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Summary
Summary
New York Times Bestseller National Book Award Longlist Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 Donald Trump's takeover of the White House is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. His reckless agenda--including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy--will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment. Acclaimed journalist, activist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and "brand bullies." From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century--the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say "no." Our historical moment demands more: a credible and inspiring "yes," a roadmap to reclaiming the populist ground from those who would divide us--one that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need. This timely, urgent book from one of our most influential thinkers offers a bracing positive shock of its own, helping us understand just how we got here, and how we can, collectively, come together and heal.
Author Notes
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Canada on May 8, 1970. She attended the University of Toronto and began writing there for the student newspaper, The Varsity. Klein was offered a series of editorial jobs in newspapers and magazines and this prevented her from getting a final degree from the university. She worked for The Toronto Globe and Mail and This Magazine.
She is an author and social activist, who is known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization. Her books include No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She received the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Klein deconstructs the ways in which Donald Trump's presidency represents a culmination of free-market policy, wealth concentration, and media manipulation to create a Frankenstein's monster that has the ability to do harm that will impact the world for generations. She identifies strategies both local and global that people can use to minimize the damage. Marling reads in a soft, smooth voice that draws listeners in most effectively during the more personal parts of the narrative, such as when Klein talks about how she has experienced Trump's rise and early presidency or when discussing her child's future. But Marling falters capturing Klein's command and intensity when delving into the details of Trump's crass antics, economic interests, questionable dealings, and encouragement of white supremacists. Klein's prose hints at anger, disdain, and reproach, but Marling's tone sounds lackadaisical and even passive, which is antithetical to the book's overall message. A Haymarket paperback. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In her 2007 best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, Klein alerted people, as the subtitle put it, to the rise of disaster capitalism. Ten years later, she asserts that the disaster, personified in the Trump administration, is here. Corporations have completed the coup they began decades ago, barely trying to cover the havoc they wreak. Institutions that are supposed to protect the citizenry are shaky. This book, which chronicles how we got where we are, is not going to make anyone suffering from dislocation, even fear, in the era of Trump feel better until, perhaps, the final chapters. There Klein puts forth a progressive agenda that asks people to take a leap forward to counter the dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable. With current events moving at warp speed, some of the book already seems a bit out-of-date, including the tired arguments about how Bernie Sanders could have beaten Donald Trump (though she does admit that scenario might not have played out after the right wing turned its full force on the senator). Even The Leap, the platform she heralds, which aims to link movements and uses words like redistribution and reparations, echoes 50-year-old Summer of Love tropes. Who and what will win the global war of ideas remain to be seen, but Klein gets the anti-austerity, anti-corporate, pro-community program on the table in a forthright, readable way.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2017 Booklist
Guardian Review
Klein's new study in shock politics is a warning of the enormous toxic potential of the Trump presidency and a call to oppose it. Refusal needs to turn into resistance Lately the pace of news has felt so fast and its volume so overwhelming that the very idea of a political book seems quaint, a relic of the gentler and more carefree time before we were all pinned to the floor by the social media firehose. Naomi Klein has written No Is Not Enough at near internet speed, a warning of the enormous toxic potential of the Donald Trump presidency and a call to oppose it. As the title suggests, Klein wants her readers to move from refusal to resistance, from a passive stance of opposition to engagement in a programme of action. If the convulsions of the last year have taught us anything, it's that we can't wait for the dust to settle and clarity to emerge. Turbulence is, at least for the foreseeable future, our new condition, and we must learn to function within it. We have to teach ourselves to stand upright on a moving deck. Klein emerged as a star of the 1990s social movements that were trying to frame a politics of opposition to capitalist globalisation. Was exchange value the only kind of value? What about the environmental, social and cultural formations that were