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

by Naomi Klein

In 1969, there was an oil spill in Santa Barbara, which coated California’s beautiful beaches, and it was something like a Great Crash for the environment—a shock millions responded to by demanding fundamental change. Many of North America’s toughest laws protecting air, water, and endangered species can trace...

In all these cases, a painful crisis served as a wake-up call, ushering in meaningful legislation that created a fairer and safer society—thanks in no small part to the hard work of organizers who had been preparing the ground for years before the shocks hit. These were far from perfect reforms, not full-scale transformations, and yet they were directly responsible for winning much of the modern social safety net, as well as the regulatory structures that protect so many workers and public health. Moreover, winning them did not require authoritarian trickery. They were so popular with voters that they didn’t have to be snuck in under cover of crisis but rather were loudly demanded by muscular social movements—a deepening of democracy, not its subversion. So why...

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).

By the time the 2008 financial fiasco was unfolding, that utopian imagination had largely atrophied. A great many people knew that the appropriate response to the crisis was moral outrage, that gifting the banks with trillions, refusing to prosecute those responsible, and asking the poor and elderly to pay the steepest costs was an obscenity. Yet generations who had grown up under neoliberalism struggled to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known. This may also have something to do with the power of memory. When workers rose up against the depravities of the industrial age, many had living memories of a different kind of economy. Others were actively fighting to protect an existing way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different, they were capable of imagining—and fighting for—a radically better future. Even those who have never known anything but enslavement and apartheid have been endlessly creative in finding ways—often through clandestine art forms—to nurture and keep alive the dream of freedom, self-government, and democracy. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz observed shortly after the 2016 election, forecasting the hard times ahead: Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by f...

The role of the protector, in the wrong hands, can be lethal. In moments of crisis, strong men step into it with far too much ease, announcing themselves ready to protect the flock from all evil, asking only absolute power and blind obedience in return.

Amidst the tears and the sage smoke, we felt the touch of history. And something else too: a way to deal with rage and grief that went beyond venting. So soon after such a divisive, crude election, it came as a tremendous relief. For weeks, the screens that occupy too much of my life had been engulfed in that unrelenting rage, and in angry circular debates about who, or what, was the one and only true cause of the mess we were now in. Trump won because of the racism of America—end of discussion, some said. No he didn’t, it was the elitism of the corporate Dems—Bernie would have fixed everything, others roared. No, he won because of capitalism, the issue above all others—racism and white supremacy are a sideshow. No, identity politics is what destroyed us, you whiners and dividers. No, it was misogyny, you bunch of flaming assholes. No, it was the fossil fuel industry, determined to suck out their last mega-profits, regardless of how much they destabilize the earth. Plenty of good points were made, but it was striking that the goal was rarely to change minds, or find common ground. The goal was to win the argument.

“We can’t keep asking our members to sacrifice. They are losing so much. They need those pipeline jobs—we have to offer them something.” The man making this plea was an executive of a major trade union, with many members in Canada’s oil and gas sector. Sitting in a large circle, sixty people listened and shifted in their chairs. What he was saying was undeniable. Everyone has a right to a decent job. And energy workers are hurting badly. But the people in the room knew too that the case for even one more pipeline was not a matter of bargaining with environmentalists; it was a doomed attempt to bargain with science and chemistry. It is impossible to both keep building new fossil fuel infrastructure and have a chance of keeping temperatures at anything like safe levels. That’s when Arthur Manuel took the floor. A highly respected Indigenous intellectual and former chief from the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, Manuel leaned forward, looked the union leader in the eye, and spoke just above a whisper. “Do you think you are the only people who have had to sacrifice? Do you know how much money, how many jobs, my people have turned down from oil and gas and mining companies? Tens of millions of dollars. “We do it because there are things that are more important than money.” It felt as if the whole room was holding its breath. It was one of several wrenchingly honest exchanges that happened over the course of a two-day gathering in Toronto in May 2015. In the room were leade...

if business as usual is allowed to continue, ever-larger expanses of our planet will cease to be hospitable to human life. And as we’ve seen, responding effectively to climate change requires throwing out the entire pro-corporate economic playbook—which is one of the main reasons so many right-wing ideologues are determined to deny its reality.

We are, it bears repeating, out of time. We’ve been kicking the can down the road for so many decades that we are just plain out of road. Which means if we want a shot at avoiding catastrophic warming, we need to start a grand economic and political transition right now.

some very clear common themes emerged that made a synthesis possible. One such theme was that we have a system based on limitless taking and extracting, on maximum grabbing. Our economy takes endlessly from workers, asking more and more from them in ever-tighter time frames, even as employers offer less and less security and lower wages in return. Many of our communities are being pushed to a similar breaking point: schools, parks, transit, and other services have had resources clawed back from them over many decades, even as residents have less time to fill in the gaps. And of course we are all part of a system that takes endlessly from the earth’s natural bounty, without protecting cycles of regeneration, and while paying dangerously little attention to where we are offloading pollution, whether it be into the water systems that sustain life or the atmosphere that keeps our climate system in balance.

it was clear to all of us that this is what a system addicted to short-term profits and wealth is structurally required to do: it treats people and the earth either like resources to be mined to their limits or as garbage to be disposed of far out of sight, whether deep in the ocean or deep in a prison cell. In sharp contrast, when people spoke about the world they wanted, the words care and caretaking came up again and again—care for the land, for the planet’s living systems, and for one another. As we talked, that became a frame within which everything seemed to fit: the need for a shift from a system based on endless taking—from the earth and from one another—to a culture based on caretaking, the principle that when we take, we also take care and give back. A system in which everyone is valued, and we don’t treat people or the natural world as if they were disposable.

