by Naomi Klein
Granted, all of this change and restructuring would have demanded uncommon focus and toughness. If Obama had taken a transformative approach to the failed banks and auto companies and to the reckless energy sector when he came into office, the backlash would have been ferocious and difficult to bear. He would have been painted as a communist, the US’s own Hugo Chávez. On the other hand, his mandate for widespread change, along with the outpouring of goodwill that greeted his election, was accompanied by such rare economic powers that it could well have ushered in a new era of economic fairness and climate stability.
The fact that this moment passed Americans by is not a failure that can be pinned on the Democrats alone. During Obama’s first years in office, most progressive organizations—relieved to finally be rid of Bush and flattered to have the ear of the governing party for the first time in a decade—confused access with power. As a result, the kind of outside pressure that has leveraged major policy victories in the past was largely MIA during Obama’s first term. Despite some valiant attempts, there was no united progressive coalition pressuring Obama to make more of his unique moment in history, pushing him to deliver big on jobs, racial justice, clean air, clean water, and better services. That was a mistake. As the great (and much-missed) historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “The really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating. Those are the things that determine what happens.”
The bottom line is that in 2009, as theorists and organizers, we weren’t ready—too many of us were waiting for change to be delivered from on high. And by the time most of us realized how inadequate that change was, the window had closed and the Tea Party was already on the rise.
Remembering When We Leapt
Before shock doctrine politics became the norm in the eighties, crises that were obviously born of financial greed and corporate malfeasance often sparked very different responses. In fact, they provoked some of the most momentous progressive victories in modern history.
In the United States, after the carnage of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Blacks and their radical allies pushed for economic justice and greater social rights. They won major victories, including free public education for all children—although it would take another century before schools were desegregated.
The horrific 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, which took the lives of 146 young immigrant garment workers, catalyzed hundreds of thousands of workers into militancy—eventually leading to an overhaul of the state labor code, caps on overtime, new rules for child labor, and breakthroughs in health and fire safety regulations.
Most significantly, it was only thanks to the collective response from below to the Great Crash of 1929 that the New Deal became possible. The strike wave of the mid-1930s—the Teamsters’ rebellion and Minneapolis general strike, the 83-day shutdown of the west coast by longshore workers, and the Flint sit-down strikes in the auto plants—established the power of industrial unions, and forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers. In this same period, as a response to the suffering brought on by the Great Depression, mass movements demanded sweeping social programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance (programs from which the majority of African-American and many women workers were notably excluded). In the same period, tough new rules regulating the financial sector were introduced, at real cost to unfettered profit making. Across the industrialized world, pressure from social movements created the conditions for programs like the New Deal, featuring ambitious investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation systems, housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today. (Just as the wreckage of the Second World War provided another such catalyst.)
In 1969, there was an oil spill in Santa Barbara, which coated California’s beautiful beaches, and it was something like a Great Crash for the environment—a shock millions responded to by demanding fundamental change. Many of North America’s toughest laws protecting air, water, and endangered species can trace their roots back to the popular anger that exploded in response to that disaster.
In all these cases, a painful crisis served as a wake-up call, ushering in meaningful legislation that created a fairer and safer society—thanks in no small part to the hard work of organizers who had been preparing the ground for years before the shocks hit. These were far from perfect reforms, not full-scale transformations, and yet they were directly responsible for winning much of the modern social safety net, as well as the regulatory structures that protect so many workers and public health. Moreover, winning them did not require authoritarian trickery. They were so popular with voters that they didn’t have to be snuck in under cover of crisis but rather were loudly demanded by muscular social movements—a deepening of democracy, not its subversion.
So why did those crises produce such visionary change, while more recent ones—Katrina, the subprime mortgage debacle, BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster—have left so little progressive public policy behind?
When Utopia Lends a Hand
Here is one theory: The interplay between lofty dreams and earthly victories has always been at the heart of moments of deep transformation. The breakthroughs won for workers and their families after the Civil War and during the Great Depression, as well as for civil rights and the environment in the sixties and early seventies, were not just responses to crises. They were responses to crises that unfolded in times when people dared to dream big, out loud, in public—explosions of utopian imagination.
