by Naomi Klein
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2017 Naomi Klein
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Haymarket Books, Chicago, and in Great Britain by Allen Lane, a division of the Random House Group Limited, Penguin Random House UK, London. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Klein, Naomi, author
No is not enough : resisting the new shock politics and winning the world we need / Naomi Klein.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780735273993
eBook ISBN 9780735274006
1. Civil disobedience—United States. 2. Political culture—United States. 3. United States—Politics and government—2009–. 4. Political Participation—United States. 5. Political psychology—United States. 6. Political sociology. 7. Government, Resistance to—United States.
I. Title.
JC328.3.K55 2017 303.6 C2017-902203-2
Book design by CS Richardson
v4.1
a
For my mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein,
who teaches me more about shock resilience every day.
I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.
—JOHN TRUDELL
Santee Dakota activist, artist, and poet (1946–2015)
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
PART I | HOW WE GOT HERE: Rise of the Superbrands
1. How Trump Won by Becoming the Ultimate Brand
2. The First Family of Brands
3. The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games
PART II | WHERE WE ARE NOW: Climate of Inequality
4. The Climate Clock Strikes Midnight
5. The Grabber-in-Chief
6. Politics Hates a Vacuum
7. Learn to Love Economic Populism
PART III | HOW IT COULD GET WORSE: The Shocks to Come
8. Masters of Disaster:
Doing an End Run around Democracy
9. The Toxic To-Do List:
What To Expect When You Are Expecting a Crisis
PART IV | HOW THINGS COULD GET BETTER
10. When the Shock Doctrine Backfires
11. When No Was Not Enough
12. Lessons from Standing Rock:
Daring to Dream
13. A Time to Leap:
Because Small Steps Won’t Cut It
CONCLUSION: THE CARING MAJORITY WITHIN REACH
POSTSCRIPT: The Leap Manifesto
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Shock.
It’s a word that has come up again and again since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016—to describe the poll-defying election results, to describe the emotional state of many people watching his ascent to power, and to describe his blitzkrieg approach to policy making. A “shock to the system,” in fact, is precisely how his adviser Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly described the new era.
For almost two decades now, I’ve been studying large-scale shocks to societies—how they happen, how they are exploited by politicians and corporations, and how they are even deliberately deepened in order to gain advantage over a disoriented population. I have also reported on the flip side of this process: how societies that come together around an understanding of a shared crisis can change the world for the better.
Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I’ve had a strange feeling. It’s not just that he’s applying shock politics to the most powerful and heavily armed nation on earth. It’s more than that. 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.
Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, an investigation that spanned four decades of history, from Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. 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.”
Though Trump breaks the mold in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis. During Trump’s first week in office, when he was signing that tsunami of executive orders and people were just reeling, madly trying to keep up, I found myself thinking about the human rights advocate Halina Bortnowska’s description of Poland’s experience when the US imposed economic shock therapy on her country in the midst of Communism’s collapse. She described the velocity of change her country was going through as “the difference between dog years and human years,” and she observed that “you start witnessing these semi-psychotic reactions. You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when they’re so disoriented they don’t know—or no longer care—what those interests are.”
From the evidence so far, it’s clear that Trump and his top advisers are hoping for the sort of response Bortnowska described, that they are trying to pull off a domestic shock doctrine. 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.”
Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administration’s underlying goals. ExxonMobil for secretary of state. General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. 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.”
Much has been made of the conflict between Bannon’s Christian nationalism and the transnationalism of Trump’s more establishment aides, particularly his son-in-law Jared Kushner. And Bannon may well get voted off this gory reality show entirely before long (perhaps by the time you read these words). Which is why it’s worth underlining that when it comes to deconstructing the state, and outsourcing as much as possible to for-profit corporations, Bannon and Kushner are not in conflict but in perfect alignment.
As this has been unfolding, it struck me that what’s happening in Washington is not the usual passing of the baton between parties. It’s a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making. It seems that the economic interests that have long since paid off both major parties to do their bidding have decided they’re tired of playing the game. Apparently, all that wining and dining of elected officials, all that cajoling and legalized bribery, insulted their sense of divine entitlement. So now they’re cutting out the middlemen—those needy politicians who are supposed to protect the public interest—and doing what all top dogs do when they want something done right: they are doing it themselves.
Which is why serious questions about conflicts of interest and breaches of ethics barely receive a response. Just as Trump stonewalled on releasing his tax returns, so he has completely refused to sell, or to stop benefiting from, his business empire. That decision, given the Trump Organization’s reliance on foreign governments to grant valuable trademark licenses and permits, may in fact contravene the United States Constitution’s prohibition on presidents receiving gifts or any “emolument” from foreign governments. Indeed, a lawsuit making this allegation has already been launched.
But the Trumps seem unconcerned. 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.