Acting with care and consent, rather than extractively and through force, became the idea binding the whole draft together, starting with respect for the knowledge and inherent rights of Indigenous peoples, the original caretakers of the land, water, and air. Though many of us (including me) had originally thought we were convening to draft a list of policy goals, we realized that this shift in values, and indeed in morality, was at the core of what we were trying to map. The specifics of policy all flowed from that shift. For example, when we talk about “green jobs,” we usually picture a guy in a hard hat putting up a solar array. And that is one kind of green job, and an important one. But it’s not the only one. Looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued and underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks. 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.

In a way, we asked ourselves this: what are the qualities that we value most in people? Those included: generosity, hospitality, warmth, and wisdom. And then we asked ourselves: what do those qualities look like when expressed in public, as policy? We discovered that one of the things those qualities reflect is openness. Which means nurturing a culture that welcomes those in need, rather than greeting strangers with fear and suspicion; that values elders and the knowledge they have accumulated over lifetimes, as well as the ways of knowing that long predate this very recent invention called Canada. Bianca Mugyenyi, who co-leads the organization that came out of the gathering, boils that principle down when it comes to climate and migration: The refugee flows we’re seeing now are just a glimpse of what’s to come. Climate change and migration are intimately linked, and we’re going to see massive displacement of people caused by sea-level rise and extreme weather in the decades to come, all around the world. So there’s a question facing all of us: are we all in this together? We think most people, given the opportunity, believe that we are. You see it over and over in times of crisis, when people step up for others in their communities, but also for complete strangers. But we need our immigration, border and social support systems to catch up with this idea. The Leap is about speaking to our better selves.

In summary, our plan argued that in the process of fundamentally changing our country to make it cleaner, we also have a historic opportunity to make it a lot fairer. As we move to get off fossil fuels, we can simultaneously begin to redress the terrible wrongs done to Indigenous peoples; radically reduce economic, racial, and gender inequalities; eliminate glaring double standards for immigrant workers; and we can create a whole lot of stable, well-paying jobs in green sectors, in land and water remediation, and in the caring professions. Kids would have an opportunity to be healthier because they wouldn’t be breathing toxic air; our increasingly aging society could be provided with healthier community living; and we could spend less time stuck in traffic, working long hours, and more time with our friends and families. A happier, more balanced society, in other words, with the definition of happiness liberated from the endless cycle of ever-escalating consumption that underlies the logic of branding (and fueled the rise of Donald Trump). It sounded good to us and—in very un-Canadian fashion—we even dared to hope that the manifesto might become a model for similar broad-based alliances beyond our country’s borders.

The math is clear: the money for this great transition is out there—we just need governments with the guts to go after it. So that, in summary, was our vision—to invest in those sectors that tangibly improve our quality of life and create more caring societies, rather than hacking away at them in the name of that manufactured crisis called “austerity.” And we were committed to embedding justice in every aspect of the transition.

The Opposite of The Art of the Deal As I look back on the drafting process, 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.

At first there was a lot of pressure on The Leap team to start our own party, or run candidates in existing ones, using the manifesto as its platform. We resisted those calls, wanting to protect The Leap’s movement roots, and not wanting it to be owned by any one party. The vitality of The Leap today, especially since Trump’s election, lies in the people, inside Canada and out, who are using it more and more as the basis for their own local work and electoral platforms.

We have reached the limits of siloed politics, where everyone fights in their own corner without mapping the connections between our various struggles, and without a clear idea of the concepts and values that must form the moral foundation of the future we need.

The plans that are taking shape for defeating Trumpism wherever we live go well beyond finding a progressive savior to run for office and then offering that person our blind support. Instead, communities and movements are uniting to lay out the core policies that politicians who want their support must endorse. The people’s platforms are starting to lead—and the politicians will have to follow.

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times. —JEAN-CLAUDE SERVAIS

I opened this book with the word shock, since that’s what a great many people said they felt on election day and after. But as I’ve reflected on the word during the past months of writing, I started to question its accuracy in this context. A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured, when we have no idea what’s going on. 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. Given these stories are, for many of us, part of the very air we breathe, Trump really shouldn’t come as a shock. A billionaire president who boasts he can grab women by their genitals while calling Mexicans “rapists” and jeering at the disabled is the logical expression of a culture that grants indecent levels of impunity to the ultrarich, that is consumed with winner-take-all competition, and that is grounded in dominance-based logic at every level. We should have been expecting him. And indeed, m...

Because we can try to fight the global rise of right-wing demagoguery in two possible ways. There’s the establishment option embraced by centrist parties the world over. This promises a little more child care, better representation of women and people of color at the top, and maybe a few more solar panels. But this option also comes with the same old austerity logic, the same blind faith in markets, the same equation of endless consumption with happiness, the same Band-Aids on gaping wounds. There are many reasons why this limited vision is utterly failing to stop the surge of the Far Right around the world, but the main one is this: it does not have nearly enough to offer. It does nothing to address the real and legitimate grievances that supercharge the search for scapegoats, nor does it give the people most endangered by the rising Right enough hope for a better future. A society with extreme inequality, unmasked neo-fascist tendencies, and an unraveling climate is sick, and neoliberalism, as one of the major drivers of all of these crises, is grossly inadequate medicine. It offers only a weak no to the forces responsible, and it lacks a yes worth seizing. A great many of us are clearly ready for another approach: a captivating “yes” that lays out a plan for tangible improvements in daily life, unafraid of powerful words such as redistribution and reparation, and intent on challenging Western culture’s equation of a “good life” with ever-escalating creature comforts ins...