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

by Naomi Klein

I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has. —JOHN TRUDELL Santee Dakota activist, artist, and poet (1946–2015)

The term “shock doctrine” describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.”

The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programs for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations. It’s a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions. And of course it is being backed up with a massive increase in war spending, a dramatic escalation of military conflicts on multiple fronts, from Syria to North Korea, alongside presidential musings about how “torture works.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights). And “if you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

A near-impenetrable sense of impunity—of being above the usual rules and laws—is a defining feature of this administration. Anyone who presents a threat to that impunity is summarily fired—just ask former FBI director James Comey. Up to now in US politics there’s been a mask on the corporate state’s White House proxies: the smiling actor’s face of Ronald Reagan or the faux cowboy persona of George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney/Halliburton scowling in the background). Now the mask is gone. And no one is even bothering to pretend otherwise.

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).

We don’t go into a state of shock when something big and bad happens; it has to be something big and bad that we do not yet understand. A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.

All this work is born of the knowledge that saying no to bad ideas and bad actors is simply not enough. The firmest of no’s has to be accompanied by a bold and forward-looking yes—a plan for the future that is credible and captivating enough that a great many people will fight to see it realized, no matter the shocks and scare tactics thrown their way. No—to Trump, to France’s Marine Le Pen, to any number of xenophobic and hypernationalist parties on the rise the world over—may be what initially brings millions into the streets. But it is yes that will keep us in the fight. Yes is the beacon in the coming storms that will prevent us from losing our way.

This book’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion—a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century.

Trump is not shocking. He is the entirely predictable, indeed clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and trends that should have been stopped long ago. Which is why, even if this nightmarish presidency were to end tomorrow, the political conditions that produced it, and which are producing replicas around the world, will remain to be confronted. With US vice president Mike Pence or House speaker Paul Ryan waiting in the wings, and a Democratic Party establishment also enmeshed with the billionaire class, the world we need won’t be won just by replacing the current occupant of the Oval Office.

To get started, we first need to understand what we’re saying no to—because that No on the cover is not just to an individual or even a group of individuals (though it is that too). We’re also saying no to the system that has elevated them to such heights. And then let’s move to a yes—a yes that will bring about change so fundamental that today’s corporate takeover will be relegated to a historical footnote, a warning to our kids. And Donald Trump and his fellow travelers will be seen for what they are: a symptom of a deep sickness, one that we decided, collectively, to come together and heal.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. “Beyond Vietnam,” 1967

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

The trouble is, to understand Trump you really have to understand the world that made him what he is, and that, to a very large extent, is the world of branding. He reflects all the worst trends I wrote about in No Logo, from shrugging off responsibility for the workers who make your products via a web of often abusive contractors to the insatiable colonial need to mark every available space with your name.

As a 1938 editorial in Fortune magazine put it,“the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things…It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates.”

Most importantly, with The Apprentice, Trump wasn’t paying, as other brands do, to have his brand featured in a hit network TV show; he was getting paid a fortune for priceless free advertising. More than that, his shows collected millions by promoting other brands. In April 2011, for example, The Celebrity Apprentice was paid to promote more products on the air than any other show, 120 product placements in all. This is the mark of a true Superbrand: Trump built a brand that contains brand multitudes. (And in bringing his children into the show, he even began to breed brands.) After you have pulled off a feat like that, what’s your next trick? Merge your brand with the ultimate symbol of power and authority: the White House.

He still owns a few flagship properties, including Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago in Florida. But if you look at the broader network of a great many Trump-branded properties—from the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai to the many other Trump properties in India, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and New York City—what you see is that Trump either doesn’t own them himself or owns just a piece of them. His revenue comes from leasing his name.

Trump won the White House on a campaign that railed ceaselessly against the loss of manufacturing jobs—the same kind of jobs he has outsourced at virtually every opportunity. As a businessman, he took full advantage of the outsourcing economy, as does Ivanka’s company. And, unsurprisingly, there have been major investigative reports detailing the appalling conditions under which Trump’s ties are made in Shengzhou, China, for instance, and the even worse conditions in the Chinese factories producing Ivanka’s line of footwear. In April 2017, the Fair Labor Association, a watchdog that grew out of the sweatshop scandals in the nineties, issued a report disclosing that workers in a factory in China producing for a major supplier of Ivanka’s dresses and blouses put in close to 60 hours a week, and earned what works out to a little over $1 an hour (well below the average wage for urban Chinese manufacturing workers). Most employees also lacked health and maternity benefits—not a good look for an advocate of women in the workforce.

