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

by Naomi Klein

The only way to justify such untenable levels of inequality is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for “Canadian values,” or successive Australian prime ministers justifying sinister island detention camps as a “humanitarian” alternative to death at sea. This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes—countries that have insisted slavery and Indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation—of cotillions in the master’s house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen Indigenous land on which North America’s wealth was built. What is becoming clear is that the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are visibly resurfacing as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously. Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.