No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

Overview

The New York Times–bestselling roadmap to resistance in the Trump era from the internationally acclaimed activist and author of On Fire and The Battle for Paradise.
 
The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump’s vision—a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” and a sweeping aside of climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy—will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks, to the economy, to national security, to the environment.
 
In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein explains that Trump, extreme as he is, is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half-century. In exposing the malignant forces behind Trump’s rise, she puts forward a bold vision for a mass movement to counter rising militarism, nationalism, and corporatism in the United States and around the world.
 
Longlisted for the National Book Award
 
“I hope that Klein’s book is read by more than just her (mostly) leftwing fan base. For whatever you think about her economic arguments, she makes a powerful and an important point: that you cannot understand Trump without looking at how he reflects bigger cultural and social dynamics. And what is perhaps refreshing about No Is Not Enough is that Klein tries to move beyond mere outrage and hand-wringing to offer a practical manifesto for opposition.” —Financial Times
 
“Brims with ideas rarely heard in the mainstream media. And her fiery, punchy writing style, which is occasionally laced with humor, makes it hard to put down.” —The Georgia Straight

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608468911
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	02/13/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
Sales rank:	523,642
File size:	993 KB

About the Author

NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the international bestsellers No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and most recently This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In 2017 she joined The Intercept as Senior Correspondent. In 2016 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, for, according to the prize jury, "exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice."

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I How We Got Here: Rise of the Superbrands

1 How Trump Won by Becoming the Ultimate Brand 15

2 The First Family of Brands 35

3 The Mar-a-Lago Hunger Games 46

Part II Where We are Now: Climate of Inequality

4 The Climate Clock Strikes Midnight 63

5 The Grabber-in-Chief 83

6 Politics Hates a Vacuum 101

7 Learn to Love Economic Populism 121

Part III How It Could Get Worse: The Shocks to Come

8 Masters of Disaster: Doing an End Run around Democracy 131

9 The Toxic To-Do List: What To Expect When You Are Expecting a Crisis 161

Part IV How Things Could Get Better

10 When the Shock Doctrine Backfires 189

11 When No Was Not Enough 209

12 Lessons from Standing Rock: Daring to Dream 222

13 A Time to Leap: Because Small Steps Won't Cut It 251

Conclusion: The Caring Majority Within Reach 257

Postscript: The Leap Manifesto 267

Acknowledgments 272

Editorial Reviews

This year's most immediately useful political book.”
—Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017

“Naomi Klein is a critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes of the last election cycle. No Is Not Enough tells a compelling story about where we are, how we got here, and what we should do now. The book is a genuine page-turner—highly engaging and provocative—and provides a fascinating lens through which we can view our current moment. Klein is not preaching to the choir, but framing the moment, connecting necessary dots, and outlining the challenge that lies ahead in clear terms that anyone can understand.”
—Michelle Alexander, author, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Naomi Klein is one of the few revolutionary public intellectuals of great integrity and vision. This new book confirms her crucial relevance and essential pertinence.”
—Cornel West, author, Race Matters

“Urgent, timely, and necessary.”
—Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (Emeritus), MIT

“A blueprint for combating Trumpism and the corporatist policies of his predecessors that made his rise possible. With a genuine sense of hope, Naomi Klein illuminates paths to collectively forge an ecologically sound, anticapitalist order.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein anatomises the roots of Trump in the already dystopian world of corporate-ruled America and predicts the “end run around democracy”. A clear and readable guide to action, if it is action you are contemplating.”
—Paul Mason, The Guardian

“Klein moves beyond mere outrage and hand-wringing to offer a practical manifesto for opposition.”
—Financial Times

“Naomi Klein shows us that the monstrosity of Donald Trump has not occurred in a vacuum but is the culmination of decades of unchecked economic inequality, racism, militarism, and war. As the shock of Trump as president gives way to anger and the determination to fight, No Is Not Enough makes an urgent intervention in emerging movements. It will take more than ‘resistance’ to beat Trumpism. We need history, politics, strategy, and, most importantly, the optimism that another world is possible. Klein has made a critical contribution to the developing opposition to Trump and the economic disorder that produced him.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