This situation is made all the more squalid by the fact that Trump was never the head of a traditional company but has, rather, long been the figurehead of an empire built around his personal brand—a brand that has, along with his daughter Ivanka’s brand, already benefited from its merger with the US presidency in countless ways. The Trump family’s business model is part of a broader shift in corporate structure that has taken place within many brand-based multinationals, one with transformative impacts on culture and the job market, trends that I wrote about in my first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. What this model tells us is that the very idea that there could be—or should be—any distinction between the Trump brand and the Trump presidency is a concept the current occupant of the White House cannot begin to comprehend. The presidency is in fact the crowning extension of the Trump brand.
—
As I explored Trump’s inextricable relationship with his commercial brand, and its implications for the future of politics, I began to see why so many of the attacks on him have failed to stick—and how we can identify ways of resisting him that will be more effective.
The fact that such defiant levels of profiteering from public office can unfold in full view is disturbing enough. As are so many of Trump’s actions in his first months in office. But history shows us that, however destabilized things are now, the shock doctrine means they could get a lot worse.
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).
In addition to the obvious threats this entire project poses to those who are already most vulnerable, it’s also a vision that can be counted on to generate wave after wave of crises and shocks. Economic shocks, as market bubbles—inflated thanks to deregulation—burst; security shocks, as blowback from anti-Islamic policies and foreign aggression comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do when the safety and environmental regulations that prevent chaos are slashed.
All this is dangerous. Even more so is the way the Trump administration can be relied upon to exploit these shocks to push through the more radical planks of its agenda.
A large-scale crisis—whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash—would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply. This, in turn, would provide the cover to push through aspects of the Trump agenda that require a further suspension of core democratic norms—such as his pledge to deny entry to all Muslims (not only those from selected countries), his Twitter threat to bring in “the feds” to quell street violence in Chicago, or his obvious desire to place restrictions on the press. A large-enough economic crisis would offer an excuse to dismantle programs like Social Security, which Trump pledged to protect but which many around him have wanted gone for decades.
Trump may have other reasons for upping the crisis level too. As the Argentine novelist César Aira wrote in 2001, “Any change is a change in the topic.” Trump has already proven head-spinningly adept at changing the subject, using everything from mad tweets to Tomahawk missiles. Indeed, his air assault on Syria, in response to a gruesome chemical weapons attack, won him the most laudatory press coverage of his presidency (in some quarters, it sparked an ongoing shift to a more respectful tone). Whether in response to further revelations about Russian connections or scandals related to his labyrinthine international business dealings, we can expect much more of this topic changing—and nothing has the ability to change the topic quite like a large-scale shock.
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.
This is, today, a global phenomenon, not one restricted to the United States. After the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, the French government declared a state of emergency that banned political gatherings of more than five people—and then extended that status, and the ability to restrict public demonstrations, for months. In Britain, after the shock of the Brexit vote, many said they felt as though they’d woken up in a new, unrecognizable country. It was in that context that the UK’s Conservative government began floating a range of regressive reforms, including the idea that the only way for Britain to regain its competitiveness is by slashing regulations and taxes on the wealthy so much that it would effectively become a tax haven for all of Europe. It was also in this context that Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election against her low-polling rival, clearly in the hope of securing another term in office before the public has a chance to rebel against new austerity measures that are the antithesis of how Brexit was originally sold to voters.
—
For each of my previous books I spent five or six years deeply researching the subject, examining it from many angles, and reporting from the regions most impacted. The results are hefty tomes,
with a whole lot of endnotes. In contrast, I’ve written this book in just a few months. I’ve kept it brief and conversational, knowing that few of us have time these days for tomes, and that others are already writing about parts of this intricate story that they grasp far better than me. But I’ve come to realize that the research I’ve done over the years can help shed some light on crucial aspects of Trumpism. Tracing the roots of his business model and of his economic policies, reflecting on similar destabilizing moments from history, and learning from people who found effective ways to resist shock tactics can go some way toward explaining how we ended up on this dangerous road, how we can best withstand the shocks to come, and, more importantly, how we can quickly get to much safer ground. This, then, is the beginning of a road map for shock resistance.
Here’s one thing I’ve learned from reporting from dozens of locations in the midst of crisis, whether it was Athens rocked by Greece’s debt debacle, or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or Baghdad during the US occupation: these tactics can be resisted. To do so, two crucial things have to happen. First, we need a firm grasp on how shock politics work and whose interests they serve. That understanding is how we get out of shock quickly and start fighting back. Second, and equally important, we have to tell a different story from the one the shock doctors are peddling, a vision of the world compelling enough to compete head-to-head with theirs. This values-based vision must offer a different path, away from serial shocks—one based on coming together across racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divides, rather than being wrenched further apart, and one based on healing the planet rather than unleashing further destabilizing wars and pollution. Most of all, that vision needs to offer those who are hurting—for lack of jobs, lack of health care, lack of peace, lack of hope—a tangibly better life.
