Street Roots • June 23-29, 2017
News
KLEIN, from page 4
humanity dominating the Earth and
disregarding limits of any kind - if it
gets in the way, just deny reality.
I think it’s been a tremendous
weakness that progressives have
partitioned on issues that are all so
deeply interconnected. And the reasons
for that are complex. There are funding
structures in place that encourage
organizations to have a narrow lens and
a set of demands that seem winnable in
the short term. You can write a grant
application and say, “I’m going to do
this,” and go back a few months later
and say, “I did it.” That doesn’t lend
itself to political ambition or systemic
change because it’s hard to write a
grant application for that.
We need to find ways out of those
boxes, because they are really
dangerous right now.
I do believe there has been a process
of metabolizing some of the lessons of
9/11, and one of them has been about
the need to show up for one another.
We saw that very movingly with the
response to the travel ban, and frankly,
what happened in this city. The fact
that people witnessed a hate crime and
harassment, and stepped up to
intervene, I think, reflects that. They
paid the ultimate price for that. But
that’s why they’re being held up as
heroes, because that embodies what we
all need to do.
N .K .: This is part of why I wanted to
get the book out before a shock like
that happened - pointing out how
shocks will be exploited before they
happen and also connecting it to
moments in U .S . history when this has
happened - because historical memory
is the best shock absorber of all. It is
the thing that allows societies to
identify patterns, and go, “Wait a
minute - they did this before and
they’re doing it again.” I think there is
some of that post 9/11.1 think people
do remember the way the Bush
administration exploited that shock.
There are a lot of people around who
vividly remember how Rudy Giuliani
seemed like a great daddy figure, and
that’s pretty embarrassing right now in
retrospect. It’s important to remind
people, yeah - maybe it was a mistake
to hand over so much power to Dick
Cheney and Rudy Giuliani.
I think reminding your readers of
what happened after the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, with the internment of
Japanese Americans, and what
happened during the Great Depression,
with the mass deportations of
Mexicans. This is history that,
unfortunately, isn’t taught well enough
in schools, if at all. In particular, it’s not
taught as a warning for what happens
in these states of crisis and hyper-jingoism.
Societies that have learned that history, that
can identify it early and go wait a minute,
they’re doing it again, we’re not going to fall for
it again. T h a t ’s th e w o rk th a t n e e d s to b e d o n e
before the moment of shock, because as you
say, when the shock happens, that’s when
people are most vulnerable.
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journalists and
independent media
work as a shock
absorber rather
than just fueling
the hysteria?
N .K .: There’s
no shortage of
people fueling the
hysteria. I think it
creates a lot of
space for
alternative media
and independent media to focus on all the
things that are being missed while the national
media has its eyes fixed on the Trump show.
By the Trump show, I mean the show that
Trump is putting on because he’s always
understood the value of distraction. And also
the show that is being foisted on Trump - I
don’t think he enjoys being investigated by the
FB I but all this is just journalistic crack. They
can’t look away. The ratings for cable news
have never been better. It physically pains
them to spend one minute talking about
healthcare, talking about what’s being done to
Dodd-Frank, talking about the economic
policies that are being advanced and how that
is going to impact people’s actual lives, they
can’t, anymore than they couldn’t during the
election campaign. They are addicted to
Trump.
There was this mea culpa after the election
with all of these cable news people admitting
that they helped fuel and create this monster
Page 5
because they just couldn’t look away, and it’s
only gotten worse.
It’s not to say that there is nothing to cover,
absolutely - cover the Russia investigation,
cover all the investigations. The investigations
November 2016, you wrote the
Democratic Party needs to move away from
neoliberals like the Clintons or be abandoned. In
the months since, have you seen any prom ising
sh o u ld b e h a p p e n in g , an d it sh o u ld b e a p a rt o f
alternative parties popping up or signs that
the coverage, but it’s not - it’s 99 percent of
the coverage. This has basically been the
biggest gift of all time to Mitch McConnell.
They didn’t plan this, but this has landed on
their laps, and this is basically the best recipe
they’ve ever had for pushing through an
incredibly unpopular, damaging economic
program because they have this constant
distraction.
And the Democrats seem to think their best
strategy is to run an impeachment into 2018.
Basically, to go all-in on building the case for
impeachment and then run the next election
on “elect us and we’ll impeach Trump.”
I think that the vacuum for independent
media is to focus on all the things that are
being missed while the Trump show provides
cover.
would suggest it is possible to reshape the
Democratic Party?
E .G .: In the Pacific Northwest, we’ve recently
experienced a string of alt-right rallies, increases
in reported hate crimes, as well as renewed efforts
to build fossil fuel infrastructures that activists
thought had been killed. How do historically
siloed causes, such climate change and racial
equity, best come together when they are all so
vehemently under attack?
N .K .: Just by doing it, and by understanding
that precisely because all of our movements
are under attack, we are not going to resist this
onslaught on our own. It really benefits the
Trumps of this world - and there are many -
for us to be siloed and treat these issues as
unconnected.
They’re not unconnected for Trump. He has
a coherent worldview called “Make America
Great Again,” which is about dominance on
every level. Dominating people, women, people
of color, creating this brutal hierarchy of
E.G.: In
N .K .: What I’ve seen is like a hardening of
positions within the Democratic Party and a
hardening around treating Bernie’s base as the
enemy.
I don’t really understand what planet these
people are on, like that it’s a good idea to just
write off 13 million people who voted for
Bernie - and the fact that he carried more
than 20 states, I mean I don’t understand. But
that seems to be where some powerful people
in the Democratic Party are going.
In terms of whether or not the fight is
within the Democratic Party or outside the
Democratic Party or some space in between, I
don’t really know.
It is interesting what has happened in the
U .K . because Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was
fought at every single stage by the equivalent
of the D N C, the Labour Party. He was
sabotaged again and
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movement to join the
Labour Party led by
young people, and
this appears to have
worked. Finally, it
appears that they are
going to stop fighting
him because he did
so much better than expected in the last
election.
You’re going to be fought at every stage. Of
course they will undermine you and undercut
you - and that means maybe you don’t walk
away, but it’s a different structure.
See KLEIN, page 7