by Naomi Klein
Meanwhile, as the administration prepared the ground for slashing funding to women’s shelters, family planning, and violence-against-women programs, grassroots fundraising efforts took off in response. Planned Parenthood reported an astonishing 260,000 donors in the month after the election, with nearly a quarter of the contributions coming in the name of Mike Pence (during the election campaign, the vice president had said he wanted the landmark, pro-choice Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision sent “to the ash heap of history”).
All of these acts of solidarity and expressions of unity reflect the fact that, after decades of “siloed” politics, more and more people understand that we can only beat Trumpism in cooperation with one another—no one movement can win on its own. The trick is going to be to stick together, and have each other’s backs as never before. That’s why over fifty progressive groups, drawn from a dizzying array of struggles, greeted the start of Trump’s cabinet hearings with a declaration of “United Resistance”—publicly pledging “to take action to support one another, to be accountable to one another, and to act together in solidarity, whether in the streets, in the halls of power, or in our communities every day. When they come for one, they come for us all.”
Nor can we afford to restrict our vision to any one sphere. As Angela Davis put it, concluding a rousing speech at the Women’s March on Washington, “The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music. This is just the beginning and in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.’ ”
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The refusal to be bullied by Trump reaches beyond US borders, across the North American continent. When the Muslim travel ban was announced, thousands of Canadians, led by Muslim and immigrant-rights groups, immediately sprang into action, demanding that Canada provide safe haven to the migrants and refugees being denied entry to the USA. There’s also a burgeoning support movement to welcome the growing numbers of immigrants fleeing the States and crossing into Canada by foot, even in subzero weather (with horrifying stories of fingers and toes lost to frostbite).
Canadian refugee law currently treats the United States as a “safe” country, and therefore not a legitimate point from which to flee and seek asylum in Canada. But many are now putting pressure on the Canadian government—through petitions and demonstrations—to change those rules. As a letter from a group of law professors pointed out, Trump’s actions “reflect the very bigotry, xenophobia and nativist fear-mongering that the international refugee regime was designed to counteract.”
In Mexico, meanwhile, tens of thousands of people across more than a dozen cities have protested Trump’s immigration policies, as well as his anti-Mexican ethnic smears. Outside North America, the pressure is on too. In the UK, nearly two million people signed an official petition to block Trump from making a state visit to Britain (Trump, reportedly, is demanding a ride in the golden royal carriage). There is also a growing international movement calling on governments to impose trade sanctions on the United States for violating the emissions reduction pledges it made under the Paris climate accord. And the movement to jam the Trump brand is growing, including a global call to boycott companies that rent space in Trump’s various towers, as well as campaigns to push developers to drop the Trump name from cities’ skylines.
…and around the World
Nearly every country has its own white nationalist or neo-fascist movement to confront, and there are many signs that resistance is rising. In response to the anti-immigrant backlash in Europe, huge demonstrations have been held in cities across the continent—from Berlin to Helsinki—to insist that migrants are welcome. In Barcelona, more than 100,000 people heeded a call from their new mayor (a former housing rights activist) and marched through the streets under the banner “volem acollir” (We welcome them).
Many grassroots organizations have sprung up to provide direct aid where governments have failed. When large numbers of migrants began arriving in Greece in 2015, they encountered a people who had “endured five years of austerity shock treatment, who had seen their lives degraded and their social, political and labor rights vanishing,” writes sociologist Theodoros Karyotis. And yet, rather than jealously guard what little they had left, locals met migrants with an “outpouring of solidarity.” Thousands of Greeks opened their homes to refugees, millions of home-cooked meals were delivered to refugee camps, free health care was provided in community-run clinics, and a warehouse in a worker-run factory was opened to collect donated items such as clothes and baby food.
In Germany, as proposals surfaced that migrants be housed in dodgy conditions that included school gyms, vacant office buildings, empty warehouses, army barracks, and even a former Nazi forced-labor camp, people organized an “Airbnb for refugees,” matching migrant families in need of a safe place to stay with spare rooms in local houses. The effort has now spread to thirteen other countries. My country is home to a remarkable pro-refugee movement that has seen thousands of Canadians sponsor Syrian families, taking financial and interpersonal responsibility for the newcomers’ needs for one year as they adjusted to a new language, culture, and climate. The New York Times described it as “the world’s most personal resettlement program.”
Most encouragingly, while the early assumption was that Trump’s rise could set off a wave of far-right electoral victories, in some countries it seems to be having the opposite effect. Witnessing Trump’s ugly administration in action, some electorates are deciding to stop the tide. Ahead of elections in the Netherlands in March 2017, many predicted a win for Geert Wilders and his profoundly anti-Islamic and xenophobic Freedom Party. Instead, Wilders’s support suddenly collapsed and the governing party held on to the most seats. But the biggest winner in the election was the GreenLeft party, which went from holding four seats to capturing fourteen. The party’s leader, Jesse Klaver, is of Moroccan and Indonesian descent and campaigned with a bold antiracist message. On election day, Klaver had advice for other politicians in Europe facing resurgent right-wing populism and racism: “Don’t try to fake the populace. Stand for your principles. Be straight. Be pro-refugee. Be pro-European…. You can stop populism.”
