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

by Naomi Klein

A CNN analysis of exit polls found that Trump won 77 percent of the vote among those who said that their financial situation was “worse today” than it had been four years earlier. In other words, they may have been doing well compared with the country’s average, but many had lost ground. And indeed the losses began long before that.

Over the past three decades, but accelerating since the 2008 financial crisis, pretty much everyone apart from the one percent has been losing job security as well as whatever feeble safety net used to exist. That means a lost job has greater implications now for one’s ability to pay for health care or hold on to a home. This state of affairs hurts Trump’s working-class white male voters just as it does so many others. On the other hand, because many of Trump’s blue-collar voters had a notably better deal until fairly recently—able to access well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs that supported middle-class lives—these losses appear to come as more of a shock.

On top of those losses, there are also the ground-shifting uncertainties associated with living in a changing country, a nation rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse, and where women are gaining more access to power. That’s part of progress toward equality, the result of hard-fought battles, but it does mean that white men are losing economic security (which everyone has a right to) and their sense of a superior status (which they never had a right to) at the same time. In the rush to condemn the latter form of entitlement, we shouldn’t lose sight of something important: not all forms of entitlement are illegitimate. All people are entitled to a dignified life. In wealthy countries, it is not greedy or an expression of unearned privilege to expect some basic security in your job when you work hard for decades, some certainty that you will be taken care of in old age, that you won’t be bankrupted by illness, and that your kids will have access to the tools they need to excel. In a decent society, people should feel entitled to those things. That’s human privilege. And yet those sorts of entitlements have been under vicious attack by the Right for four decades, to the extent that the word entitlements—referring to pensions and health care—is a slur in Washington, DC. It is this complex mix of factors that allowed Trump to come along and say: I will champion the beleaguered working man. I will get you those manufacturing jobs back. I’ll get rid of these free trade agreemen...

On the campaign trail, Clinton mocked her opponent’s “Trumped-up trickle-down economics,” but her own philosophy is what we might call “trickle-down identity politics”: tweak the system just enough to change the genders, colors, and sexual orientation of some of the people at the top, and wait for the justice to trickle down to everyone else. And it turns out that trickle-down works about as well in the identity sphere as it does in the economic one.

It was immensely important that a generation of kids grew up seeing Obama in the most powerful office in the world. And yet this top-down approach to change, if it is not accompanied by bottom-up policies that address systemic issues such as crumbling schools and lack of access to decent housing, is not going to lead to real equality. Not even close.

So perhaps this is another lesson to draw from 2016. Fear of “the other” may be an animating force for many supporters of far-right parties, but “inclusion” of the other within an inherently unjust system will not be powerful enough to defeat those forces. It wasn’t inspiring enough to galvanize the demoralized Democratic base in 2016, or to defeat Brexit, and there is no reason to believe that dynamic will change anytime soon. Instead, the overarching task before us is not to rank our various issues—identity versus economics, race versus gender—and for one to vanquish all the others in some sort of oppression cage match. It is to understand in our bones how these forms of oppression intersect and prop each other up, creating the complex scaffolding that allowed a kleptocratic thug to grab the world’s most powerful job as if it were a hostess at a strip club.

This is a good time to remember that manufacturing false hierarchies based on race and gender in order to enforce a brutal class system is a very long story. Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state–sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively “unseen” by European explorers—visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land—and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd “finders keepers” basis.

It was these same systems of human ranking that were deployed to justify the mass kidnapping, shackling, and torturing of other humans in order to force them to work that stolen land—which led the late political theorist Cedric Robinson to describe the market economy that gave birth to the United States not simply as capitalism but as “racial capitalism.” The cotton and sugar picked by enslaved Africans was the fuel that kick-started the Industrial Revolution. The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States—so why would it suddenly be today?

