good. We are almost at midnight on the climate clock.

We have so far warmed the planet by just one degree Celsius, and from that, we are already seeing dramatic results: the mass coral die-off, balmy Arctic weather leading to severe ice loss, the breaking apart of Antarctic ice sheets. 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.” That is why governments came together in Paris and drew up an agreement to make their best efforts to get off this dangerous course, and try to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees, pursuing efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees. The high end of that temperature target represents double the warming we have already experienced, so it’s by no means safe.

For many years, I wondered why some people were so determined to deny global warming. It’s strange at first glance. Why would you work so hard to deny the scientific facts that have been affirmed by 97 percent of climate scientists—facts whose effects we see all around us, with more confirmation in the news we consume every day? That question led me on a journey that informed my book This Changes Everything—and I think some of what I discovered when writing that book can help us make sense of the centrality of climate vandalism to the Trump administration. 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. Neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the market or the decisions of individual consumers. It is probably best summarized by another of Reagan’s famous phrases, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The primary tools of this project are all too familiar: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sphere, and low taxes paid for by cuts to public services, and all of this locked in under corporate-friendly trade deals. It’s the same recipe everywhere, regardless of context, history, or the hopes and dreams of the people who live there. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist of the World Bank in 1991, summed up the ethos: “Spread the truth—the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” (Which is why I sometimes call neoliberalism “McGovernment.”) 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. As Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative.” (Another way of thinking about this is that neoliberalism is simply capitalism without competition, or capitalism lying on the couch in its undershirt saying, “What are you going to do, leave me?”) 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.

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. That’s why the Right is in a rebellion against the physical world, against science (which is what prompted hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world to participate in the March for Science in April 2017, collectively defending a principle that really shouldn’t need defending: that knowing as much as possible about our world is a good thing). But there is a reason why science has become such a battle zone—because it is revealing again and again that neoliberal business as usual leads to a species-threatening catastrophe. 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.

Global warming really does have radical progressive implications. If it’s real—and it manifestly is—then the oligarch class cannot continue to run riot without rules. Stopping them is now a matter of humanity’s collective survival. If we fail, the death I saw at the Great Barrier Reef will spread to all corners of our collective home in ways we can scarcely imagine.

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.

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. That the lives of the people being put in tangible danger by this rhetoric (and the policies that flow from it) matter less than your life and the lives of people who look more like you. You just can’t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice those other categories of people for your (hoped-for) gain. To put it bluntly, a vote for Trump might not reflect active hatred, but there is still, at best, a troubling indifference behind the act.

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. In other words, they may have been doing well compared with the country’s average, but many had lost ground. And indeed the losses began long before that.

because many of Trump’s blue-collar voters had a notably better deal until fairly recently—able to access well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lives—these losses appear to come as more of a shock. 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. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the Princeton economists who noticed this trend dating back to 1999 and authored a landmark paper on what they term “deaths of despair,” explain the discrepancy as coming down to different prior experiences and expectations, or “the failure of life to turn out as expected.” Another way of thinking about it is: when a building starts to collapse, it’s the people on the higher floors who have further to fall—that’s just physics.

To a terrifying degree, skin color and gender conformity are determining who is physically safe in the hands of the state, who is at risk from vigilante violence, who can express themselves without constant harassment, who can cross a border without terror, and who can worship without fear.

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. Similarly, if there was a problem with her focus on gender, sexuality, and racial identity, it was that Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.” So, yes to marriage equality and abortion access and transgender bathrooms, but forget about the right to housing, the right to a wage that supports a family (Clinton resisted the calls for a $15 minimum wage), the universal right to free health care, or anything else that requires serious redistribution of wealth from top to bottom and would mean challenging the neoliberal playbook. On the campaign trail, 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 ...

As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, writes: “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.”