The construction of many Trump-branded hotels and towers has been plagued with similar controversies, in the US and abroad. An investigation by Vice, for instance, revealed that the treatment of migrant workers constructing a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai stood out even in a city notorious for slave-like labor conditions. Ben Anderson, who produced the report, describes worker dorms in which “guys live 21 to a room with rats running around above them” and bathrooms that “didn’t look fit for human beings.” The Trump Organization issued a statement about its “zero tolerance policy for unlawful labor practices at any project bearing the ‘Trump’ name.” Needless to say, this particular project was being built by an outside company; Trump had just leased his name. Some brands would have been badly battered by these types of revelations. The Trump Organization just shrugs them off. And that has everything to do with the big branding idea around which Donald Trump chose to build his empire.

The truth, which doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous, is that the Trump brand stands for wealth itself—or, to put it more crassly, money. That’s why its aesthetics are Dynasty-meets-Louis XIV. It’s why Trump’s relationship to gold is the inverse of Superman’s relationship to kryptonite: Trump crumples when he is more than three feet away from something big and shiny.

Donald Trump’s personal brand is slightly different but intimately related. His brand is being the ultimate boss, the guy who is so rich he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and to whomever he wants (including grabbing whichever woman he wants, by whichever body part he wants). This helps explain why signifiers of Trump’s wealth are so important to him. Gold curtains and shots of his private jets are how Trump constantly reinforces his brand as the ultimate capitalist success story—power and wealth incarnate. It’s why he placed his personal wealth (however exaggerated) at the center of his campaign for president.

It’s also why no labor scandal is ever going to stick to him. In the world he has created, he’s just acting like a “winner”; if someone gets stepped on, they are obviously a loser. And this doesn’t only apply to labor scandals—virtually every traditional political scandal bounces off Trump. That’s because Trump didn’t just enter politics as a so-called outsider, somebody who doesn’t play by the rules. He entered politics playing by a completely different set of rules—the rules of branding. According to those rules, you don’t need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created. That’s why brand managers are so obsessed with discipline and repetition: once you have identified what your core brand is, your only job is to embody that brand, project that brand, and repeat its message. If you stay focused, very little can touch you. That’s a problem when applied to a sitting US president, especially because over many, many years, and with a startling level of consistency, Donald Trump created a brand that is entirely amoral. On the campaign trail, Trump was able to shrug off almost every conventional “gotcha.” Caught dodging fed...

Ivanka invariably stresses that just as her father has supposedly distanced himself from the Trump Organization by putting it in the hands of his sons (while he still collects the profits), Ivanka has put her company in the hands of “independent trustees”—her husband’s brother and sister (while she still collects the profits). This goes well beyond nepotism; it’s the US government as a for-profit family business.

Trump’s ownership of Mar-a-Lago is telling in itself. A decade before Trump purchased the property in 1985, the owner of the estate, socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, had bequeathed it to the US government in the hopes that it could be used as a presidential retreat or a “Winter White House.” But no president used it and it was eventually returned. Long before the 2016 election, Trump had enjoyed boasting about the fact that he lived in a house intended for presidents. Indeed, in retrospect it is as if he was playing at being president for three decades. And now, with the 2016 elections, that fantasy has become a reality—or is it reality that has been swallowed whole by Trump’s fantasy? As with all things Trump, it’s genuinely difficult to tell. Trump may call his Palm Beach estate the “Winter White House” or the “Southern White House,” but it is, of course, no such thing. The White House is a public institution; Mar-a-Lago remains a private, for-profit, members-only club with the proceeds flowing directly to Trump and his family.

The Trump Organization has said it will not make any new deals for foreign properties, to prevent an appearance of impropriety. But this isn’t just an international question. If a US city or state government grants a Trump development a break on taxes or regulations, are they really doing it because they think this particular business will help their community—or because they want something from the White House? Same goes for any government or business—foreign or domestic—that chooses a Trump property for an event or as a place for employees to stay. Do they really think it’s the best option, or are they trying to curry favor? What’s fascinating about these ethics questions is that they are so similar to the scandals surrounding the Clinton Foundation, which may well have contributed to Hillary’s electoral loss. There were many thorny questions about what a private company or foreign government thought they were getting when they made a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation. Were they being purely philanthropic, moved by the scourge of infectious diseases and childhood obesity? Or were they also making a calculation that their donation would pay some dividends because Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and looked likely to become the next US president? Those were valid concerns, and Trump didn’t hesitate to raise them about his rival. But with the money the Trump sons are collecting from leasing their father’s name, and the favors they are negotiating, the potential...

