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

by Naomi Klein

Across the industrialized world, pressure from social movements created the conditions for programs like the New Deal, featuring ambitious investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation systems, housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today. (Just as the wreckage of the Second World War provided another such catalyst.)

Utopian socialist fiction, including Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, topped the best-seller lists (in sharp contrast to today, when it is classic dystopian fiction—George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here—that has reappeared on best-seller lists since Trump’s inauguration).

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. And this was no idle threat. When Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, ran for governor of California in 1934, it was something like the Bernie Sanders campaign of its day. Sinclair was a champion of a more left-wing version of the New Deal, arguing that the key to ending poverty was full state funding of workers’ cooperatives.

Which is partially why the movements that did emerge—from Europe’s “movement of the squares” to Occupy Wall Street and even Egypt’s revolution—were very clear on their “no”: no to the greed of the bankers, no to austerity, and, in Egypt, no to dictatorship. But what was too often missing was a clear and captivating vision of the world beyond that no.

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.

Because, as Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”

finding and strengthening the threads that run through our various issues and movements—is our most pressing task. That out of those connections would emerge a larger and more fired-up progressive coalition than we have seen in decades, one capable of taking on not only the symptoms of a failed system, but maybe even the system itself. Our goal, and it wasn’t modest, was to try to map not just the world we don’t want but the one we want instead.

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.

So we decided to deliberately extend the traditional definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said: “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.” It was an attempt, in short, to show how to replace an economy built on destruction with an economy built on love.

So we decided that we didn’t want to be buying renewable power from ExxonMobil and Shell, even if they were offering it—we wanted that power generation to be owned by the public, by communities, or by energy cooperatives.

it strikes me that it is about as far away from Trump’s “how can I screw you” art of the deal as you can get. No one got everything they wanted, or even sought to. There were serious disagreements, but to arrive at the final document, everyone made concessions; nobody went to the wall. This give-and-take reflected the principles and values that emerged from our discussions: if the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care—because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all. And that’s the antithesis of bullying one another into submission.

We also agreed on a name: The Leap Manifesto—A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another. We chose leap because it raises a defiant middle finger to centrist incrementalism—the kind that calls itself “cautious” but is in fact exquisitely dangerous at this late stage in the climate crisis. The gap between where we are and where we need to go is so great, and the time left is so short, that small steps are not going to cut it—we need to leap.

Yes. This is who we want to be. Let’s push our politicians. Cautious centrism be damned.

It’s becoming possible to see a genuine path forward—new political formations that, from their inception, will marry the fight for economic fairness with a deep analysis of how racism and misogyny are used as potent tools to enforce a system that further enriches the already obscenely wealthy on the backs of both people and the planet.

The people’s platforms are starting to lead—and the politicians will have to follow.

But in so many ways explored in these pages, Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination—the logical end point—of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.

Specifically, the horror of recognition that we feel when we read effective dystopian fiction or watch good dystopian films. All stories of this genre take current trends and follow them to their obvious conclusion—and then use that conclusion to hold up a mirror and ask: Do you like what you see?

It’s not enough to superficially challenge him as an individual, foul and alarmingly ignorant though he may be. We have to confront the deep-seated trends that rewarded him and exalted him until he became the most powerful person in the world.

The persistence of these other stories should remind us that, while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story.

the part that sees other people doing similar work not as potential allies in a struggle that will need all our talents, but as rival products competing for scarce market share. (Given that Trump’s presidency is the culmination of corporate branding’s insidious colonial logic, perhaps it’s past time to leave all that behind.)