While white Trump voters responded to their precariousness by raging at the world, many traditional liberals seem to have responded by tuning out. When Hillary Clinton called out identifiable groups at every rally, declaring that she would “stand up” for each of them, it was too tepid an offering to build the ground-swell of support she needed. So while white identity politics pumped up Trump’s base, trickle-down identity politics fell flat for his opponent. 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).

we are allowing conditions eerily similar to those in the 1930s to be re-created today. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (known as the “troika”) have forced country after country to accept “shock therapy”–style reforms in exchange for desperately needed bailout funds. To countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and even France, they said: “Sure, we’ll bail you out, but only in exchange for your abject humiliation. Only in exchange for you giving up control over your economic affairs, only if you delegate all key decisions to us, only if you privatize large parts of your economy, including parts of your economy that are seen as central to your identity, like your mineral wealth. Only if you accept cuts to salaries and pensions and health care.” There is a bitter 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. Our current financial system is spreading economic humiliation all over the world—and it’s having the precise effects that the economist and diplomat John Maynard Keynes warned of a century ago, when he wrote that if the world imposed punishin...

the reduction of the current crisis to just one or two factors at the exclusion of all else won’t get us any closer to understanding how to defeat these forces now or the next time out. If we cannot become just a little bit curious about how all these elements—race, gender, class, economics, history, culture—have intersected with one another to produce the current crisis, we will, at best, be stuck where we were before Trump won. And that was not a safe place. Because already, before Trump, we had a culture that treats both people and planet like so much garbage. A system that extracts lifetimes of labor from workers and then discards them without protection. That treats millions of people, excluded from economic opportunity, as refuse to be thrown away inside prisons. That treats government as a resource to be mined for private wealth, leaving wreckage behind. That treats the land, water, and air that sustain all of life as little more than a bottomless sewer.

bottom line; truer than ever in 2025 during Trump 2

The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public.” I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.

any opposition that is serious about taking on Trump, or other far-right forces like him around the world, must embrace the task of telling a new history of how we ended up here, in this perilous moment. A history that compellingly shows the role played by the politics of division and separation. Racial divisions. Class divisions. Gender divisions. Citizenship divisions. And a false division between humans and the natural world. Only then will it become possible to truly come together to win the world we need.

mic drop

The long list of gifts the Trump administration has already handed out to corporate America makes it clear that Trump’s strategy for “making America great again” by reviving manufacturing is to make American manufacturing cheap again. Without all those pesky regulations, with far lower corporate tax rates, with Trump’s all-out assault on environmental protections, American workers will indeed be closer to competing on cost with workers in low-wage countries like Mexico.

In the late 1990s through to the early 2000s, from London to Genoa, to Mumbai, to Buenos Aires, Quebec City and Miami, there could not be a high-level gathering to advance the neoliberal economic agenda without counterdemonstrations. That’s what happened in Seattle during a summit of the World Trade Organization, where the city was completely shut down by protesters, derailing the meetings. It happened a few months later at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, and at summits to push the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a deal that would have stretched from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. And this movement was no small thing: by July 2001, roughly 300,000 people were on the streets of Genoa during a G8 meeting. Unlike today’s hypernationalist right-wing movements that rail against “globalism,” our movement was proudly international and internationalist, using the novelty of a still-young Internet to organize easily across national borders, online and face to face. Finding common ground in how those deals were increasing inequality and looting the public sphere in all our countries, we called for open borders for people, the liberation of medicines, seeds, and crucial technologies from restrictive patent protections, and far more controls over corporations.

wouldn't it be great to get back here

One of the early fights that typified what was at stake involved the Bolivian city of Cochabamba and the American corporation Bechtel. As part of the push to privatize the city’s services, Bechtel won a contract to run the local water system. As a result, prices for this most essential of services soared, and it was even deemed illegal to collect rainwater without special permission. Residents of Cochabamba rose up in what became known as “the Water War” and threw Bechtel out of the country. But then Bechtel turned around and sued Bolivia for $50 million in damages and lost revenue. So even when the people reclaimed their democratic rights over this corporation, they were still vulnerable to brutal claims in trade court. Which is why we saw trade policy as such a core fight between democracy and oligarchy. Anyone who has paid attention during Trump’s first months in office, or seen who he has surrounded himself with, knows that he is not going to reverse these trends, but accelerate them.