A few months into the new administration, the cover of the New Yorker featured an illustration of Trump whacking golf balls at the White House, shattering window after window. It’s a striking image, in large part because it slowly dawns that the broken windows are not at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower but the publicly owned building where Trump’s own family has assiduously avoided living. And this points to a difficult truth. With every alleged ethics violation, with every brazen lie, with every deranged tweet, this administration leaves the public sphere more broken and degraded. Even if corruption (or treason) ultimately costs Trump the White House, what will be left behind will be wreckage—proof of the fundamental premise of Trump’s political project: that government is not just a swamp, it’s a burden. That there is nothing worth protecting. That private is better than public. And if that’s all true, why not wreck the place before you leave—figuratively if not literally.

It’s absolutely true that the system is corrupt. It is a swamp. And people know it. They know that the rewriting of the rules in favor of a small group of corporate interests and the one percent has been a bipartisan process—that it was Bill Clinton who deregulated the banks, setting the stage for the 2008 collapse, and it was Obama who chose not to prosecute the bankers, and that the Democratic candidate running against Trump would almost surely have done no different.

Sure, it’s preposterous for a self-described billionaire sitting on a golden throne to pass himself off as a savior of the working class. But a pitch as patently irrational as “Trust me because I cheated the system” could only have sold to a significant portion of the American public because what passed for “business as usual” in Washington well before Trump looked a whole lot like corruption to everyone else. That’s why so many people have been happy to treat electoral politics as macabre entertainment. Once politics has reached such a debased state, why bother protecting it from a boor like Trump? It’s a cesspool anyway, so let the games begin. As a resident of Toronto, this is a pathology that I’ve lived through before. Our former mayor, Rob Ford, was something of a municipal rehearsal for Trump. Ford, who died in 2016, created a performance-based image that was impossible to shame—because his brand was being shameless. Even when he was caught on tape smoking crack, it didn’t finish him off, because it was still the wacky Rob Ford show, and his supporters were his semi-ironic loyal audience, taking it all in like a Saturday Night Live sketch. But, as with Trump, the over-the-top performance and the personal scandals distracted from a sinister agenda, a pseudopopulism that specialized in handouts to corporations, a blank check for police, and eroded services for the most vulnerable.

What’s extraordinary about Donald Trump’s presidency is that now we are all inside the Trump branded world, whether we want to be or not. We have all become extras in his for-profit reality TV show, which has expanded to swallow the most powerful government in the world. Is there any escape? The essential immorality of Trump’s brand does present unique barriers to holding this administration accountable. And yet there is hope. In fact, Trump’s animating life force—the quest for money—may actually make him more vulnerable than any president before.

This is central to how Trump built his brand and amassed his wealth—by selling the promise that “you too could be Donald Trump”—at a time when life was becoming so much more precarious if you weren’t in the richest one percent. He then turned around and used that very same pitch to voters—that he would make America a country of winners again—exploiting those deep economic anxieties and using all the reality-simulation skills that he had picked up from years at the helm of a top-rated TV show. After decades of hawking how-to-get-rich manuals, Donald Trump understands exactly how little needs to be behind the promise—whether on renegotiating trade deals or bringing back manufacturing—if the desperation is great enough.

Well before Trump’s rise, elections had already crossed over into ratings-driven infotainment on cable news. What Trump did was to exponentially increase the entertainment factor, and therefore the ratings. As a veteran of the form, he understood that if elections had become a form of reality TV, then the best contestant (which is not the same thing as the best candidate) would win. Maybe they wouldn’t win the final vote, but they would at least win wall-to-wall coverage, which from a branding perspective is still winning. As Trump said when he was contemplating a presidential run in 2000 (he decided against it): “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

Since the election, we’ve heard a few mea culpas from media executives acknowledging that they helped Trump’s electoral rise by giving him such an outsized portion of their coverage. And that’s true, they helped enormously, but the hand-wringing doesn’t go nearly far enough. They are also responsible because the biggest gift to Trump was not just airtime but the entire infotainment model of covering elections, which endlessly plays up interpersonal dramas between the candidates while largely abandoning the traditional journalistic task of delving into policy specifics and explaining how different candidates’ positions on issues such as health care and regulatory reform will play out in voters’ lives. The Tyndall Report found that, through the entire election, the three major nightly network news shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on “issues coverage”—down from an already paltry 220 minutes in the 2008 election. The rest was the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll where. For millions of viewers, the result was highly entertaining. (Which is likely why French media followed a markedly similar formula to cover its high-stakes 2017 elections.) This is worth underlining: Trump didn’t create the problem—he exploited it. And because he understood the conventions of fake reality better than anyone, he took the game to a whole new level.

