Rocky horror show stopper
Naomi Klein has been unpacking the neo-liberal bag of tricks on our behalf since 2000. Now she’s leading a call to resist the gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats in the White House.
Naomi Klein is leading a call to resist the gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats in the White House.
“What if it’s all a hoax and we’ve created a better world for nothing?” – Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.
What if a lot of people made reservations at Trump hotels and resorts, then changed their minds just before the cancellation deadline? Naomi Klein wonders as much in her video on creative ways to grab the attention of the US “Grabber-in-Chief”.
“Now I’m not suggesting anyone do this, of course,” says Klein with a carnivorous smile. “I’m just wondering what would happen.” She is nothing if not media-savvy and seems to have made a strategic decision not to be too earnest about the three-ring circus that is current American political life. The video is called How to Jam the Trump Brand. Who better to advise on such subversion than the culture-jammer-in-chief?
Klein has been unpacking the neo-liberal free-market bag of tricks on our behalf since 2000, when she wrote her zeitgeistnailing, anti-branding manifesto No Logo (“The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement,” one critic called it.” In 2007, there was The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and in 2014, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Klein is so up with the play that she’s already published a book about the Trump presidency. She started writing it in February and updated the results from the French election when the book was at the proof stage.
Klein is a curious mix of dynastic oldschool agitator – her socialist parents left the US for Canada as a protest against the Vietnam War – and modern media construct. She is – as journalists never tire of reminding her, No Logo or not – also a brand. “Um, yes,” she says briskly. “Where I really see writers becoming brands is when they write the same book over and over again. I haven’t. Brand managers would tell you that’s very bad brand management.”
Nice try, but a brand is a brand. Even she didn’t think it would come to this. “The end of No Logo is really quaint. It’s like: ‘And some people even think that people can be brands.’”
The advent of social media has changed everything. “The ability to package, polish and edit our own one-person reality TV
“The ability to package, polish and edit our own one-person reality TV show is corrosive.”
show is corrosive,” says Klein, embarking on an impromptu TED talk before reining herself in. “I’m not really answering the question of whether I am a brand. We’re all being told that we have to be brands and I think it sucks. And I’m not saying I’m out of it. It’s one of the things we need to look at when Donald Trump is taking all these social trends to their worst logical conclusion.”
Trump. We’ve barely started talking about him when Klein finds her own brand temporarily jammed. “My five-yearold has locked me out on this balcony,” she reports. Goodness. What’s he up to in there? “I don’t know. Luckily I’ve got my phone, so I can call for help.”
As setbacks in the business of saving the world go, being trapped on your balcony on a balmy Toronto evening is small beer. Klein has stepped outside because she hasn’t seen sunlight for some time. Normally she takes five years to write a book, not five months. The book’s urgent title – No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need – reads like a call to arms. “I was a bit of a woman possessed, trying to get it done. I feel a bit stunned by the whole experience.”
We’re all a bit stunned. It’s been chaos since Trump was inaugurated. He’s not really a five-year situation. “No. Who knows how long he’ll even be here? It was that chaos that made me want to put some context around him as quickly as possible, because having this Tweeter-in-Chief does damage to our already-damaged attention spans. I think he’s kind of an addiction for people. The show that he puts on is just impossible not to watch.” Potus as car crash.
EXPLOITING CRISES
In The Shock Doctrine, Klein persuasively unpicked the way “disaster capitalism” exploits crises to impose corporate-friendly
policies. Some would say she’s employing her own doctrine now, using the shock of Trump to push her agenda. She’s not having that. “That’s not what I mean by the shock doctrine,” she says. “I mean something really specific, which is using crisis and people’s fear and disorientation to do away with democracy; various very concrete measures, some extremely violent; suspending laws.
“Doing an end run around democracy,” she calls it, borrowing an American football term for an evasive strategy. The crisis we are in “requires that we deepen and renew democracy. It is true that Trump is a rolling daily shock, but the real reason I wrote this book in such a rush is that I fear that there will be a major external shock under Trump’s tenure. Not that they’ll cook it up, but we live in very rocky times.”
Indeed. We speak soon after the terrorist attacks in Manchester and Kabul; the London Bridge and Finsbury Park atrocities are still to come. “We live in a time of increasingly frequent weather shocks and market shocks. We’re dealing with instability on multiple fronts. What really scares me about Trump and particularly the people he’s surrounded himself with, like [Vice President Mike] Pence, [White House chief strategist Steve] Bannon, [Treasury Secretary] Steven Mnuchin and [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson is what they will do when they have not the Trump show but a real crisis to exploit.”
This presidency is “a gory reality show”, she writes. Trump’s win amounts to a “corporate coup d’état”. He is “greed and carelessness incarnate”. She doesn’t hold back.
“I sort of feel like I do, though. I don’t do that much name-calling,” she says, a little regretfully. As we speak, there is fresh provocation for name-calling. “This is a bad day because I think they are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.”
PASTICHE, NOT ABERRATION
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Klein has been writing for nearly two decades about the forces that have brought us here. Trump, she concludes, isn’t a monstrous aberration but an inevitability, “a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half-century”. He has long been a human brand with, as Klein told the Guardian, “a family of spin-off brands around, completely unable to distinguish his own personal identity from his corporate identity”.
She is somewhat wary of the word she uses a lot – “shock” – as applied to Trump, “because it absolves us, in a way. If we’re shocked, then we’re innocent. And that’s why horror is a better word. It’s this horror of recognition.” He’s the product, she writes, of “a system that has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House”.
When you stop being distracted by the handshakes and Twitter buffoonery, it’s a chilling scenario. “Yeah, some of it just feels like fun and kind of benign. I think people thought of The Apprentice as fairly benign. Little did we know.”