“If you’re wondering how Naomi Klein has managed to produce an essential and gripping book so early in the Trump presidency, it’s because she’s spent her whole intellectual life preparing for just this moment. Trump is the ultimate logo. Every day we watch him try to exploit yet another shock to the system. So this is the book to read—not just the first word on Trump, but in powerful ways the last word as well.”
—Bill McKibben, author, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

“Naomi Klein has written an ordinary person’s guide to hope. Read this book.”
—Arundhati Roy, author, The End of Imagination

“No Is Not Enough manages to be that rare thing in political writing: both rousing and profoundly sensible. It is brilliant.”
—Laurie Penny, The New Statesman

“[A]nyone struggling for a place to even start making sense of Trump, and Trumpism, will find a book abounding in insight… Without lapsing into corny cheeriness or the puffed-up cant of centrist political cliché (“Love Trumps Hate!”), Naomi Klein holds out a cautious hope for the despairing age: an honest, prescriptive belief that people can unite in their opposition to Trumpism to build a better world.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Klein’s 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. 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.”
—Hari Kunzru, The Guardian

“No Is Not Enough is the absolute must-read book of the Trump era. Naomi Klein lays out exactly what we need to know about how we got here, and ends with a clarion call to channel our despair and outrage into action. This book is inspiring and energy-giving. Like a little sun.”
—Emma Thompson

“Saying No to their shock doctrine is essential but insufficient. Naomi Klein’s new book incites us brilliantly to stiffen our lip, to overcome quickly their calculated shocks, and to interweave our No with a programmatic Yes. It is a manual for emancipation by means of the only weapon we have against orchestrated misanthropy: constructive disobedience.”
—Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25 co-founder, Professor of Economic Theory, University of Athens

“Naomi Klein's books are ceaselessly illuminating, daring, and indispensable. As accessible as it is brilliant, No Is Not Enough is an essential blueprint for a worldwide counter-attack against right-wing corporate hegemony.”
—Owen Jones, author, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“From No Logo to The Shock Doctrine to This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein’s books have charted the harmful impact of surging corporate power on culture, jobs, peace, and the planet. In our current hellish situation, who better than Naomi to make sense of this madness, and help us find a way out? This book is a top-of-the-stack summer must-read.”
—Michael Stipe, musician

“No Is Not Enough is Naomi Klein 2.0. It is the accumulation of years of brilliant and layered analysis applied with lightning precision to an understanding of how we got to Trump, and how we can use this moment to bring about another system and world. It is a potent stand for No—and a compelling vision of the Yes to come.”
—Eve Ensler, author, In the Body of the World

“Naomi Klein has written a compelling book that we all need to read and act on. No Is Not Enough is an essential handbook for all people, especially young people, who want to understand the economic, social, and political forces that produced the current crisis we are facing—and how we can effectively organize to win a better world.”
—Danny Glover, actor

“Naomi Klein constructs a common story that allows us to withstand the effects of being shocked. We can act upon that, with intelligence and happiness, to recover our world and the use of adjectives.”
—Gael García Bernal, actor

“The desire to radically challenge capitalism is widespread and growing. Klein’s new book is an important contribution to that project.”
—Nicole M. Aschoff, Jacobin

“A useful volume in the fast-growing library of resistance.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

The main point of this audiobook is that Donald Trump’s election is a terrible turn for both the United States and the world, and it aims to instruct his opponents about how to resist and fight back against his policies. Given the content, one would expect that the audiobook’s narrator would approach it with force and urgency. That’s why the choice of Brit Marling is rather curious. She reads clearly and paces herself well, but her voice is thin and timid. Further, she often drops her intonation at the ends of sentences and seems to approach this manifesto as an academic work, rather than as the call to the barricades the author intends. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

2017-06-10
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.

Kirkus Reviews