Our movement had always been a very big tent—a “movement of movements,” as we called it (a phrase that has come back into the lexicon). 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 left a vacuum for Trump and far-right parties in Europe to step in, exploit the justified rage at loss of control to unaccountable transnational institutions, direct it toward immigrants and Muslims and anyone else who makes an easy target, and take the project of corporate rule into new and uncharted waters. Many stayed active in this period and joined other broad coalitions, but by comparison these were thin and tactical: “Defeat Bush,” “Stop the War.” The deeper analysis of the global economic forces we were all up against regardless of which party was in power was largely lost.

shocked out of the way

In Europe—particularly in Germany, France, and Belgium—there has been a big recent surge of unions and environmentalists coming together to oppose corporate trade deals with the United States and Canada. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, came out powerfully against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, slamming it as “part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs; undercutting worker rights; dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety and financial laws; and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system.” 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. But Sanders didn’t run against Trump—Hillary Clinton did. And with her long history of both backing and personally negotiating precisely these sorts of deals, she had no credibility when she criticized them on the campaign trail. Whenever she tried, it became one more opportunity to paint her as a typical shifty politician.

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.” Billionaire CEOs and celebrities—Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and always, for some reason, Bono—are treated less like normal people who are gifted in their fields and happen to be good at making a great deal of money, and more like demigods. Business Insider ran a listicle in 2011 headlined “10 Ways Bill Gates Is Saving the World”—a perfect distillation of the enormous powers and responsibilities being delegated to, and projected upon, this tiny clique and their charitable foundations.

the Tony stark effect

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, one who could single-handedly fix the most intractable of social crises. Never mind whether Gates has any specific expertise in the areas in question, or that many of the Gates Foundation’s silver-bullet fixes have backfired badly. Gates and his fellow world-saving billionaires are part of what has come to be known as “the Davos class,” named for the annual World Economic Summit held at the top of a mountain in Davos, Switzerland. This is the hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. At Davos’s 2017 summit, for example, Shakira spoke about her charitable work on education in Colombia, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver discussed his plan to fight diabetes and obesity. Gates featured prominently, as always, announcing with other partners a new $460-million fund to fight the spread of infectious disease. 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 C...

Trump’s assertion that he knows how to fix America because he’s rich is nothing more than an uncouth, vulgar echo of a dangerous idea we have been hearing for years: that Bill Gates can fix Africa. Or that Richard Branson and Michael Bloomberg can solve climate change.

The divide between the Davos class and everyone else has been widening since the 1980s. But for a lot of people, the breaking point came with the 2008 financial crisis. After forcing decades of grinding austerity on people, Treasury secretaries and finance ministers and chancellors of the exchequer suddenly found trillions of dollars to rescue the banks; people witnessed their governments printing vast sums of money. They had given up so much—pensions, wages, decent schools—when in fact, contrary to what Margaret Thatcher claimed, there were alternatives. All of a sudden it turned out that governments can do all kinds of things to interfere in the market, and have seemingly unlimited resources with which to help you out if only you are rich enough. At that moment, everyone on earth saw that they had been lied to.

defeating the rising pseudo-populist Right is not just a matter of electoral strategy, not just about finding the right candidates. It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place.

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for US president I have ever openly backed. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with candidate endorsements. I made an exception in 2016 because, for the first time in my voting life, there was a candidate inside the Democratic Party primaries who was speaking directly to the triple crises of neoliberalism, economic inequality, and climate change. The fact that his campaign caught fire in that context, where he could not be smeared as a spoiler or vote-splitter (though many tried anyway), is what made his campaign different. Bernie was not a protest candidate; once he pulled off an early upset by winning New Hampshire, the game was on. It was suddenly clear that, contrary to all received wisdom (including my own), Sanders had a shot at beating Hillary Clinton and becoming the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. In the end, he carried more than twenty states, with 13 million votes. For a self-described democratic socialist, that represents a seismic shift in the political map.

Bernie was incredibly well suited to this moment of popular outrage and rejection of establishment politics. He was able to speak directly to the indignation over legalized political corruption, but from a progressive perspective—with genuine warmth and without personal malice. That’s rare. He championed policies that would have reined in the banks and made education affordable again. He railed against the injustice that the bankers had never been held accountable. And, after a lifetime in politics, he was untainted by corruption scandals. That’s even more rare. Precisely because Bernie is about as far as you can get from the polished world of celebrity reality TV, it would have been hard to find a better foil for Trump and the excesses of the Mar-a-Lago set.

two months into Trump’s term, a Fox News poll found that Sanders had the highest net favorability rating of any politician in the country. The reason it’s worth going over these facts is that when a candidate like that presents him or herself, and when that candidate proves that, with the right backing and support, they could conceivably win, it’s worth understanding what stood in the way—so that the mistakes aren’t repeated. Because in 2016, there was—almost—a transformative option on the ballot, and there could actually be one next time.

probably never again after 2024...