being reorganised (and in some cases damaged or destroyed) by the logic of the market? Klein's widely-read 2000 book No Logo packaged and synthesised ideas that had been circulating in anti-capitalist circles during the previous decade, helping a general readership to understand changes taking place in corporations, which had begun to outsource many of their functions and view themselves primarily as "brands", deployers of intellectual property that did not need, for example, to do their own manufacturing or distribution. It was, as she puts it in No Is Not Enough, "a race toward weightlessness; whoever owned the least, had the fewest employees on the payroll and produced the most powerful images as opposed to things, won the race". Klein points out that Trump's business has followed that trajectory. As a property developer, the future president was (by Manhattan standards) only moderately successful, his primary distinction being an above average appetite for seeing himself in the media. His innovation, helped by his position as host of The Apprentice, was to brand high-end real estate -- not just hotels and resorts, but office towers, apartment buildings and golf courses. Klein dissects the values of the Trump brand, noting that it doesn't stand for quality or innovation or taste, but for "richness" itself, associating the consumer with wealth in its most direct and uninflected form. In Trumpworld there are only two existential categories: winners and losers. Trump stands for winning, and if you oppose him, you are a loser. His support is curiously immune to scandals and failings that would have sunk other politicians, a curious fact that Klein ascribes to the migration of branding into politics. Trump has shown that "you don't need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created". Trump's brand is that he's the boss and part of being the boss is that the rules don't apply to him. One strategy for opposing him is to attack the brand. It's why, for example, a red line for interviewers has always been any suggestion that his fortune is not as large as he claims. The most consequential part of Klein's analysis stems from personal experience. The social movements were gaining traction when 9/11 happened. "The era of the so-called War on Terror pretty much wiped our movement off the map in North America and Europe," she writes. Intimidated (or seduced) by the rhetoric of the "clash of civilisations" and the harsh new security environment, many participants withdrew their support. "Antiglobalisation is so yesterday," ran a headline in Canada's National Post, a few days after the attacks. The shock of 9/11 was exploited by various actors to inaugurate a "security bubble", in which police and security powers were extended and vast resources were diverted from other uses to fight the war on terror. In The Shock Doctrine (2007), Klein argued that there is a playbook for exploiting shock events such as 9/11 and the Iraq war. As she puts it in No Is Not Enough : "Wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called 'extraordinary politics', suspend some or all democratic norms -- and then ram the corporate wish list through as quickly as possible." This wish list may include the seizure of land and resources, increased military spending, privatisation of public goods and economic deregulation. The "shock doctrine" doesn't require the machinery of conspiracy to function. It is a collection of political techniques and impulses, the dark underside of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter's idea of "creative destruction" and the Silicon Valley injunction to "move fast and break things". The result is "the decimation of the public sphere and the public interest", and the tendency to move wealth rapidly upwards into the hands of a tiny minority. Klein notes that Trump's cabinet is packed with "masters of disaster", men whose careers have been based on exploiting shock. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson 's Exxon profited handsomely from the spike in the oil price after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has done more or less everything in its power to ensure global inaction on climate change. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin is known as "the foreclosure king". Vice-president Mike Pence played a particularly ignominious role in the aftermath of Katrina when, as chair of a group of conservative lawmakers called the Republican study committee, he promoted a slate of what Klein terms "pseudo relief policies", including reduction of labour standards, "making the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone" and (staggeringly) repealing environmental regulations along the Gulf Coast. Trump's unselfconscious reaction to 9/11 was to see it as a marketing opportunity, remarking to a journalist that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. Intentionally or not, he has shown himself adept at creating instability, not least in his own workplace, and the fear, as Klein underscores, is that he will be tempted to deliver the ultimate shock in the form of another war. Then, perhaps, he will be able to test out his armchair quarterback opinion about Iraq, that America "should have taken the oil". Go to war, take the oil. It's a foreign policy of a sort. If you spend your days glued to your phone and have 30 political tabs open on your browser, much of the material in No Is Not Enough will be familiar. The book's chief value lies in synthesis. Klein's particular background and