The Gilded Age strikers of the late nineteenth century, enraged by the enormous fortunes being amassed off the backs of repressed laborers, were inspired by the Paris Commune, when the working people of Paris took over the governing of their city for months. They dreamed of a “cooperative commonwealth,” a world where work was but one element of a well-balanced life, with plenty of time for leisure, family, and art. Utopian socialist fiction, including Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, topped the best-seller lists (in sharp contrast to today, when it is classic dystopian fiction—George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here—that has reappeared on best-seller lists since Trump’s inauguration). Working-class organizers in the Great Depression were versed not only in Marx but also in W.E.B. Du Bois, whose vision was of a pan–working class movement that could unite the downtrodden to transform an unjust economic system. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley has written, the end of the nineteenth century was a period of foment for “black-led biracial democratic, populist, and radical movements.”
The same is true of the hard-won victories of the civil rights era. It was the movement’s transcendent dream—whether articulated in the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. or in the vision of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—that created the space for, and inspired, the grassroots organizing that in turn led to tangible wins. A similar utopian fervor in the late sixties and early seventies—emerging out of the countercultural upheaval, when young people were questioning just about everything—laid the groundwork for feminist, lesbian and gay, and environmental breakthroughs.
The New Deal, it is always worth remembering, was adopted by President Roosevelt at a time of such progressive and Left militancy that its programs—radical by today’s standards—appeared at the time to be the only way to prevent full-scale revolution. And this was no idle threat. When Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, ran for governor of California in 1934, it was something like the Bernie Sanders campaign of its day. Sinclair was a champion of a more left-wing version of the New Deal, arguing that the key to ending poverty was full state funding of workers’ cooperatives. He received nearly 900,000 votes, but fell short of winning the governor’s office. (If you didn’t learn this in history class, it may not be a coincidence. As
the Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously observed, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”)
Trapped in the Matrix
By the time the 2008 financial fiasco was unfolding, that utopian imagination had largely atrophied. A great many people knew that the appropriate response to the crisis was moral outrage, that gifting the banks with trillions, refusing to prosecute those responsible, and asking the poor and elderly to pay the steepest costs was an obscenity.
Yet generations who had grown up under neoliberalism struggled to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known. This may also have something to do with the power of memory. When workers rose up against the depravities of the industrial age, many had living memories of a different kind of economy. Others were actively fighting to protect an existing way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different, they were capable of imagining—and fighting for—a radically better future. Even those who have never known anything but enslavement and apartheid have been endlessly creative in finding ways—often through clandestine art forms—to nurture and keep alive the dream of freedom, self-government, and democracy. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz observed shortly after the 2016 election, forecasting the hard times ahead:
Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same.
It is this imaginative capacity, the ability to envision a world radically different from the present, that has been largely missing since the cry of No first began echoing around the world in 2008. In the West, there is little popular memory of any other kind of economic system. There are specific cultures and communities—most notably Indigenous communities—that have vigilantly kept alive memories and models of other ways to live, not based on ownership of the land and endless extraction of profit. But most of us who are outside those traditions find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix—so while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, imagining something else entirely is distinctly more difficult.
Which is partially why the movements that did emerge—from Europe’s “movement of the squares” to Occupy Wall Street and even Egypt’s revolution—were very clear on their “no”: no to the greed of the bankers, no to austerity, and, in Egypt, no to dictatorship. But what was too often missing was a clear and captivating vision of the world beyond that no.
And in its absence, the shocks kept coming.
With unleashed white supremacy and misogyny, with the world teetering on the edge of ecological collapse, with the very last vestiges of the public sphere set to be devoured by capital, it’s clear that we need to do more than draw a line in the sand and say “no more.” Yes, we need to do that and we need to chart a credible and inspiring path to a different future. And that future cannot simply be where we were before Trump came along (aka the world that gave us Trump). It has to be somewhere we have never been before.
Picturing that place requires a reclaiming of the utopian tradition that animated so many transcendent social movements in the past. It means having the courage to paint a picture of a different world, one which, even if it exists only in our minds, can fuel us as we engage in winnable battles. Because, as Oscar Wilde wrote in 1891, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”
Part of that voyage is not just talking and writing about the future we want—but building it as we go.
It’s a principle I saw in action (and prayer, and song) in Standing Rock.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LESSONS FROM STANDING ROCK
DARING TO DREAM
Less than a month after Trump was elected, I went to Standing Rock, North Dakota. The forecast called for an epic snowstorm and it was already starting to come down as we arrived, the low hills and heavy sky a monochromatic white.
