by Naomi Klein
I don’t claim to know exactly what that vision looks like. I am figuring it out with everyone else, and I am convinced it can only be birthed out of a genuinely collaborative process, with leadership coming from those most brutalized by our current system. In the final chapters of this book, I’ll explore some early and very hopeful grassroots collaborations between dozens of organizations and thinkers who have come together to begin to lay out that kind of agenda, one capable of competing with rising militarism, nationalism, and corporatism. Though still in its early stages, it is becoming possible to see the outlines of a progressive majority, one grounded in a bold plan for the safe and caring world we all want and need.
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.
Yes is the beacon in the coming storms that will prevent us from losing our way.
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This book’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion—a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century. Trump is the product of powerful systems of thought that rank human life based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, and physical ability—and that have systematically used race as a weapon to advance brutal economic policies since the earliest days of North American colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. He is also the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one-man megabrand, whose wife and children are spin-off brands, with all the pathologies and conflicts of interest inherent in that. 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. He is the product of a business culture that fetishizes “disruptors” who make their fortunes by flagrantly ignoring both laws and regulatory standards. Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project—one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones—that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs as superheroes who will save humanity. In 2002, George W. Bush threw a ninetieth-birthday party at the White House for the man who was the intellectual architect of that war on the public sphere, the radical free-market economist Milton Friedman. At the celebration, then US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.” He was right—and Donald Trump is a direct consequence of those ideas.
In this sense, there is an important way in which Trump is not shocking. He is the entirely predictable, indeed clichéd outcome of ubiquitous ideas and trends that should have been stopped long ago. Which is why, even if this nightmarish presidency were to end tomorrow, the political conditions that produced it, and which are producing replicas around the world, will remain to be confronted. 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.
About that word we: as you read, you may notice that I sometimes say we about the United States and sometimes about Canada. One reason for that is pretty simple. I am a citizen of both countries, with deep ties and relationships on both sides of the border. My parents are American, and my extended family all lives in the United States. But I was raised in Canada, and I choose to live here. (On election night, I got a text from my father: “Aren’t you glad we already moved to Canada?”) Most of my journalism, however, and much of my political work, is in the States, where I’ve participated in countless meetings and debates about how we can collectively rise to the responsibility of this moment.
Another reason I sometimes say we about the US has nothing to do with passports. The fact is, the US presidency impacts everyone on earth. No one is fully protected from the actions of the world’s largest economy, the planet’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the nation with the world’s largest military arsenal. Those on the receiving end of Trump’s missiles and monstrous bombs bear the greatest burdens and risks by far. But with powers so vast and policies so reckless, everyone on this planet is potentially in the blast zone, the fallout zone, and certainly in the warming zone.
There’s no one story that can explain everything about how we arrived at this juncture, no one blueprint for how to fix things—our world is far too braided and complicated for that. This is but one attempt to look at how we got to this surreal political moment; how, in concrete ways, it could get a lot worse; and how, if we keep our heads, we might just be able to flip the script and arrive at a radically better future.
To get started, we first need to understand what we’re saying no to—because that No on the cover is not just to an individual or even a group of individuals (though it is that too). We’re also saying no to the system that has elevated them to such heights. And then let’s move to a yes—a yes that will bring about change so fundamental that today’s corporate takeover will be relegated to a historical footnote, a warning to our kids. And Donald Trump and his fellow travelers will be seen for what they are: a symptom of a deep sickness, one that we decided, collectively, to come together and heal.
Note: A small portion of the writing here has appeared in previous essays, books, and speeches; the vast majority, however, is appearing for the first time. Please visit noisnotenough.org for a list of ways to plug into the movements described in these pages, and to connect with many more organizations and theorists.
PART I
HOW WE GOT HERE: RISE OF THE SUPERBRANDS
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
“Beyond Vietnam,” 1967
CHAPTER ONE
HOW TRUMP WON BY BECOMING THE ULTIMATE BRAND
The night Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 election and forty-fifth president of the United States was particularly disorienting for me because it wasn’t a night at all. I was in Sydney, Australia, on a lecture tour, and because of the time difference, it was late morning on Wednesday, November 9, where I was. For almost everyone in my life, it was Tuesday night, and friends were sending texts from drunken election-night viewing parties. But for Australians, it was the start of a normal workday, which for me just contributed to the overall feeling of vertigo when the results started coming in.
