This was not an accident—the ideas were just too unpopular to be introduced without the help of a strong-arm despot. Richard Nixon had famously growled after Allende won the 1970 elections: “Make the economy scream.” With Allende left dead in the bloody coup, Friedman advised Pinochet that he should not blink when it came to economic transformation, prescribing what he termed the “shock treatment” approach. Under the advice of the famed economist and his former students (known in Latin America as “the Chicago Boys”), Chile replaced its public school system with vouchers and charter schools, made health care pay-as-you-go, and privatized kindergartens and cemeteries (and did many other things US Republicans have been eyeing for decades). And recall: this was in a country whose people were distinctly hostile to exactly these policies—a country which had, before the coup, democratically chosen socialist policies.
Similar regimes were installed in several Latin American countries during this period. Leading intellectuals in the region drew a direct connection between the economic shock treatments that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that ravaged hundreds of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil who believed in a fairer society. As the late Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano asked: “How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?”
Latin America received a particularly strong dose of these twin forms of shock. Most “free-market” makeovers were not so bloody. Radical political transitions such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the end of South African apartheid have also provided disorienting cover for neoliberal economic transformations. The most frequent midwife by far has been large-scale economic crisis, which time and again has been harnessed to demand radical campaigns of privatization, deregulation, and cuts to safety nets. But in truth, any shock can do the trick—including natural disasters that require large-scale reconstruction and therefore provide an opening to transfer land and resources from the vulnerable to the powerful.
The Opposite of Decency
Most people are appalled by this kind of crisis exploitation, and with good reason. The shock doctrine is the polar opposite of the way decent people, left to their own devices, tend to respond when they see widespread trauma, which is to offer help. Think of the staggering $3 billion privately donated in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the millions offered in response to the 2015 quake in Nepal or the 2004 Asian tsunami. These disasters, like so many others, provoked extraordinary gestures of generosity from individuals around the world. Thousands upon thousands of regular people donated money and volunteered their labor.
As the American historian and writer Rebecca Solnit has so eloquently described, disasters have a way of bringing out the best in us. It is in such moments that we often see some of the most moving displays of mutual aid and solidarity. In Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, despite decades of interethnic civil war, Muslims saved their Hindu neighbors and Hindus saved their Buddhist neighbors. In flooded post-Katrina New Orleans, people put their own lives at great risk to rescue and care for their neighbors. After Superstorm Sandy hit New York, a remarkable network of volunteers fanned out across the city, under the banner of Occupy Sandy—it grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement—to serve hundreds of thousands of meals, help clear out more than a thousand homes, and provide clothing, blankets, and medical care to thousands of people in need.
The shock doctrine is about overriding these deeply human impulses to help, seeking instead to capitalize on the vulnerability of others in order to maximize wealth and advantage for a select few.
There are few things more sinister than that.
The Art of the Steal
Shock doctrine logic is entirely in keeping with Trump’s view of the world. He unabashedly sees life as a battle for dominance over others—and he keeps obsessive track of who is winning. In his much-self-celebrated negotiations, the questions are always the same: What’s the most that I can get out of this deal? How do I exploit my adversary’s weakness?
In a particularly candid moment on Fox & Friends in 2011, he described a deal he made with former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi like this: “I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for the whole year, or for two years, and then I didn’t let him use the land. That’s what we should be doing. I don’t want to use the word screwed, but I screwed him. That’s what we should be doing.”
If Trump extracted predatory terms only from despised dictators, few tears would be shed. But this is Trump’s attitude to all negotiations. In Think Big, one of his how-to-be-like-me manuals, he describes his negotiation philosophy this way: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”
This cold-blooded enthusiasm for exploiting the weakness of others has shaped Trump’s career as a real estate developer, and it is a trait he shares with many members of his administration. It’s worrying for what it tells us about not only the atmosphere of chaos his team appears to be consciously cultivating but also, far more alarmingly, how they might exploit any larger crises yet to come.
So far, Trump’s unending atmosphere of crisis has been sustained largely through his own over-the-top rhetoric—declaring cities “crime-infested” sites of “carnage” when in fact the violent-crime rate has been declining nationwide for decades; hammering away at a manufactured narrative about an immigrant crime wave; and generally insisting that Obama destroyed the country. Soon enough, however, Trump could well have some crises to exploit that are distinctly more real, since crisis is the logical conclusion of his policies on every front.
Given this, it’s well worth taking a close look at the ways in which Trump and his team have exploited moments of crisis in the past to achieve their economic and political goals. Understanding this track record will make whatever happens next a whole lot less shocking, and will ultimately help us to resist these tired tactics.
A Career Forged in Shock
In the United States, the neoliberal revolution got a head start in New York City in the mid-1970s. Up until this point, the city had been a bold, if imperfect, experiment in social democracy, featuring the most generous public services in the United States, from libraries to mass transit to hospitals. But in 1975, federal and state cutbacks, combined with a national recession, pushed New York to the brink of all-out bankruptcy, and the crisis was seized upon to dramatically remake the city. Under cover of crisis came a wave of brutal austerity, sweetheart deals to the rich, and privatizations—with the end result of turning the city so many of us love into the temple of speculative finance, luxury consumption, and nonstop gentrification that we know today.