Days earlier, the governor had announced plans to clear the camps of the thousands of “water protectors” who had gathered on the outskirts of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to try to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The company was determined to build the oil pipeline under Lake Oahe, the sole source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, as well as under another section of the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for 17 million people. If the pipeline ruptured, the tribal leaders argued, their people would have no safe water and their sacred sites would be desecrated. The movement’s Lakota-language slogan, heard around the world, was Mni Wiconi—“water is life.”
After months of confrontations with private security and highly militarized police, it seemed the governor now felt, with Trump on the way to the White House, that the coast was clear to crush the movement with force. The blows had been coming for months—about 750 people would be arrested by the time the camps were cleared—and when I arrived, Standing Rock had already become the site of the most violent state repression in recent US history. With the issuing of the eviction order, many were calling December 5, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux’s “last stand,” and I along with many others had traveled there to stand with them.
In a surprise development, a convoy of more than two thousand military veterans had also come to Standing Rock to stand with the Sioux, prepared to face off against their fellow uniformed officers if need be. The veterans said they had taken an oath “to serve and protect” the Constitution. And after seeing footage of peaceful Indigenous water protectors being brutally attacked by security dogs, blasted with water cannons in subzero temperatures, and fired on with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and bean-bag rounds, these vets had decided that the duty to protect now required that they stand up to the government which had once sent them to war.
By the time I arrived, the network of camps had swelled to roughly ten thousand people, living in hundreds upon hundreds of tents, tepees, and yurts. Dozens of kids were sledding down a snowy hill. The main camp was a hive of calm, nonstop activity. Volunteer cooks served meals to thousands, trucks arriving with fresh ingredients all day. Young media-makers, world-famous musicians, and Hollywood actors were filing continuous dispatches about the latest developments, exposing their huge followings to the drama of the standoff. Seminars on decolonization and nonviolence were happening in the larger tents and a geodesic dome. A group of drummers was gathered around the sacred fire, tending to the flames so they were never extinguished.
Down the road, the newly arrived vets were setting up camp with impressive speed, employing skills honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, for a few, Vietnam. It struck me that the last time I had spent this much time with US military personnel was in Baghdad, where young men and women in these same uniforms were sent in to occupy a country that just so happened to have one of the world’s largest reserves of crude oil. After all the times American soldiers have been called upon to protect oil and gas wealth and to wage war on Indigenous people at home and abroad, it was unbearably moving to see these soldiers show up, voluntarily and unarmed, to join an Indigenous-led fight to stop yet another water-poisoning, climate-destabilizing fossil fuel project.
One of my first conversations at Standing Rock was with legendary Lakota elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who in many ways had got all this resistance going when she opened the first camp on her land, the Sacred Stone Camp. That was in April 2016. Eight months later, here she was, eyes still sparkling, betraying not a bit of fatigue despite playing den mother to thousands of people who had come from across the world to be part of this historic movement.
She told me that the ca
mp had become a home and a community to hundreds and then thousands. It had also become a field hospital—for those injured by the police attacks, and also those psychically frightened by what Trump’s rise was already unleashing.
Learning by Living
Brave Bull Allard, who is the official historian of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said that, most of all, the encampment had become a school—for Indigenous youth seeking to connect more deeply with their own culture, to live on the land and in ceremony, and also for non-Indigenous people who realized that the moment called for skills and knowledge most of us don’t have.
“My grandkids can’t believe how little some of the white people know,” she told me, laughing, but without judgment. “They come running: ‘Grandma! The white people don’t know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?’ I say, ‘Yes, teach them.’ ” Brave Bull Allard herself patiently taught hundreds of visitors what she considered basic survival skills: how to use sage as a natural disinfectant, how to stay warm and dry in North Dakota’s vicious storms (“everyone needs at least six tarps,” she declared sternly).
She told me she had come to understand that, although stopping the pipeline was crucial, there was something greater at work in this convergence. She said the camps were now a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike were learning to live in relationship and community with the land. And for her, it was not just the hard skills that mattered. This moment was also about exposing visitors to the traditions and ceremonies that had been kept alive despite hundreds of years of genocidal attacks on Indigenous people and culture. This, she told me, is why the traditions survived the onslaught. “We knew this day was coming—the unification of all the tribes….We are here to protect the earth and the water. This is why we are still alive. To do this very thing we are doing. To help humanity answer its most pressing question: how do we live with the earth again, not against it?”