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

by Naomi Klein

But the Trumps seem unconcerned. A near-impenetrable sense of impunity—of being above the usual rules and laws—is a defining feature of this administration. Anyone who presents a threat to that impunity is summarily fired—just ask former FBI director James Comey.

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. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. “Beyond Vietnam,” 1967

Because the ground we were on before Trump was elected is the ground that produced Trump.

And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments.

Trump’s pitch has always been different. From the start, it was: I will turn you into a winner—and together we can crush the losers.

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.

Given that Trump ordered the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in combat before, and given that he did this just twelve weeks into his presidency and with no obvious provocation, there is little reason to hope he will be able to resist putting on the show of shows—the televised apocalyptic violence of a full-blown war, complete with its guaranteed blockbuster ratings.

There are many plots and intrigues swirling around Washington, most notoriously claims about the Trump team conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election outcome—and these are being investigated, as they should be. But make no mistake: Trump’s collusion with the fossil fuel sector is the conspiracy hiding in plain sight.

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.

Trump speaks directly to that economic panic, and, simultaneously, to the resentment felt by a large segment of white America about the changing face of their country, about positions of power and privilege increasingly being held by people who do not look like them. The

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.

I’ll return your power to you. I’ll make you a real man again. Free to grab women without asking all those boring questions. Oh, and the most potent part of Trump’s promise to his base: I will take away the competition from brown people, who will be deported or banned, and Black people, who will be locked up if they fight for their rights. In other words, he would put white men safely back on top once again.

A president who introduced a travel ban that, if it had not been blocked by the courts, would have barred Syrian migrants from entering the United States. A president who has said about Syrian children seeking asylum, “I can look in their faces and say ‘You can’t come.’ ”

Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather, possibly linked to climate change, and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow “free-market” travelers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future. And now Mike Pence is in a position to bring this vision to the entire United States.

the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11—nine days before Trump’s inauguration—in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said.

it’s clear that we need to do more than draw a line in the sand and say “no more.” Yes, we need to do that and we need to chart a credible and inspiring path to a different future. And that future cannot simply be where we were before Trump came along (aka the world that gave us Trump). It has to be somewhere we have never been before.

To help humanity answer its most pressing question: how do we live with the earth again, not against it?”

As we talked, that became a frame within which everything seemed to fit: the need for a shift from a system based on endless taking—from the earth and from one another—to a culture based on caretaking, the principle that when we take, we also take care and give back.

The key tools included: ending fossil fuel subsidies (worth about $775 billion globally); getting a fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax (which could raise $650 billion globally, according to the European Parliament); increasing royalties on fossil fuel extraction; raising income taxes on corporations and the wealthiest people (lots of room there—a one-percent billionaire’s tax alone could raise $45 billion globally, according to the United Nations); a progressive carbon tax (a $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries would raise an estimated $450 billion annually); and making cuts to military spending (if the military budgets of the top ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). To our chagrin, we neglected to include a call to shut down tax havens, perhaps the greatest potential revenue source of all.

The outpouring reminded me of a slogan I first heard in Argentina, during a raucous election campaign: “Our dreams don’t fit on your ballot.”

There is even a community of “Leapers” in prison: at a Connecticut detention facility for teenaged boys tried as adults, a group of incarcerated students has been exploring ways that a justice-based transition off fossil fuels could be part of a process that keeps young people like them out of prison.

The plans that are taking shape for defeating Trumpism wherever we live go well beyond finding a progressive savior to run for office and then offering that person our blind support. Instead, communities and movements are uniting to lay out the core policies that politicians who want their support must endorse.

If some of these impulses and stories seem hardwired inside us, it’s not because we’re terrible people. It’s because so many of us function within systems that are constantly telling us there are not enough resources for everyone to thrive, so we’d better elbow our way to the top, whatever the costs.

What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud by candidates who win millions of votes: free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows, demilitarize the police, prisons are no place for young people, refugees are welcome here, war makes us all less safe.

Just one last reminder: Trump’s disaster capitalists control a very powerful part of the US government—but they do not control everything. They do not control what cities and states do. They do not even control what Congress does a lot of the time. They certainly do not control what universities and faith institutions and unions do. They do not control what the courts do (yet). They do not control what other sovereign nations do. And they do not control what we do as individuals and in groups around the world.