NO IS NOT ENOUGH

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.