While on a recent overseas trip, President Donald Trump was pictured gripping a glowing orb in a shadowy room with Middle Eastern heads of state—for some the photo suggested the Legion of Doom summoning some dark force in a plot to destroy the world. The image spread quickly on social media in part because it served as a perfect visual metaphor for those who consider themselves part of the resistance to Trump: He’s not just a billionaire reality-TV host with bad ideas, he’s a supervillain whom they must defeat to save democracy.
Sometimes this book felt like a 300-page op-ed that could appear in today’s paper. I had this vision of you frantically writing it up until the last minute.
He does feel like the Frankenstein monster of all these trends. My main goal in writing this book was to say that we are at our least effective and least intelligent when we feel like we’re in new territory without any kind of political, economic, and cultural context. We’ve never seen a figure exactly like Trump before, but he doesn’t come from outer space—he’s very much a made-in-America phenomenon. I think tracing the various roots of Trumpism helps remind people that we know quite a bit of what produced him and helps us go beyond the idea that we can just impeach the bastard and everything will be fine. We need to see the conditions that produced this disaster and then ask how we change those underlying conditions?
Or they’re too busy looking for the next Superman. Obama, Trudeau in Canada, Macron in France—a lot of liberals just want to elect these charismatic, handsome, well-spoken politicians to save us from Trumpism.
I feel hopeful about it because what we saw with the Sanders campaign was a tremendous appetite for transformative change. We’ve been told for so long that only the most incremental changes are sellable to the American public. That turns out not to be true. What Bernie’s weaknesses were: race and gender. I think there needs to be a much more integrated story told about how extreme capitalism has advanced since the beginning of the United States on the backs of racial politics.
By Naomi Klein (Haymarket Books)