Ronald Reagan kicked this into high gear in the United States with the myth that food stamps were being collected by fur-wearing, Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” and used to subsidize a culture of crime. And Trump was no small player in this hysteria. In 1989, after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park, he bought full-page ads in several New York daily papers calling for the return of the death penalty. The Central Park Five were later exonerated by DNA evidence, and their sentences were vacated. Trump refused to apologize or retract his claims. No wonder, then, that his Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is arguing that social services and infrastructure in cities such as New York and Chicago are “crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime”—conveniently moving the subject away from years of neoliberal neglect toward the supposed need to crack down on crime, and to bar these cities from declaring themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants.

In truth, nothing has done more to help build our present corporate dystopia than the persistent and systematic pitting of working-class whites against Blacks, citizens against migrants, and men against women. White supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia have been the elite’s most potent defenses against genuine democracy. A divide-and-terrorize strategy, alongside ever more creative regulations that make it harder for many minorities to vote, is the only way to carry out a political and economic agenda that benefits such a narrow portion of the population. We also know from history that white supremacist and fascist movements—though they may always burn in the background—are far more likely to turn into wildfires during periods of sustained economic hardship and national decline. That is the lesson of Weimar Germany, which—ravaged by war and humiliated by punishing economic sanctions—became ripe for Nazism. That warning was supposed to have echoed through the ages. After the Holocaust, the world came together to try to create conditions that would prevent genocidal logic from ever again taking hold. It was this, combined with significant pressure from below, that formed the rationale for generous social programs throughout Europe. Western powers embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking for scapegoats or extreme ideologies. But all that has been discarded, and we are all...

I understand the urge to boil Trump’s election down to just one or two causes. To say it is all simply an expression of the ugliest forces in the United States, which never went away and roared to the foreground when a demagogue emerged who tore off the mask. To say it is all about race, a blind rage at the loss of white privilege. Or to say that it’s all attributable to women-hatred, since the very fact that Hillary Clinton could have been defeated by so vile and ignorant a figure as Trump is a wound that, for a great many women, refuses to heal. But the reduction of the current crisis to just one or two factors at the exclusion of all else won’t get us any closer to understanding how to defeat these forces now or the next time out. If we cannot become just a little bit curious about how all these elements—race, gender, class, economics, history, culture—have intersected with one another to produce the current crisis, we will, at best, be stuck where we were before Trump won. And that was not a safe place. Because already, before Trump, we had a culture that treats both people and planet like so much garbage. A system that extracts lifetimes of labor from workers and then discards them without protection. That treats millions of people, excluded from economic opportunity, as refuse to be thrown away inside prisons. That treats government as a resource to be mined for private wealth, leaving wreckage behind. That treats the land, water, and air that sustain all of life as ...

The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that “justice is what love looks like in public.” I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy. It looks like generations of children, overwhelmingly Black and brown, raised amidst an uncaring landscape. It looks like the rat-infested schools of Detroit. It looks like water pipes leaking lead and poisoning young minds in Flint. It looks like foreclosed mortgages on homes that were built to collapse. It looks like famished hospitals that feel more like jails—and overstuffed jails that are humanity’s best approximation of hell. It looks like trashing the beauty of the planet as if it had no value at all. It is, much like Trump himself, greed and carelessness incarnate.

While our global economic model is failing the vast majority of people on the planet, it is not failing all of us equally. The hatred that Trump and his team are helping to direct at the most vulnerable is not a separate project from their economic pillage on behalf of the ultra rich, their corporate coup—the former enables the latter. Trump’s ugliness on race and gender serves a specific set of wildly profitable goals, as identity-based hatreds always have. Fortunately, the fastest-growing grassroots political formations of our era—from the movement to end violence against women to the Movement for Black Lives, from workers calling for a living wage to Indigenous rights and climate justice movements—are rejecting a single-issue approach. They have embraced the “intersectionality” framework articulated by feminist and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. That means identifying how multiple issues—race, gender, income, sexuality, physical ability, immigration status, language—intersect and overlap within an individual’s life experience, and also within structures of power. The Trump administration does not choose between amping up law and order, attacking women’s reproductive rights, escalating foreign conflicts, scapegoating immigrants, setting off a fossil fuel frenzy, and otherwise deregulating the economy in the interests of the super-rich. They are proceeding on all these fronts (and others) simultaneously, knowing them to be component parts of the singula...