expertise allow her to pull together the disparate threads of what it would be misleading to call "Trumpism", if only because of the unwarranted suggestion of system and control. How you view her political proposals will depend on your politics, particularly on the value one ascribes to what used to be called "the extraparliamentary left". She insists, rightly in my view, that there is a need to promote a positive alternative social vision, and that ostensibly "utopian" aims and proposals are a way to avoid being caught in a politics that is merely reactive or timidly reformist. Partly, I think, because she believes (again, I'd argue correctly) that a lightly greenwashed version of the status quo will never save us from the catastrophic consequences of climate change, Klein skims over the terrain of legislative politics. She has little practical advice for people engaged in the sort of dull, incremental political action -- lobbying, attempting to influence legislation -- that is aimed at turning the oil tanker that is the US Congress. Nor does she advocate particular aims or tactics for organisers. The book ends with a document called The Leap Manifesto, drawn up by Canadian activists in 2015, a "platform without a party", which is a powerful statement of alternative principles that feels as though it needs a thread to connect it to today's largely defensive struggles. Leaving aside the thorny issue of electoral subversion, it is notable that Russia provides a possible model for the Trump administration. Its rulers are men who profited from the cataclysmic shock of the end of communism, reaping fortunes in the violent, turbulent 1990s. The order they have imposed has brought about the near destruction of politics as a public activity. This is not an easily reversible condition, and its spread to the US would be a catastrophe. The supreme court has, in its wisdom, decided that corporations are people and money is speech, and free speech cannot be limited. In an environment where the amount of money in politics is truly staggering, the only safeguard left to the public is rigorous transparency. If public scrutiny is ended, Trump and his "masters of disaster" may also be able to put an end to ordinary people's ability to shape the forces governing their lives. Klein's book is ultimately optimistic, because she believes the power to make change lies in the popular will. She calls on us to recognise that this will has enemies, and they are making havoc. - Hari Kunzru.
Kirkus Review
Viewing the Trump-ian train wreck, Intercept senior correspondent Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014, etc.) insists that she told us so.Ten years ago, in The Shock Doctrine, the author described the neoliberal project of weakening already feeble economies in the developing world and then looting them, as happened in places such as Chile and Iraq. She considers the unfolding policies of the Trump administration the domestic version of that shock program, an "all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest," and one that no longer bothers to disguise itself behind the "mask on the corporate state's White House proxies" but instead is cheerfully and busily at war with anything that resembles the social contract. Klein is rather too quick to catalog her earlier insights, but her point remains: in a welter of discontent, voters propelled Trump to leadership because they believed his message that he was too wealthy to need the corruption of the system and only he knew how to fix it. Something else is developing, of course. Writes Klein, "he reflects all the worst trends I wrote about in No Logo, from shrugging off responsibility for the workers who make your products via a web of often abusive contractors to the insatiable colonial need to mark every available space with your name." So it would seem. The author spends much of the book describing and decrying the elements of the "corporate coup" that Trump represents, arguments that will be familiar to most of her core readership but are handy to have in one place. More interesting are her planks in an evolving platform of what to do about the mess, from being sure to vote ("yes, I am going to cast a ballot in this deeply flawed and constricted electoral system, but do not mistake that vote as an expression of the world I want") to setting a progressive "reverse shock" in motion. A useful volume in the fast-growing library of resistance, complete with concluding manifesto. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
Part I How We Got Here: Rise of the Superbrands | |
1 How Trump Won by Becoming the Ultimate Brand | p. 15 |
2 The First Family of Brands | p. 35 |
3 The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games | p. 46 |
Part II Where We are Now: Climate of Inequality | |
4 The Climate Clock Strikes Midnight | p. 63 |
5 The Grabber-in-Chief | p. 83 |
6 Politics Hates a Vacuum | p. 101 |
7 Learn to Love Economic Populism | p. 121 |
Part III How It Could Get Worse: The Shocks to Come | |
8 Masters of Disaster: Doing an End Run around Democracy | p. 131 |
9 The Toxic To-Do List: What To Expect When You Are Expecting a Crisis | p. 161 |
Part IV How Things Could Get Better | |
10 When the Shock Doctrine Backfires | p. 189 |
11 When No Was Not Enough | p. 209 |
12 Lessons from Standing Rock: Daring to Dream | p. 222 |
13 A Time to Leap: Because Small Steps Won't Cut It | p. 251 |
Conclusion: The Caring Majority Within Reach | p. 257 |
Postscript: The Leap Manifesto | p. 267 |
Acknowledgments | p. 272 |