What it’s about: Naomi Klein diagnoses the failings of neoliberal capitalism following Trump’s shock ascendancy to the highest office in the land, and gives readers a foundation for how to build a unified resistance based not merely on opposition, but on a foundation of strong, affirmative shared values.
Notes:
- The world reeled when Trump won, not just because he was a buffoon, but because of what he signified – a herald of an era where branding was king and the tool of neoliberal capitalists to propagate themselves by exploiting the labor of the poor, and for disaster capitalists to profit and flourish from crises, both real and engineered.
- According to Klein, Trump himself is the epitome of both tendencies. First, his business empire is built upon his Trump branding, a form of rent that he extends to franchisees in return for handsome royalties, which in turn gives him a kind of immunity to his antics – because his crassness is part of that brand, of hedonistic, callous excess turned up to eleven. When Trump acts crass, he is not judged as harshly because he is conforming to that brand – this is, I think, a valuable insight that Klein has given us about why Trump appears so invulnerable to criticism.
- Second, the incompetence of his presidency has merely led to more shocks – periods of extreme crisis, unrest and instability in the general world order, which are rich seams of opportunity for disaster capitalists to profit from. The incompetence of the federal government in handling these crises is just used as a justification to reduce the size of government, creating a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing loop of the steady erosion of the public realm, or creates a period where democratic norms are suspended, allowing them to ram through a capitalist wishlist of neoliberal reforms that concentrate wealth ever more in the hands of the rich.
- Global warming and extreme weather are just one, rather worrying part of this torrent of anthropocentric crisis, one that neoliberals are all too ready to be sanguine about because to stop the tide of global warming would be to cease the culture of unchecked extractionism that drives capitalist growth.
- Klein tells us that the need for resistance is stronger than ever, but left-leaning coalitions often break apart because they are driven by a multitude of different agendas – feminism, native rights, environmentalism, racial and social justice, LGBTQ rights – and often their marriage to the cause is one of convenience, and has only a tenuous link to the critique of the neoliberal state of affairs. There is no blood-and-soil essentialist tribalism that unifies the disparate threads of the left in pseudo-religious fervor.
- Ultimately, Klein tells us – to mount an effective resistance and to offer a real, sustainable solution, no is not enough – there needs to be a coherent, singular manifesto that everyone on the left can agree on, a set of shared goals and values based on compromise and mutual respect, a vision and mission to fight for. She offers one such vision – the Leap Manifesto – a mishmash of liberal identity politics and native rights mixed with awareness of the effects of capitalism on the working class – which provides a strong conceptual backing from which to build a new social vision.
- Klein here once again writes with galvanizing force, synthesising various discursive strands of the new Trumpist reality into a coherent and singular thesis of what Trumpism signifies. It is a taut, powerful and impassioned call for positive action, given life and breath by the righteous outrage generated by the visible incursions of Trumpian depredations into our everyday reality, and the looming threat to the viability of our living planet. While her Leap Manifesto might not be the answer, what she says needs to be done strikes a chord of truth – to combat the a machine built upon essentialist tribalism, the Left must come up with a manifesto of its own, not just in opposition to an enemy, but in fashioning a new and better state of affairs to today’s Trumpist reality.
I give this book: 4 out of 5 Trump steaks
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