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It’s a piece of advice that many heeded in France a couple of months later, though ultimately not enough. Faced with the threat of a victory for the Far Right’s Marine Le Pen, many withdrew their support from centrist candidates, fearing a repeat of Clinton vs. Trump, and lent it instead to the left populist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He had campaigned on an anti–free trade, pro-peace, and radical economic redistribution agenda and started attracting crowds as large as seventy thousand, more than any other candidate. Against all odds, Mélenchon—who was initially reported to have the support of just 9 percent of voters—managed to capture 19.6 percent of votes cast in the first ballot, putting him within just 2 percentage points of making it to the final runoff. In the final vote, Emmanuel Macron, a neoliberal former banker, trounced Marine Le Pen, though her extremist party still received a record number of votes. And roughly one-third of eligible voters chose to express their displeasure with both Le Pen and Macron by either abstaining or spoiling their ballots. In Spain, meanwhile, candidates with deep roots in social movements have won mayoralty races in Barcelona and Madrid, and have begun introducing concrete policies that welcome refugees, battle homelessness, and fight pollution at the same time.
Will Solidarity Survive a Major Shock?
These reactions are a vast improvement over the far too successful post–September 11 divide-and-conquer politics. So far, Trump’s shock tactics aren’t disorienting the opposition. Instead, they are waking people up, in the United States and around the world. But of course the new alliances in the US have not yet had to face a major security crisis or a state of emergency. The real test will be whether the bravery and solidarity seen so far can
be sustained when people are being told they are in imminent danger, and that the group they’re expressing solidarity with could be harboring the individual who set off a bomb last week.
Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that many of the relationships being built in these early days will be strong enough to counter the fear that inevitably sets in during a state of emergency. If Trump tries to use a crisis event to ram through draconian measures, this emerging resistance is poised to rise up and act as a human barrier to say: “No—not this time.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN NO WAS NOT ENOUGH
Here’s the trouble. Just saying no to shock tactics is often not enough to stop them, at least not on its own. It’s a lesson I learned the year after The Shock Doctrine came out, when Wall Street suffered its worst crisis since the Great Crash of 1929.
We saw how the 2008 financial crisis—the clear result of unchecked greed in the financial sector—was exploited all around the world, but particularly in southern Europe, to extract punishing, shock doctrine–style concessions from regular people. Europeans resisted these cynical tactics with incredible tenacity and courage (well beyond anything seen so far in the United States under Trump). They occupied squares and plazas and stayed for months. They staged general strikes that shut down cities and, in some cases, even voted to throw the bastards out. Outside Europe, in Tunisia, it was a sudden rise in food prices that became the catalyst for the wave of uprisings that came to be called the Arab Spring.
One of the street slogans in this period, which originated in Italy before spreading to Greece and Spain, was: “We will not pay for your crisis!” Millions of people understood that this was what was being asked of them. They were getting stuck with the bankers’ bills, forced to pay for their sins with a higher cost of living and lower wages. And they said no. Loudly, unmistakably, and in tremendous numbers.
But in the vast majority of cases, it wasn’t enough—the economic punishments kept coming. At times, a particularly egregious austerity measure might be successfully fought back with street protests. Quebec students fought off a tuition increase in 2012, much as Chilean students fought for an overhaul of their broken education system in 2011. But the austerity agenda ground on.
More importantly, this wave of protest and occupations did not produce a fundamental change in the economic model, one that could shift us off the road headed toward that world of Green Zones and Red Zones. When the failures of our current model revealed themselves in a manner more spectacular than at any point since the Great Depression, we did not collectively seize that moment to grab the wheel of history and swerve.
The responsibility for that is collective. No one person or political party is to blame for the roads not taken. But the failures in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash were starkest in the United States, because of the remarkable number of factors that seemed aligned in favor of transformative, rather than incremental, change. Which is why it’s worth revisiting that moment of crisis in some depth, not to point fingers, but to understand what it looks like to miss such a rare political opening—so we don’t repeat those mistakes when the next economic shock hits.
Let’s cast our minds back to the beginning of 2009. Barack Obama was entering the White House as the first African-American president, a decisive rebuke to eight years of Bush. He had easily carried the popular vote and for the next two years his fellow Democrats would control Congress.