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that some of the chaos is deliberate. “Trump’s constant tweeting and feeding stories to the press about internal conflict within his administration, picking fights with various people: this is something he’s done his whole career. He has described it as the Trump show. The show is Trump.”
The value of distraction has been a governing principle. “Look, I’m not saying that he’s a genius. I’m saying this is the one thing he understands, and he deserves credit for knowing how to put on a show. They’ve clearly had a strategy, what they call a ‘shock to the system’, where they’ve moved very quickly on multiple fronts, so people are scrambling. We’re all focused on the daily shocks, and meanwhile the work of methodically transferring wealth to the wealthiest in society continues day after day: the handing out of tax breaks; stripping people of healthcare; getting rid of regulations that get in the way of business. That should be front-page news, but it doesn’t compete with the Trump show and that is fine with them.”
I put it to her that a lot of people seem to have lost faith in the media, which doesn’t help. “There is some terrific journalism going on, but where the liberal media is making a really big mistake is the relentless focus on Russia and the drama of how he shakes some leader’s hand.
“Trump couldn’t care less about that, and as you say, many people believe he’s being treated unfairly because a lot of it comes off as quite snobby and elitist, whereas they would be quite interested in what’s happening to their healthcare and the US Treasury and their jobs and the many ways that Trump is betraying working-class voters.”
The scariest part about Trump is the not reading, the not thinking, she says,
“and the determination, really, to make us dumber. Look at what they’re cutting – the attacks on education, on public schools, cutting programmes that teach kids science education. I mean, that just kills me.”
SURPRISE ATTACK
What a mess. Klein is no ivory-tower theorist; she’s a journalist, who saw the shock doctrine, which is “all about taking us by surprise”, in action reporting from Iraq, Sri Lanka after the tsunami and New Orleans after Katrina. She hoped that the tactic, once understood, would no longer work.
But after the 2008 financial crisis she saw – in Italy, Spain, Greece – that just resisting policies of “brutal economic austerity imposed under cover of an economic crisis that was created by the bankers” didn’t work. “People were very aware that it was happening. They were saying no, but that wasn’t enough.”
So No is Not Enough ends on a positive note, with a plan of action that involves more than just messing with Trump’s brand. It’s called the Leap Manifesto. “We called it that so people could call us communists more,” she says dryly. She’s not a communist or even completely anti-capitalist. “I don’t think we need to do away with markets and property altogether.” Indeed, there was a time when she kicked against the radical politics of her family. “I was a pretty typical 80s teenager, embarrassed by her hippy parents.” Then she saw her feminist mother’s fortitude in recovering from a stroke. She got involved in student politics, which further fuelled her activism.
Though it can seem now that all the gains made by her parents’ generation are in danger of being erased. “[There’s] the feeling that we were going to fall through a wormhole and be back in the 80s. But actually,” she says, dropping into confidential stage whisper, “[Trump] doesn’t have that much power.”
Not if she has anything to do with it, anyway. Klein’s plans are radical. “I think that the system needs to change so much that it wouldn’t be called capitalist by today’s measures. I don’t think that profit can be the driving force in our society any more. We have to be starting from human need and what our planet can sustain.”
The Leap marks a major change for someone who has never been into utopian books promising to fix the future.
“It is a big change, and I still don’t feel comfortable being the person who offers the prescriptions. I don’t think it’s the role of a writer to say, ‘I’ve figured it out and here are your Ten Commandments.’”
The Leap commandments are more collaborative than biblical, the work of 60 people, including her husband, filmmaker Avi Lewis. “It’s been endorsed by 220 organisations. It’s more prescriptive than I write, but I found my way through to it.”
It proposes policies familiar to readers of Klein’s books: racial justice, decent jobs, sustainable technology, rejection of fossil fuels, higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy. As with the Trump book, there’s a punishing deadline. “With climate, we’re on this deadline: if we don’t turn things around in this very small window that we have left, we lose our chance.”
The book is, in part, about demonstrating there can be another way. “Because the success of neo-liberalism is such that people don’t believe alternatives are possible.” There are heartening developments. “They’ve got really progressive municipal governments in Madrid and Barcelona. There is an alternative, and it might even make your daily life better if you’re not choked in traffic and it’s possible to do this is in a way that doesn’t make your energy prices go up.”
And the Bernie Sanders campaign, says Klein, was remarkable. “It’s not to say that Bernie was the perfect candidate or that he got everything right, but it was such a breakthrough in terms of what we’ve been told could possibly be popular in the United States in my lifetime. Bernie is now the most popular politician in the US.”
So when will we see the first Leap candidate run? “That’s a very live question. I can’t answer it right now,” she says enigmatically, hastening to add that she’s not running. She keeps getting that question and the answer is: “No, no, no.” Why not? “I really don’t think it’s my strength. I would support the right candidates; I just don’t think that I’m the candidate.”
What’s next for her? “Just following through on the organising, seeing where this goes. Writing shorter, more reportorial pieces for a while and not having a big deadline.” But this is no time to sit on the balcony catching the sun.
“I finish the book by saying Trump is like living dystopian fiction, in that the role of dystopian fiction is to hold up a mirror, to wake us up and say, ‘Is this what you want? Because every road you’re on leads here.’”
Is she optimistic about change? “I’m not sure I think of myself exactly as an optimist. I have a friend who talks about himself as a possibilist. It’s more the way I feel. If it’s possible we have to try.”
NO IS NOT ENOUGH: RESISTING TRUMP’S SHOCK POLITICS AND WINNING THE WORLD WE NEED, by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane, $35)
“We’re all focused on the daily shocks of the Trump show, and meanwhile the work of transferring wealth to the wealthiest in society continues.”