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

by Naomi Klein

The main pillars of Trump’s political and economic project are: the deconstruction of the regulatory state; a full-bore attack on the welfare state and social services (rationalized in part through bellicose racial fearmongering and attacks on women for exercising their rights); the unleashing of a domestic fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science and the gagging of large parts of the government bureaucracy); and a civilizational war against immigrants and “radical Islamic terrorism” (with ever-expanding domestic and foreign theaters).

In 2002, George W. Bush threw a ninetieth-birthday party at the White House for the man who was the intellectual architect of that war on the public sphere, the radical free-market economist Milton Friedman.

He is the entirely predictable, indeed clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and trends that should have been stopped long ago.

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

We are seeing a surge of authoritarian, xenophobic, far-right politics—from Marine Le Pen in France, to Narendra Modi in India, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to the UK Independence Party, to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and all of their counterparts (some explicitly neo-fascist) threatening to take power around the world.

What Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—the latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more.

According to NBC News in December 2016, Trump’s picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including “special adviser” Carl Icahn, who’s worth more than $15 billion on his own). Moreover, the key figures who populate Trump’s cabinet are more than just a representative sample of the ultrarich. To an alarming extent, he has collected a team of individuals who made their personal fortunes by knowingly causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and to the planet itself, often in the midst of crisis. It almost appears to be some sort of job requirement.

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.