Obama also had a clear democratic mandate to do more than tinker with the shattered economy. In the final three months before he took office, the country had lost almost two million jobs and the picture going into 2009 looked grim. The idea of taking on Wall Street was incredibly popular (it still is) because the big financial institutions that had tanked the global economy were the reason so many people had lost their homes and jobs and seen their life savings evaporate. The banks had no defenders—their executives were virtually in hiding. On the campaign trail, Obama had talked forcefully about how he would rebuild the economy in favor of “the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street” while standing up to “the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street.”
The new administration had a mandate to battle the climate crisis too. After eight years of denial and obstructionism under George W. Bush, Obama had pledged to put a price on carbon, and to create five million green jobs by making major investments, including in renewable energy and hybrid cars. When Obama won the Democratic primary, he told the cheering crowd that this would be remembered as the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow and “the planet began to heal.” Yes, he was weak on the details, but this was no ordinary election, and there is no question that the democratic mandate for boldness was there.
When the Banks Were on Their Knees
Looking back, it’s really striking how much economic power Obama and the Democrats had in that short window before they lost Congress. First, they had a free hand to design a stimulus program to rebuild Main Street—and to make it as big as required. After decades of unrelenting cutbacks in social spending, there was suddenly a widespread consensus on the need for the federal government to pull the economy out of recession. The stimulus plan ended up being $800 billion, a staggering sum, although, at the time, it was widely criticized for being too small.
And that was not the only tool that Obama had to make good on his promises to rebuild Main Street. The banks were on their knees, receiving trillions of dollars in public money in direct bailouts and loan guarantees, and there were very lively and heated debates going on, in the United States and around the world, about what governments should demand in exchange for saving the banks from the consequences of their own greed. Should they cap executive salaries? Restore Glass–Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks? Should they throw the CEOs responsible for the global crisis in jail? Should the banks be permanently nationalized and run as public trusts? Some of this may sound radical today, but it’s worth remembering that these were the actual debates going on in 2009, even in staid publications like the Financial Times. And there were similar discussions about the fate of the big auto companies, which were also heading to Washington needing bailouts. Two of the Big Three—General Motors and Chrysler—had to declare bankruptcy that same year and were put under government control.
So, let’s zoom out and imagine what might have been…. Obama had the electoral mandate for real change, he had a virtual blank check to design a stimulus package, and he had an opportunity to impose much-needed changes on two failing sectors of the US economy—the banks and the auto companies.
Imagine if the Democrats had used the leverage they had in 2009 and 2010 to make serious, substantive restructuring demands of the banks and the auto giants in exchange for continuing to bail them out. Imagine if Obama, who had been elected on a promise to rebuild Main Street, solve climate change, and stabilize the economy, had treated the banking and automotive sectors as components of a unified vision for reviving the economy, while fighting inequality and climate change at the same time.
To be concrete, what if the auto companies had been mandated to restructure themselves so they were producing the vehicles of the low-carbon future—electric cars, electric buses, and light rail? In the midst of the financial crisis, two million manufacturing jobs were lost and hundreds of factories closed down. What if, instead of letting that happen, those factories had been refurbished and retooled? A similar industrial transformation took place during World War II, when US factories were enlisted for the war effort.
It would have been expensive, yes, but the banks could have been required to spend a healthy portion of their bailout money providing the necessary loans for this industrial transformation (as it was, they hoarded the cash). And stimulus money could have been spent to help workers get the training they needed to fully participate in the transition, building the public infrastructure—transit, energy grids—of this same green economy. Obama’s infrastructure bill did include important
support for green energy and green projects, but the clean infrastructure of the future, including public transit and light rail, was shortchanged in favor of the dirty infrastructure of the past, such as highways. And the opportunities presented by the bank and auto bailouts were squandered almost completely. Even after all their failures, the attitude in Washington was still: the banks know best, the auto companies know best, our job is just to get these industries on their feet as quickly as possible so they can get back to a gently tweaked version of business as usual.
The Jobs Revolution That Wasn’t
This road not taken matters because, right now, one of the biggest obstacles to serious action on climate change is the fossil fuel companies’ successful positioning of themselves as the only ones capable of creating well-paying jobs and keeping the lights on. Obama and the Democrats could have buried that claim once and for all.
Other countries, in the same period, did bury the claim. Over the past decade, the German government has treated the green economy as the main way to revive its manufacturing sector. In the process, it has created 400,000 jobs, and now 30 percent of the country’s energy comes from renewables. And Germany has the strongest economy in Europe by far. The energy transition there is incomplete—Germany remains excessively reliant on coal—and its government has inflicted merciless austerity on other countries while choosing another course for itself. But if the US had followed Germany’s domestic example, it would have been so far along the road to a renewables-based economy that it would have been impossible for Trump to undo—no matter how many executive orders he signed. And who knows? The new manufacturing jobs and improved infrastructure might well have been enough to deprive him of his win altogether.
