No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics

by Naomi Klein

In books, documentary films, and investigative reporting, I have documented a range of trends: the rise of Superbrands, the expanding power of private wealth over the political system, the global imposition of neoliberalism, often using racism and fear of the “other” as a potent tool, the damaging impacts of corporate free trade, and the deep hold that climate change denial has taken on the right side of the political spectrum. And as I began to research Trump, he started to seem to me like Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together out of the body parts of all of these and many other dangerous trends.

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.”

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.

He is the embodiment of the belief that money and power provide license to impose one’s will on others, whether that entitlement is expressed by grabbing women or grabbing the finite resources from a planet on the cusp of catastrophic warming.

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.

Most US voters did not cast a ballot for Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton received nearly 2.9 million more votes, a fact that continues to torment the sitting president. That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

And as the meeting I attended in Sydney suggested, there was a growing understanding, in the United States and beyond, that the pressing task ahead was to connect the dots among these movements in order to build a common agenda, and with it a winning progressive coalition—one grounded in an ethic of deep social inclusion and planetary care.

The Trump administration, far from being the story of one dangerous and outrageous figure, should be understood partly in this context—as a ferocious backlash against the rising power of overlapping social and political movements demanding a more just and safer world.

And for no one more than Donald Trump, a man who has merged so completely with his corporate brand that he is clearly unable to tell where one stops and the other begins.

At around this same time, a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional all-American manufacturers for market share. These were the Nikes and Apples and, later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Starbucks and so on. These pioneers had a different model: Create a transcendent idea or brand surrounding your company. Use it to connect with consumers who share its values. Then charge a steep premium for products that are less about the objects themselves than about the profound human desire to be part of a tribe, a circle of belonging.

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.

Moreover those original court filings make plain how the Trumps see public office: as a short-term investment to enormously swell the value of your commercial brand in the long run.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The problem is, even before Trump, no major economy was doing what was required. They were all still trying to have it all ways—introducing some solid green policies but then approving expanded fossil fuel extraction and new pipelines. It’s like eating lots of salad and a whole lot of junk food at the same time, and expecting to lose weight.

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.

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.

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.

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, at its core, is a rationale for greed.

To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project.

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.

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.

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.

We all cope with fear and uncertainty differently. A great many conservatives are dealing with their fears about a changing and destabilizing world by attempting to force back the clock. 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.

Still, I’m suspicious of the speed with which we are being told to move on. Because we do need to build as broad a coalition as possible against Trump and forces like him wherever we live—but we also need to avoid repeating the same mistakes that have created the conditions for the rise of Trumpism and its counterparts around the world.

If there is a single, overarching lesson to be drawn from the foul mood rising around the world, it may be this: we should never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the appeal of wielding power over “the other,” be they migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, women, the other in any form. Especially during times of economic hardship, when a great many people have good reason to fear that the jobs that can support a decent life are disappearing for good.

Trump speaks directly to that economic panic, and, simultaneously, to the resentment felt by a large segment of white America about the changing face of their country, about positions of power and privilege increasingly being held by people who do not look like them.

Much of the rage directed at Hillary Clinton during the campaign came from a similarly primal place. Here was not just a female candidate, but a woman who identifies with and is a product of the movement for women’s liberation, and who did not package her quest for power in either cuteness or coyness.

And it was a preview of the rooms packed with white men who would soon be making fateful decisions about women’s health and reproductive freedoms.

There is no shortage of sexual predators on the liberal side of the political spectrum, but the litany of allegations, accusations, and hush money that swirls around Trump’s inner circle is unlike anything we have seen before. No matter the allegation, it is met with a wall of denial, of powerful men vouching for other powerful men, sending a message to the world that women are not to be believed.

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.

To a terrifying degree, skin color and gender conformity are determining who is physically safe in the hands of the state, who is at risk from vigilante violence, who can express themselves without constant harassment, who can cross a border without terror, and who can worship without fear.

Similarly, if there was a problem with her focus on gender, sexuality, and racial identity, it was that Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.”

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.

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.

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.

But all that has been discarded, and we are allowing conditions eerily similar to those in the 1930s to be re-created today.

But here’s the catch: by “better,” he doesn’t mean better for unionized workers, and certainly not better for the environment. He means better in the same way he always means better—better for him and his corporate empire, better for the bankers and oil executives who make up his administration.

This left a vacuum for Trump and far-right parties in Europe to step in, exploit the justified rage at loss of control to unaccountable transnational institutions, direct it toward immigrants and Muslims and anyone else who makes an easy target, and take the project of corporate rule into new and uncharted waters.

Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, white workers grew progressively more pissed off at having their voices ignored. This opened the space for demagogues like Trump to step in and direct workers’ rage away from plutocrats like him, who had profited so lavishly from the outsourcing opportunities enabled by these deals, and at Mexican migrants instead, victims of the same policies that were hollowing out their communities, the very same bad deals.

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.

The Clinton Foundation established the annual Clinton Global Initiative, a kind of “Davos on the Hudson” featuring a continuous parade of oligarchs who, rather than pay their taxes at a fair rate, publicly shared their plans to fix the world out of the goodness of their hearts.

In this destabilized era, status-quo politicians often cannot get the job done. On the other hand, the choice that may at first seem radical, maybe even a little risky, may well be the more pragmatic one in this volatile era.

First came an intense crisis—natural disaster, terrorist attack—then came the blitzkrieg of pro-corporate policies. Often the strategy of crisis exploitation was discussed right out in the open—no dark conspiracy theories required.

Far more common is for neoliberal politicians to campaign on promises of cutting taxes and government waste while protecting essential services, and then, under cover of some sort of crisis (real or exaggerated), claim, with apparent reluctance and wringing of hands, that, sorry, we have no choice but to go after your health care.