Trump didn’t just bring reality TV expertise to electoral politics—he mashed that up with another blockbuster entertainment genre that is also based on a cartoonishly fake performance of reality: professional wrestling. It’s hard to overstate Trump’s fascination with wrestling. He has performed as himself (the ultrarich boss) in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) appearances at least eight times, enough to earn him a place in the WWE Hall of Fame. In a “Battle of the Billionaires,” he pretended to pound wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon and then celebrated victory by publicly shaving McMahon’s head in front of the cheering throngs. He also dropped thousands of dollars in cash into the audience of screaming fans. Now, he has appointed the former CEO of WWE, Linda McMahon (wife of Vince), to his cabinet as head of the Small Business Administration, a detail that has largely been lost amidst the daily deluge. As with The Apprentice, Trump’s side career in pro wrestling exposed and endeared him to a massive audience—in stadiums, on TV, and online. Pro wrestling might be largely invisible as a cultural force to most liberal voters, but WWE generates close to a billion dollars in annual revenue. And Trump did more than pick up votes from this experience—he also picked up tips.

As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, Trump’s entire campaign had a distinctly WWE quality. His carefully nurtured feuds with other candidates were pure pro wrestling, especially the way he handed out insulting nicknames (“Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted”). And most wrestling-like of all was the way Trump played ringmaster at his rallies, complete with over-the-top insult-chants (“Lock her up!” “Killary”) and directing the crowd’s rage at the arena’s designated villains: journalists and demonstrators. Outsiders would emerge from these events shaken, not sure what had just happened. What happened is that they had just been to a bizarre cross between a pro-wrestling match and a white supremacist rally.

In Trump’s world, and according to the internal logic of his brand, lying with impunity is all part of being the big boss. Being tethered to fixed, boring facts is for losers.

And so far it seems to be working, at least with his base. Some liberals have seized upon this apparent tolerance for “alternative facts” to dismiss his working-class voters as “suckers.” But it’s worth remembering that a large portion of Barack Obama’s base was quite happy to embrace the carefully crafted symbols his administration created—the White House lit up like a rainbow to celebrate gay marriage; the shift to a civil, erudite tone; the spectacle of an incredibly appealing first family free of major scandals for eight years. And these were all good things. But, too often, these same supporters looked the other way when it came to the drone warfare that killed countless civilians, or the deportations of roughly 2.5 million immigrants without documents during Obama’s term, or his broken promises to close Guantanamo or shut down George W. Bush’s mass-surveillance architecture. Obama positioned himself as a climate hero, but at one point bragged that his administration had “added enough new oil and gas pipelines to encircle the Earth and then some.”

In Canada, many liberals are displaying the same kind of selective blindness. Dazzled by the progressive messaging of our handsome prime minister, they are letting him hang on to many of his predecessor’s disastrous policies, from the indefinite detention of many immigrants to ramming through tar sands pipelines (more on that later). Politically, Justin Trudeau is very different from Donald Trump, but for his staunchest supporters—who often behave a lot like fans—his celebrity has a similarly distorting effect. T...

Acknowledging that Trump’s presidency is being produced like a reality show in no way diminishes the danger it represents—quite the opposite. People have already died in this show—in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in the United States—and many more will meet the same fate before it goes off the air. In March alone, a UK-based monitoring group recorded allegations of more than 1,500 civilian deaths from US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, higher than ever recorded under Obama. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show. Blood-sport reality TV is, after all, a science-fiction cliché. Think of The Hunger Games, with its reality TV spectacle in which all the players die but one. Or The Running Man, another film about a televised event where the stakes are life or death. (Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, reportedly described the bombing of Syria as Mar-a-Lago’s “after-dinner entertainment.”) The most chilling part is that, as I write, Trump has only just started playing his version of The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games with the full arsenal of US military power as his props—and he is getting plenty of encouragement to keep upping the ante. When Trump launched Tomahawk missiles on Syria, MSNBC host Brian Williams declared the images “beautiful.” Just one week later, Trump went for more spectacle, dropping the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal on a cave complex in Afghanistan, an act of violence so indiscriminate and disproportionate that analysts struggled to...