At the time, I was in a meeting with around fifteen heads of various Australian environmental, labor, and social justice organizations. We were having a discussion that circled around a key insight. Up to now, the fights against global warming, racism, inequality, violations of Indigenous, migrant and women’s rights, as well as many other progressive battles, have often been broken up into their own boxes or silos. But we had been asking, as so many movements are today: how do they intersect? What root causes connect them? How can these issues be tackled in tandem, at the same time? What values would govern such a movement? And how could it translate into political power? With a group of colleagues, I had been working on how to build that kind of cross-movement “people’s platform” in North America through a project called the Leap Manifesto—which I’ll come back to in the final chapter—and there were many Australian groups who were int
erested in exploring a similar approach.
For the first hour or so, it was a pretty upbeat meeting, with lots of excitement about what was possible. People were feeling totally relaxed about the US elections. Like many progressives and liberals, and even many traditional conservatives, we were sure Trump would lose.
Then everyone’s phones started to buzz. And the room grew quieter and quieter, and everyone around the light-filled boardroom began to look increasingly panicked. All of a sudden, the reason for gathering—the idea that we could help spark an integrated leap forward on climate action, racial justice, decent jobs, and more—felt utterly absurd. It was as if everyone instantly understood, without even having to speak, that we were about to be blasted backward by a gale-force wind and all we could do now was try to hold our ground. The idea of forward momentum on any one of the pressing crises on the table seemed to evaporate before our eyes.
Then, without anyone calling it to a close, the meeting dispersed, with colleagues barely saying goodbye to one another. CNN was calling out like some sort of irresistible homing device and we all silently went in search of bigger screens.
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 on the rest of the planet, overwhelming majorities of people told pollsters that if they had been magically able to vote in this pivotal election, they would have cast a ballot for Clinton. (A notable exception to this global trend was Russia, where Trump enjoyed strong support.)
Within this very large anti-Trump camp, we all have different stories about how we felt on that night/day. For many, the defining emotion was shock that this could happen in the United States. For a great many others, it was grief at seeing long-held knowledge about the depth of US racism and misogyny so vividly confirmed. For others, the feeling was one of loss at watching the first female candidate for United States president lose her chance to become a role model for their children. Still others were flooded with feelings of rage that such a compromised candidate was ever put forward against Trump in the first place. And for millions inside the US and out, the primary emotion was fear—a raw bodily knowledge that Trump’s presidency would act as a catalyst to unleash extreme acts of racism, violence, and oppression. Many people experienced a mixture of these emotions, and more.
And many also understood that this election result was not only about one man in one country. Trump is but one strand of a seemingly global contagion. We are seeing a surge of authoritarian, xenophobic, far-right politics—from Marine Le Pen in France, to Narendra Modi in India, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to the UK Independence Party, to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and all of their counterparts (some explicitly neo-fascist) threatening to take power around the world.
The reason I am sharing my own experience of election day/night in Sydney is that I can’t shake the feeling that there is something important to learn from the way Trump’s win was able to cut short our conversation, how it severed plans for a forward-looking agenda without so much as a debate. It was perfectly understandable that we all felt that way on election day. But if we accept the premise that, from here on in, the battles are all defense, all about holding our ground against Trump-style regressive attacks, then we will end up in a very dangerous place indeed. Because the ground we were on before Trump was elected is the ground that produced Trump. Ground many of us understood to constitute a social and ecological emergency, even without this latest round of setbacks.
Of course the attacks coming from Trump and his kindred demagogues around the world need resisting fiercely. But we cannot spend the next four years only playing defense. The crises are all so urgent, they won’t allow us that lost time. On one issue I know a fair amount about, climate change, humanity has a finite window in which to act, after which protecting anything like a stable climate becomes impossible. And as we’ll see in Chapter 4, that window is closing fast.
