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.
Looking back, it’s really striking how much economic power Obama and the Democrats had in that short window before they lost Congress. First, they had a free hand to design a stimulus program to rebuild Main Street—and to make it as big as required. After decades of unrelenting cutbacks in social spending, there was suddenly a widespread consensus on the need for the federal government to pull the economy out of recession. The stimulus plan ended up being $800 billion, a staggering sum, although, at the time, it was widely criticized for being too small.
And that was not the only tool that Obama had to make good on his promises to rebuild Main Street. The banks were on their knees, receiving trillions of dollars in public money in direct bailouts and loan guarantees, and there were very lively and heated debates going on, in the United States and around the world, about what governments should demand in exchange for saving the banks from the consequences of their own greed. Should they cap executive salaries? Restore Glass–Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks? Should they throw the CEOs responsible for the global crisis in jail? Should the banks be permanently nationalized and run as public trusts? Some of this may sound radical today, but it’s worth remembering that these were the actual debates going on in 2009, even in staid publications like the Financial Times. And there were similar discussions about the fate of the big auto companies, which were also heading to Washington needing bailouts. Two of the Big Three—General Motors and Chrysler—had to declare bankruptcy that same year and were put under government control.
So, let’s zoom out and imagine what might have been…. Obama had the electoral mandate for real change, he had a virtual blank check to design a stimulus package, and he had an opportunity to impose much-needed changes on two failing sectors of the US economy—the banks and the auto companies.
Imagine if the Democrats had used the leverage they had in 2009 and 2010 to make serious, substantive restructuring demands of the banks and the auto giants in exchange for continuing to bail them out. Imagine if Obama, who had been elected on a promise to rebuild Main Street, solve climate change, and stabilize the economy, had treated the banking and automotive sectors as components of a unified vision for reviving the economy, while fighting inequality and climate change at the same time.
To be concrete, what if the auto companies had been mandated to restructure themselves so they were producing the vehicles of the low-carbon future—electric cars, electric buses, and light rail? In the midst of the financial crisis, two million manufacturing jobs were lost and hundreds of factories closed down. What if, instead of letting that happen, those factories had been refurbished and retooled? A similar industrial transformation took place during World War II, when US factories were enlisted for the war effort.
It would have been expensive, yes, but the banks could have been required to spend a healthy portion of their bailout money providing the necessary loans for this industrial transformation (as it was, they hoarded the cash). And stimulus money could have been spent to help workers get the training they needed to fully participate in the transition, building the public infrastructure—transit, energy grids—of this same green economy. Obama’s infrastructure bill did include important support for green energy and green projects, but the clean infrastructure of the future, including public transit and light rail, was shortchanged in favor of the dirty infrastructure of the past, such as highways. And the opportunities presented by the bank and auto bailouts were squandered almost completely. Even after all their failures, the attitude in Washington was still: the banks know best, the auto companies know best, our job is just to get these industries on their feet as quickly as possible so they can get back to a gently tweaked version of business as usual.
This road not taken matters because, right now, one of the biggest obstacles to serious action on climate change is the fossil fuel companies’ successful positioning of themselves as the only ones capable of creating well-paying jobs and keeping the lights on. Obama and the Democrats could have buried that claim once and for all.
Other countries, in the same period, did bury the claim. Over the past decade, the German government has treated the green economy as the main way to revive its manufacturing sector. In the process, it has created 400,000 jobs, and now 30 percent of the country’s energy comes from renewables. And Germany has the strongest economy in Europe by far. The energy transition there is incomplete—Germany remains excessively reliant on coal—and its government has inflicted merciless austerity on other countries while choosing another course for itself. But if the US had followed Germany’s domestic example, it would have been so far along the road to a renewables-based economy that it would have been impossible for Trump to undo—no matter how many executive orders he signed. And who knows? The new manufacturing jobs and improved infrastructure might well have been enough to deprive him of his win altogether.
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.
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?
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.”)
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.