Given that Trump ordered the use of a weapon that had never been deployed in combat before, and given that he did this just twelve weeks into his presidency and with no obvious provocation, there is little reason to hope he will be able to resist putting on the show of shows—the televised apocalyptic violence of a full-blown war, complete with its guaranteed blockbuster ratings. Well before Trump, we had wars fought as televised entertainment. The 1990 Gulf War was dubbed the first video-game war, complete with its own logo and theme music on CNN. But that was nothing compared with the show put on during the 2003 Iraq invasion, based on a military strategy called “Shock and Awe.” The attacks were designed as a spectacle for cable news consumers, but also for Iraqis, to maximize their sense of helplessness, to “teach them a lesson.” Now, that fearsome technology is in the hands of the first reality TV president. We need to get ready,

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a powerful idea that sadly doesn’t work for the climate crisis. The wealthy governments of the world have procrastinated for so long, and made the problem so much worse in the meantime, that the arc has to bend very, very fast now—or the shot at justice is gone for good. We are almost at midnight on the climate clock.

During the Democratic primaries, I was really struck by the moment when a young woman confronted Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail and asked her if—given the scale of the global warming crisis—she would pledge not to take any more money from the fossil fuel interests that are supercharging it. Up to that point, Clinton’s campaign had received large sums of money from employees and registered lobbyists of fossil fuel companies—about $1.7 million, according to Greenpeace’s research. Clinton looked disgusted and snapped at the young woman, saying she was “so sick” of this issue coming up. A few days later, in an interview, Clinton said young people should “do their own research.” The woman who had asked the question, Eva Resnick-Day, worked as a campaigner for Greenpeace. She had done her research, she insisted, “and that is why we are so terrified for the future…. What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species.” For me, her words cut to the heart of why this was not just another election cycle. Why it was not only legitimate but necessary to question Hillary’s web of corporate entanglements. Resnick-Day’s comments also highlight one of the big reasons why Trump’s presidency is harrowing: the most powerful man in the world is a person who says global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese, and who is feverishly trashing the (already inadequate) restraints on fossil fuels that his country had put in place, enc...

For many years, I wondered why some people were so determined to deny global warming. It’s strange at first glance. Why would you work so hard to deny the scientific facts that have been affirmed by 97 percent of climate scientists—facts whose effects we see all around us, with more confirmation in the news we consume every day? That question led me on a journey that informed my book This Changes Everything—and I think some of what I discovered when writing that book can help us make sense of the centrality of climate vandalism to the Trump administration. 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.

There is a lot of confusion around the word neoliberalism, and about who is a neoliberal. And understandably so. So let’s break it down. Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world’s elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US Right. Neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the market or the decisions of individual consumers. It is probably best summarized by another of Reagan’s famous phrases, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” 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 governme...

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,...

In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project. That’s why the Right is in a rebellion against the physical world, against science (which is what prompted hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world to participate in the March for Science in April 2017, collectively defending a principle that really shouldn’t need defending: that knowing as much as possible about our world is a good thing). But there is a reason why science has become such a battle zone—because it is revealing again and again that neoliberal business as usual leads to a species-threatening catastrophe.

What mainstream liberals have been saying for decades, by contrast, is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But the challenge is much more fundamental than that. It requires throwing out the neoliberal rulebook, and confronting the centrality of ever-expanding consumption in how we measure economic progress. In one sense, then, the members of Trump’s cabinet—with their desperate need to deny the reality of global warming, or belittle its implications—understand something that is fundamentally true: to avert climate chaos, we need to challenge the capitalist ideologies that have conquered the world since the 1980s. If you are the beneficiary of those ideologies, you are obviously going to be very unhappy about that. That’s understandable. Global warming really does have radical progressive implications. If it’s real—and it manifestly is—then the oligarch class cannot continue to run riot without rules. Stopping them is now a matter of humanity’s collective survival. If we fail, the death I saw at the Great Barrier Reef will spread to all corners of our collective home in ways we can scarcely imagine.

But if the Right specializes in turning backward, the Left specializes in turning inward and firing on each other in a circular hail of blame.

Trump’s brand: he’s the boss who does what he wants—grabs what and whomever he wants; mocks, shames, and humiliates whomever he wants whenever he wants. That is what the Grabber-in-Chief is selling. And there is clearly a rather large market for it.

To put it bluntly, a vote for Trump might not reflect active hatred, but there is still, at best, a troubling indifference behind the act.

What really won it for Trump was how those losses in social status were layered on top of losses in basic economic security.