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

by Naomi Klein

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. They must have “a culture of crime,” say, or lack a “work ethic,” or perhaps it’s absentee fathers, or some other racially tinged excuse for why government policy and public funds should never be used to reduce inequalities, improve lives, or address structural crises.

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.

“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.

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. (Despite his strong critique, Coates publicly said he would be voting for Sanders in the primary as “the best option that we have in the race.”)

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.”

‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.’ ”

As the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously observed, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”)