Rather than hope that Trump is going to magically transform into Bernie Sanders, and choose this one arena in which to be a genuine advocate for anyone who isn’t related to him, we would do far better to ask some tough questions about how it’s been possible for a gang of unapologetic plutocrats, with open disdain for democratic norms, to hijack an issue like corporate free trade in the first place.

The long list of gifts the Trump administration has already handed out to corporate America makes it clear that Trump’s strategy for “making America great again” by reviving manufacturing is to make American manufacturing cheap again. Without all those pesky regulations, with far lower corporate tax rates, with Trump’s all-out assault on environmental protections, American workers will indeed be closer to competing on cost with workers in low-wage countries like Mexico.

Around the world, far-right forces are gaining ground by harnessing the power of nostalgic nationalism and anger directed at remote economic bureaucracies—whether Washington, NAFTA, the WTO, or the EU—and mixing it with racism and xenophobia, offering an illusion of control through bashing immigrants, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women.

Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

Bernie was incredibly well suited to this moment of popular outrage and rejection of establishment politics. He was able to speak directly to the indignation over legalized political corruption, but from a progressive perspective—with genuine warmth and without personal malice. That’s rare. He championed policies that would have reined in the banks and made education affordable again. He railed against the injustice that the bankers had never been held accountable. And, after a lifetime in politics, he was untainted by corruption scandals. That’s even more rare. Precisely because Bernie is about as far as you can get from the polished world of celebrity reality TV, it would have been hard to find a better foil for Trump and the excesses of the Mar-a-Lago set.

For me, the tragedy of Trump is not only that the United States is now led by a man who represents the worst of all that the culture is capable of, all of it bundled into one human being. It’s that the country was within reach of the best and most hopeful political possibility to emerge in my lifetime, imperfect as Sanders is, and just as the climate clock was about to strike midnight.

The hostility of so many powerful US liberals to Bernie Sanders—and the determination to hold him back when he was on a winning streak—was both troubling and revealing. Because we so often hear that while they personally support bolder policies to fight inequality, those policies aren’t worth championing because the American public is too conservative, too pro-capitalist, and would never support them. So they back establishment candidates in the name of pragmatism—choosing the person with the best chance of winning against Republicans.

Yes, he faced unfair smears in this regard. But the more important lesson is that without Bernie’s weaknesses on race and gender, he could have won, no matter how hard the Democratic Party establishment tried to hold him back. He would have won if he had persuaded more middle-aged and older women that he understood how important and precarious reproductive rights still are, and that he fully grasped the urgency of the epidemic of violence against women. In key states such as Pennsylvania and New York, he could have won if he had been able to win the support of just half of Black voters. But to do that, he would have needed to clearly and compellingly connect the dots between the country’s deepest economic inequalities and the persistent legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and housing and financial discrimination. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in the Atlantic, pointed out that when it came to confronting that legacy, the boldness and radicalism Sanders displayed when taking on Wall Street suddenly petered out. Asked whether he supported some form of reparations for slavery, he dismissed the idea as politically impractical and unnecessarily “divisive,” saying that big investments in communities of color would have the same effect. But as Coates rightly pointed out, the whole point of Sanders’s candidacy was to push the envelope of what is considered politically possible—so where was that same boldness when it came to racial equality? “The spectacle of a socialist candidate opposin...

“Love trumps Hate” was Clinton’s final slogan. But love alone wasn’t up to the job; it needed something stronger to help it out, something like justice.

History is important. If you don’t know history it’s as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it. —HOWARD ZINN

The bottom line is that hard-core free marketers or “libertarians” (as the billionaire Koch brothers describe themselves) are attracted to moments of cataclysm because non-apocalyptic reality is actually inhospitable to their antidemocratic ambitions.

Speed is of the essence in all this, since periods of shock are temporary by nature. Like Bremer, shock-drunk leaders and their funders usually try to follow Machiavelli’s advice in The Prince: “For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.” The logic is straightforward enough: People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine. (Recall the description of Poland’s shock therapy as unfolding in “dog years.”)