So we need, somehow, to fight defense and offense simultaneously—to resist the attacks of the present day and to find space to build the future we need. To say no and yes at the same time.
But before we can get to what we want instead of Trump and all that he and his administration represent, we need to take an unflinching look at where we are and how we got here, as well as how things will likely get a lot worse in the short term. And, with respect to the latter, be advised: the doom is pretty persuasive. But we can’t let it be debilitating. Mapping this territory is tough, but it’s the only way to avoid repeating past mistakes and arrive at lasting solutions.
Not a Transition, but a Corporate Coup
What Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—the latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more.
According to NBC News in December 2016, Trump’s picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including “special adviser” Carl Icahn, who’s worth more than $15 billion on his own). Moreover, the key figures who populate Trump’s cabinet are more than just a representative sample of the ultrarich. To an alarming extent, he has collected a team of individuals who made their personal fortunes by knowingly causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and to the planet itself, often in the midst of crisis. It almost appears to be some sort of job requirement.
There’s junk banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, once chairman and lead investor in “foreclosure machine” OneWest, which kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial collapse. There’s Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest private oil company in the world. The company he headed bankrolled and amplified junk climate science for decades, and lobbied fiercely, behind the scenes, against meaningful international climate action, all while figuring out how Exxon could profit from a warming world. And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments.
We Were on a Roll
It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans. By 2016, no major sporting or cultural event—from the Oscars to the Super Bowl—could take place without some recognition of how the conversation about race and state violence had changed. Women’s movements were turning sexual violence into a front-page issue, shining a spotlight on “rape culture,” changing the conversation about high-profile men accused of sexual crimes like Bill Cosby, and helping force the ouster of Roger Ailes from the top job at Fox News, where he was accused of sexually harassing more than two dozen women (allegations he denies).
The climate movement was also on a roll, winning victory after victory against oil pipelines, natural gas fracking, and Arctic drilling, very often with resurgent Indigenous communities in the lead. And more victories were on the way: the climate accord negotiated in Paris in 2015 contained commitments to keep temperatures at a level that would require trillions of dollars’ worth of extremely profitable fossil fuel assets to stay in the ground. For a company like ExxonMobil, a realization of those goals was an existential t
hreat.
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. Rather than risk the possibility of further progress (and further lost profits), this gang of predatory lenders, planet-destabilizing polluters, war and “security” profiteers joined forces to take over the government and protect their ill-gotten wealth. After decades of seeing the public sphere privatized in bits and pieces, Trump and his appointees have now seized control of the government itself. The takeover is complete.
Granting the Corporate Wish List
In the face of his total lack of government experience, Trump sold himself to voters with a somewhat novel two-pronged pitch. First: I’m so rich that I don’t need to be bought off. And second: You can trust me to fix this corrupt system because I know it from the inside—I gamed it as a businessman, I bought politicians, I dodged taxes, I outsourced production. So who better than me and my equally rich friends to drain the swamp?
Not surprisingly, something else has occurred. Trump and his cabinet of former executives are remaking government at a startling pace to serve the interests of their own businesses, their former businesses, and their tax bracket as a whole. Within hours of taking office, Trump called for a massive tax cut, which would see corporations pay just 15 percent (down from 35 percent), and pledged to slash regulations by 75 percent. His tax plan includes a range of other breaks and loopholes for very wealthy people like the ones inhabiting his cabinet (not to mention himself). He appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to head up a “swat team” stacked with corporate executives who have been tasked with finding new regulations to eliminate, new programs to privatize, and new ways to make the US government “run like a great American company.” (According to an analysis by Public Citizen, Trump met with at least 190 corporate executives in less than three months in office—before announcing that visitor logs would no longer be made public). Pushed on what the administration had accomplished of substance in its first months, budget director Mick Mulvaney cited Trump’s hail of executive orders and stressed this: “Most of these are laws and regulations getting rid of other laws. Regulations getting rid of other regulations.”