For me, the tragedy of Trump is not only that the United States is now led by a man who represents the worst of all that the culture is capable of, all of it bundled into one human being. It’s that the country was within reach of the best and most hopeful political possibility to emerge in my lifetime, imperfect as Sanders is, and just as the climate clock was about to strike midnight.

THIS

The hostility of so many powerful US liberals to Bernie Sanders—and the determination to hold him back when he was on a winning streak—was both troubling and revealing. Because we so often hear that while they personally support bolder policies to fight inequality, those policies aren’t worth championing because the American public is too conservative, too pro-capitalist, and would never support them. So they back establishment candidates in the name of pragmatism—choosing the person with the best chance of winning against Republicans. Yet Bernie showed that positions previously dismissed as too radical for anything but the fringe Left—such as universal public health care and breaking up the banks and forgiving student debt and free college tuition and keeping fossil fuels in the ground and getting to 100 percent renewable energy—were wildly popular in the most capitalist country on earth, supported by millions of people. He showed that transformational change was not a pipe dream after all. On the other hand, what was considered the “safe” choice—Hillary Clinton—turned out to be a very dangerous choice.

Though I did endorse Bernie, I recognize that there were legitimate reasons why many people of color and women made a different choice. Though Clinton thought her nods to identity politics could substitute for substantial economic change, it often appeared as if Bernie thought that economics could paper over the unique needs and histories of Black people, women, and other traditionally marginalized groups. Yes, he faced unfair smears in this regard. But the more important lesson is that without Bernie’s weaknesses on race and gender, he could have won, no matter how hard the Democratic Party establishment tried to hold him back.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in the Atlantic, pointed out that when it came to confronting that legacy, the boldness and radicalism Sanders displayed when taking on Wall Street suddenly petered out. Asked whether he supported some form of reparations for slavery, he dismissed the idea as politically impractical and unnecessarily “divisive,” saying that big investments in communities of color would have the same effect. But as Coates rightly pointed out, the whole point of Sanders’s candidacy was to push the envelope of what is considered politically possible—so where was that same boldness when it came to racial equality? “The spectacle of a socialist candidate opposing reparations as ‘divisive’ (there are few political labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only rivalled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist,” Coates wrote.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, came out strongly against Clinton during the primaries, arguing that her track record on criminal justice and welfare meant she did not deserve the Black vote. But she also chose not to publicly endorse Sanders. The most urgent message of the 2016 election, she told me, is: “If progressives think they can win in the long run without engaging meaningfully with Black folks and taking racial history more seriously, they better get Elon Musk on speed dial and start planning their future home on Mars, because this planet will be going up in smoke.”

Trump thundered: All is hell. And Clinton answered: All is well—we just need a few minor tweaks here and there to make it more inclusive. “Love trumps Hate” was Clinton’s final slogan. But love alone wasn’t up to the job; it needed something stronger to help it out, something like justice.

In the absence of a progressive alternative, Trump had a free hand to connect with skeptical voters by saying: I feel your pain. You have been screwed. On the campaign trail, he directed some of the rage at the corporations who had pushed for these policies—but that’s mostly forgotten now. Most of his wrath was saved for the various racist bogeymen he conjured up: the immigrants coming to rape you, the Muslims coming to blow you up, the Black activists who don’t respect our men in uniform, and the Black president who messed everything up.

The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump’s victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy, while directing popular rage where it belongs: at those who have benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

it’s worth remembering that radical political and economic change is our only hope of avoiding radical change to our physical world. Whatever happens, the next few years are going to be rocky. So before we focus on how to win the world we want and need, we first have to get ready for the next wave of crises coming from the Trump White House, shocks that could well reverberate the world over.

History is important. If you don’t know history it’s as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it. —HOWARD ZINN You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, 2004 documentary