The shock doctrine is about overriding these deeply human impulses to help, seeking instead to capitalize on the vulnerability of others in order to maximize wealth and advantage for a select few. There are few things more sinister than that.

The Art of the Steal Shock doctrine logic is entirely in keeping with Trump’s view of the world. He unabashedly sees life as a battle for dominance over others—and he keeps obsessive track of who is winning. In his much-self-celebrated negotiations, the questions are always the same: What’s the most that I can get out of this deal? How do I exploit my adversary’s weakness? In a particularly candid moment on Fox & Friends in 2011, he described a deal he made with former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi like this: “I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for the whole year, or for two years, and then I didn’t let him use the land. That’s what we should be doing. I don’t want to use the word screwed, but I screwed him. That’s what we should be doing.” If Trump extracted predatory terms only from despised dictators, few tears would be shed. But this is Trump’s attitude to all negotiations. In Think Big, one of his how-to-be-like-me manuals, he describes his negotiation philosophy this way: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.” This cold-blooded enthusiasm for exploiting the weakness of others has shaped Trump’s career as a real estate developer, and it is a trait he shares with many members of his administration. It’s worrying for what it tells us about not only t...

Right from his breakout moment, his attitude toward the public sphere was that it was there to be pillaged, to enrich himself. It’s an attitude that has stayed with him ever since. It’s worth remembering that on September 11, 2001, shortly after the Twin Towers came down, Trump gave an interview to a radio station during which he could not help observing that, with the Towers gone, he now had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. Dead bodies were in the street, lower Manhattan looked like a war zone, and yet, with only a little encouragement from the radio hosts, Trump was thinking about his brand advantage.

When I asked Phillips-Fein what lessons she drew from studying Trump’s actions during New York’s debt crisis, her reply was all about fear. There was, she said, “this deep level of fear about bankruptcy, fear of the future. And it’s that kind of fear that really makes possible the cutbacks of the time, and also the sense that the city needs a savior in the first place.” Since the 2016 election, she has been thinking about this a lot. “The way that fear can make things that seem politically impossible suddenly feel as though they’re the only alternative. And so I think that is one of the things that we need to fight at this moment, and to find ways to resist that sense of overwhelming fear and chaos, and to find forms of solidarity that can counter it.” It’s good advice. Especially since Trump has assembled around him an all-star cast of crisis opportunists.

Mike Pence’s doings as a profiteer from human suffering are so appalling that they are worth exploring in a little more depth, since they tell us a great deal about what we can expect from this administration during times of heightened crisis.

Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather, possibly linked to climate change, and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow “free-market” travelers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future. And now Mike Pence is in a position to bring this vision to the entire United States.

New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is much more that this administration may try to push through under cover of crisis. To become shock resistant, we need to prepare for that too.

Trump has openly called for a new nuclear “arms race”—a call we have not heard since the 1980s. He has reportedly asked his foreign policy advisers repeatedly why the United States can’t just use nuclear weapons, seemingly not grasping the principle of retaliation. And one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, Sheldon Adelson, has talked about needing to threaten Iran with a nuclear strike in the “middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul…maybe a couple of rattlesnakes…. Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.’ ” Adelson donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest donation of its kind ever. I am not saying a nuclear war is likely. But in Trump’s very short time in office, there has already been a level of military escalation that is both chilling and bizarrely haphazard. As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog. Which is why Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked toward disarmament when he was Soviet leader, wrote in Time magazine that today “the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.” (And that was before Trump upped the ante with North Korea.)

At the ultra-extreme end of this trend is PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and member of his transition team. Thiel underwrote an initiative called the Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) in 2008. The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the movement’s manifesto states, “vote with your boat.” Thiel recently has appeared to lose interest in the project, saying that the logistics of building floating nation-states were “not quite feasible,” but it continues. What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income—precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina. (The survivalists refer to FEMA as “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid”—a joke that is only funny if you have the means to pay cash for your own escape.) This two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their ...

The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.

