Canadian journalist and essayist Naomi Klein, best known for her books No Logo (1999) and The Shock Doctrine (2007), has just published a new book: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. In this interview with the independent French environment-focused outlet Reporterre, she takes the US and European left to task: “We need to focus on green policies that are also policies of economic redistribution.”
Photo: Vera de Kok – Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0
Reporterre: How do you account for Donald Trump’s victory?
Naomi Klein: The right is reaching out to the working classes more easily than the left or the liberals. This should be a real wake-up call. It should make us consider how the progressive discourse is perceived: elitist, out of touch and with no plan to help ordinary people. I’ve always believed in the possibility of a political strategy that tackles both the ecological crisis and social inequality. But that’s not how the left has shaped its climate policy. We are seeing growing discontent among working people, who feel that such issues are a luxury they cannot afford.
So it’s because the social-democratic left won’t go down this road and engage with people’s real-life concerns?
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It’s a failure of the left as a whole. Not just America’s Democratic Party, which is not the left but rather represents the establishment. The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party has been totally marginalised. In its absence, the left has split into small, aggressive factions that fight each other. There is no movement with a positive message, capable of attracting working people. That is what the Trump campaign managed to do: it attracted a lot of people on the left, working people who need some hope of economic relief.
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It’s a paradox because it’s Trump who lives in a world of billionaires, alongside Elon Musk and others.
The Democratic Party is perceived as more elitist than the Republican Party, which is a coalition of the rich, some crassly so but others more in touch with working people For instance, Elon Musk interacts with ordinary Twitter users, whereas rich Democrats don’t talk to anyone outside their circles. In 2016, I wrote that the Democratic Party is like a party you weren’t invited to. It was a super elite who put on a show and thought working people would join in. But people felt insulted and excluded. That’s how they came to elect Trump.
Of course, the Republican Party does serve the interests of money. But it has not been condescending to working people in the way that the Democratic Party has been. Moreover, the mass deportations promised by Trump are not just a matter of racism, they are also about economics. He is promising a redistribution of wealth to the working class, in the same way that the fascists presented antisemitism as a redistribution of wealth. That is what Trump is saying to black and Latino voters: “These immigrants are taking your jobs, we’re going to get rid of them so you have more jobs.” It may be awful but it’s important to understand that there is an economic logic behind this voting choice.
What is the correct strategy for the left and greens?
We need to start by taking an honest look at how we are perceived. We need to focus on environmental policies that are also about economic redistribution, that show in concrete terms that you don’t have to choose between the environment, your family and your wallet. We should be fighting for free local public transport and for getting everyone access to heat pumps that reduce energy consumption and allow homes to be both heated and cooled. We can have green policies that also make life more affordable. We need an ecological populism, ecopopulism.
The problem is that redistribution is needed but the road to it seems absolutely blocked. People know that there is massive inequality but they see it as something that’s impossible to change. There’s a fatalistic outlook.
The best way to fight fatalism is to be strategic. Choose two or three things you can win on, and win on them! Then people will begin to feel hopeful again. You can’t convince a fatalist with arguments alone. You have to show them that it’s possible.
How?
In the United States, Trump is in charge of everything at the federal level, but the Democrats run the show in states like California and in major cities like New York. There’s a lot of criticism to be levelled at Joe Biden on the climate, but he did manage to pass the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA, a $370 billion investment scheme over ten years to kick-start the energy transition]. So I hope that the renewable-energy revolution is far enough along that it can continue without federal support. Joe Biden must unblock this money before the end of his term so that the projects can get off the ground. Some Republican governors are already saying they don’t want to get rid of the IRA because it will give them the funding they need.
Another difficulty is that Trump and the far-right are fully prepared to lie, and the public debate is no longer based on facts.
No one is completely wedded to the truth. We all choose our fantasies. The environmental, economic and military realities of our time are hard to bear. So we all live in our own bubbles and we project onto our opponents everything we cannot abide in ourselves.
But it’s true that the Republican Party is taking an increasingly creative approach to the facts. We are reaping the effects of a strategy pursued for fifty years by the right, which has destroyed the information ecosystem. That’s why I talk about things like public transport, the price of heating, the price of food, and so on. The less we get into abstract debates about the causes of climate change, the better.
‘Populism has to be redistributive, in direct response to people’s economic needs’
Ecological populism is a very bold term. Does it mean taking on the opponent’s methods and language, or even being more ruthless still?
For me, populism is not a dirty word.
In France, populism is a stigma used to discredit people.
We’re talking about a policy of redistribution and a willingness to meet people where they are. The left has become very academic and elitist. Its message is out of touch with the people. When you mention carbon trading, people don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s very easy for your opponents to distort your ideas. What the right often does is to take an academic term, like gender theory, and put their own interpretation on it. They’re able to do this because people don’t know what gender theory is. But saying “I’m for free public transport” is easy.
How would you define populism?
Populism has to be redistributive, in direct response to people’s economic needs. Bernie Sanders is an economic populist because he talks about redistributing wealth and raising wages, about universal healthcare and public services, things that respond directly to people’s needs. This is derided by the centre as populist. I think we should be embracing these ideas. It’s good to be populist!
In the early 2000s, there were the World Forums, such as in Porto Alegre in Brazil. Is it conceivable to try to reset the situation, starting with green issues? How might we revive a major grassroots movement? Is that a dream?
It’s not such a distant dream. There could be another upsurge that captures and directs this energy. People are angry. They understand that their living conditions are increasingly difficult and stressful. They feel that the system is rigged. Right-wing populism takes this anger and directs it at the most vulnerable, by scapegoating immigrants. Left-wing populism tries to direct the energy against corporations and elites. But this energy has also been co-opted by the likes of Steve Bannon [Donald Trump’s former right-hand man], Giorgia Meloni [the hard-right Italian prime minister], Marine Le Pen, etc.
The threat of war seems to be growing all over the world. How can we deal with it?
Trump is going to feed it. He wants more European spending on armaments. It’s also an invitation to the left to invest in health and housing instead of militarism. And it’s a difficult choice. Do we build bombs or hospitals?
What would be a left-wing answer to that question? Should we increase our military spending?
No, but we can invest in an economy that gives hope for peace with the Earth and with each other. Trump holds out the prospect of a world where we invest in offensive weapons and a global iron dome. This would protect our borders from the effects of our policies and mass immigration, etc. There could be another vision for the populist left, focused on the war on climate change and economic injustice.
Artificial intelligence is becoming the engine of capitalism. How will it change the political landscape and how should the left and ecologists respond?
We need to identify the cracks in the coalition cobbled together by the right. It has a lot of vulnerabilities. One of them is that Trump is already talking about investing in artificial intelligence, but this contradicts what Bannon and figures on the New Right are saying about a spiritual collapse. The left has not been good at giving voice to this sense that the world is becoming dehumanised. It’s a climate issue, it’s a labour-rights issue, but it’s also a spiritual issue. We need to talk more about it.
👉 Original article on Reporterre
🤝 This article is published within the Come Together collaborative project.
