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It’s a piece of advice that many heeded in France a couple of months later, though ultimately not enough. Faced with the threat of a victory for the Far Right’s Marine Le Pen, many withdrew their support from centrist candidates, fearing a repeat of Clinton vs. Trump, and lent it instead to the left populist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He had campaigned on an anti–free trade, pro-peace, and radical economic redistribution agenda and started attracting crowds as large as seventy thousand, more than any other candidate. Against all odds, Mélenchon—who was initially reported to have the support of just 9 percent of voters—managed to capture 19.6 percent of votes cast in the first ballot, putting him within just 2 percentage points of making it to the final runoff. In the final vote, Emmanuel Macron, a neoliberal former banker, trounced Marine Le Pen, though her extremist party still received a record number of votes. And roughly one-third of eligible voters chose to express their displeasure with both Le Pen and Macron by either abstaining or spoiling their ballots. In Spain, meanwhile, candidates with deep roots in social movements have won mayoralty races in Barcelona and Madrid, and have begun introducing concrete policies that welcome refugees, battle homelessness, and fight pollution at the same time.
Will Solidarity Survive a Major Shock?
These reactions are a vast improvement over the far too successful post–September 11 divide-and-conquer politics. So far, Trump’s shock tactics aren’t disorienting the opposition. Instead, they are waking people up, in the United States and around the world. But of course the new alliances in the US have not yet had to face a major security crisis or a state of emergency. The real test will be whether the bravery and solidarity seen so far can be sustained when people are being told they are in imminent danger, and that the group they’re expressing solidarity with could be harboring the individual who set off a bomb last week.
Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that many of the relationships being built in these early days will be strong enough to counter the fear that inevitably sets in during a state of emergency. If Trump tries to use a crisis event to ram through draconian measures, this emerging resistance is poised to rise up and act as a human barrier to say: “No—not this time.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN NO WAS NOT ENOUGH
Here’s the trouble. Just saying no to shock tactics is often not enough to stop them, at least not on its own. It’s a lesson I learned the year after The Shock Doctrine came out, when Wall Street suffered its worst crisis since the Great Crash of 1929.
We saw how the 2008 financial crisis—the clear result of unchecked greed in the financial sector—was exploited all around the world, but particularly in southern Europe, to extract punishing, shock doctrine–style concessions from regular people. Europeans resisted these cynical tactics with incredible tenacity and courage (well beyond anything seen so far in the United States under Trump). They occupied squares and plazas and stayed for months. They staged general strikes that shut down cities and, in some cases, even voted to throw the bastards out. Outside Europe, in Tunisia, it was a sudden rise in food prices that became the catalyst for the wave of uprisings that came to be called the Arab Spring.
One of the street slogans in this period, which originated in Italy before spreading to Greece and Spain, was: “We will not pay for your crisis!” Millions of people understood that this was what was being asked of them. They were getting stuck with the bankers’ bills, forced to pay for their sins with a higher cost of living and lower wages. And they said no. Loudly, unmistakably, and in tremendous numbers.
But in the vast majority of cases, it wasn’t enough—the economic punishments kept coming. At times, a particularly egregious austerity measure might be successfully fought back with street protests. Quebec students fought off a tuition increase in 2012, much as Chilean students fought for an overhaul of their broken education system in 2011. But the austerity agenda ground on.
More importantly, this wave of protest and occupations did not produce a fundamental change in the economic model, one that could shift us off the road headed toward that world of Green Zones and Red Zones. When the failures of our current model revealed themselves in a manner more spectacular than at any point since the Great Depression, we did not collectively seize that moment to grab the wheel of history and swerve.
The responsibility for that is collective. No one person or political party is to blame for the roads not taken. But the failures in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash were starkest in the United States, because of the remarkable number of factors that seemed aligned in favor of transformative, rather than incremental, change. Which is why it’s worth revisiting that moment of crisis in some depth, not to point fingers, but to understand what it looks like to miss such a rare political opening—so we don’t repeat those mistakes when the next economic shock hits.
Let’s cast our minds back to the beginning of 2009. Barack Obama was entering the White House as the first African-American president, a decisive rebuke to eight years of Bush. He had easily carried the popular vote and for the next two years his fellow Democrats would control Congress.
Obama also had a clear democratic mandate to do more than tinker with the shattered economy. In the final three months before he took office, the country had lost almost two million jobs and the picture going into 2009 looked grim. The idea of taking on Wall Street was incredibly popular (it still is) because the big financial institutions that had tanked the global economy were the reason so many people had lost their homes and jobs and seen their life savings evaporate. The banks had no defenders—their executives were virtually in hiding. On the campaign trail, Obama had talked forcefully about how he would rebuild the economy in favor of “the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street” while standing up to “the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street.”
The new administration had a mandate to battle the climate crisis too. After eight years of denial and obstructionism under George W. Bush, Obama had pledged to put a price on carbon, and to create five million green jobs by making major investments, including in renewable energy and hybrid cars. When Obama won the Democratic primary, he told the cheering crowd that this would be remembered as the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow and “the planet began to heal.” Yes, he was weak on the details, but this was no ordinary election, and there is no question that the democratic mandate for boldness was there.
When the Banks Were on Their Knees