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

by Naomi Klein

Searching for a word to describe the huge discrepancies in privileges and safety between those in Iraq’s Green and Red zones, journalists often landed on “sci-fi.” And of course, it was. The walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from The Hunger Games, with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to Elysium, with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean, with only a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story, ones in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them. Because we all pretty much know where the road we are on is leading. It leads to a world of Katrinas, a world that confirms our most catastrophic nightmares. Though there is a thriving subculture of utopian sci-fi, the current crops of mainstream dystopian books and films imagine and reimagi...