No Is Not Enough

September 4, 2017
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.

Starred review from July 24, 2017
Journalist and activist Klein (This Changes Everything) turns to lessons from her previous books as well as more recent work from fellow journalists and activists as she lays out a blueprint for combating Trumpism and the corporatist policies of his predecessors that made his rise possible. Trump, she writes, “is less an aberration than a logical conclusion” of the previous half-century’s obsession with free-market ideology. Since the 1970s, war, economic shifts, and extreme weather events have been exploited to implement the economic “shock tactics” that underpin neoliberal austerity regimes. These crises are deeply intertwined and “can only be dealt with through collective action,” Klein posits. She also outlines the history of American “racial capitalism” and the “divide-and-terrorize” political strategies that have maintained it to the present day. To counter this, she writes, movements must be prepared to take power and govern together towards multifaceted ends, as “no one movement can win on its own.” Urging social movements to crystallize the yes for which they’re fighting (as opposed to simply resisting), Klein cites the Leap Manifesto in Canada and the Vision for Black Lives in the U.S. as examples of community-developed documents for building a new world. With a genuine sense of hope, Klein illuminates paths to collectively forge an ecologically sound, anticapitalist order.

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(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.