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

by Naomi Klein

It’s a reminder that Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics. 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.