So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: what everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion in the mountains. What matters isn’t their stated views on the science of climate change. What matters is that not one of them appears to be worried about climate change. The early catastrophic events are playing out mostly in poor parts of the world, where the people are not white. And when disasters do strike wealthy Western nations, there are growing numbers of ways for the wealthy to buy their relative safety. Early in Trump’s term, Republican congressman Steve King caused a controversy by tweeting, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” It was a revealing comment on many fronts. Climate change is not a concern for the Republican Party because a great many people in positions of power clearly think it’ll be “somebody else’s babies” who will shoulder the risks, babi...

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.

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...

She’s on the horizon…I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking. —EDUARDO GALEANO Walking Words, 1995

I have seen it many times. In a shocked state, with our understanding of the world badly shaken, a great many of us can become childlike and passive, and overly trusting of people who are only too happy to abuse that trust. But I also know, from my own family’s navigation of a shocking event, that there can be the inverse response as well. We can evolve and grow up in a crisis, and set aside all kinds of bullshit—fast.

On the day Trump signed the permit approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Ponca Nation member Mekasi Camp Horinek shared a version of this theory with reporter Alleen Brown: I want to say thank you to the president for all the bad decisions that he’s making—for the bad cabinet appointments that he’s made and for awakening a sleeping giant. People that have never stood up for themselves, people that have never had their voices heard, that have never put their bodies on the line are now outraged. I would like to say thank you to President Trump for his bigotry, for his sexism, for bringing all of us in this nation together to stand up and unite.

So the problem after 9/11 was not that the United States had no experience of how shocking events can be harnessed to attack democracy and human rights. The problem, rather, was that these past traumatic events, while very well understood within the communities impacted, were insufficiently understood more broadly: they are not part of a shared national narrative that could have helped all Americans see the difference between reasonable security measures and leaders taking advantage of fear to advance opportunistic agendas. That’s why the Bush administration was able to mercilessly exploit the shock of the September 11 trauma to attack civil liberties at home and launch wars abroad, which we now know were justified through doctored intelligence. That’s why the neglect and violence of the state during and after Katrina came as no great surprise to the city’s African-American residents—yet seemed unprecedented to so many white Americans. The split between people who were stunned by Trump’s victory and those who saw it coming followed similar racial fault lines.

All of these acts of solidarity and expressions of unity reflect the fact that, after decades of “siloed” politics, more and more people understand that we can only beat Trumpism in cooperation with one another—no one movement can win on its own. The trick is going to be to stick together, and have each other’s backs as never before. That’s why over fifty progressive groups, drawn from a dizzying array of struggles, greeted the start of Trump’s cabinet hearings with a declaration of “United Resistance”—publicly pledging “to take action to support one another, to be accountable to one another, and to act together in solidarity, whether in the streets, in the halls of power, or in our communities every day. When they come for one, they come for us all.”

The bottom line is that in 2009, as theorists and organizers, we weren’t ready—too many of us were waiting for change to be delivered from on high. And by the time most of us realized how inadequate that change was, the window had closed and the Tea Party was already on the rise.

In the United States, after the carnage of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Blacks and their radical allies pushed for economic justice and greater social rights. They won major victories, including free public education for all children—although it would take another century before schools were desegregated.

The horrific 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, which took the lives of 146 young immigrant garment workers, catalyzed hundreds of thousands of workers into militancy—eventually leading to an overhaul of the state labor code, caps on overtime, new rules for child labor, and breakthroughs in health and fire safety regulations.

Most significantly, it was only thanks to the collective response from below to the Great Crash of 1929 tha...

The strike wave of the mid-1930s—the Teamsters’ rebellion and Minneapolis general strike, the 83-day shutdown of the west coast by longshore workers, and the Flint sit-down strikes in the auto plants—established the power of industrial unions, and f...

In this same period, as a response to the suffering brought on by the Great Depression, mass movements demanded sweeping social programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance (programs from which the majority of Af...

In the same period, tough new rules regulating the financial sector were introduced, at real cost to unfettered profit making. 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...