With the political climate and the financial markets the way they are, Naomi Klein has been getting a lot of air time — on Bill Mahr’s and Stephen Colbert’s shows, for example — to push her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which argues that “conservative” politicians have engineered disasters to push their unpopular “free-market” policies.
A more reasonable stance might be that all politicians take advantage of crises to push through new policies that funnel money and power into their hands and their friends’ hands — and there’s nothing conservative or free-market about cronyism.
Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan, written two decades ago, documents how American government has grown during each war or economic depression — without shrinking after each crisis has passed — and I don’t see this pattern stopping any time soon.
Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, notes that Naomi Klein’s ideas are those of the Dead Left:
It seems like a very long time — though in truth only a few years have passed — since the most sinister force on the planet that the left could imagine was Nike. In 2001, Time proclaimed that the anti-globalization movement had become the “defining cause” of a new generation, and that the spokesperson for the cause was the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. For puzzled outsiders grasping to understand why bands of youths had begun following the World Trade Organization wherever it went, brandishing oversize puppets and occasionally smashing up the local Starbucks, Klein was there to explain. She has always downplayed her place within the movement, but in fact her influence is as considerable as her press clippings proclaim. Her achievement, and it is no small feat, has been to revive economicism — and more grandiosely, materialism — as the central locus of left-wing politics.From the time of Marx, and through the Depression, the left concerned itself primarily with economic inequality. The analysis of injustice in terms of class conflict and the forces of production was the canonical one. But the postwar boom — the authors of the Port Huron Statement famously described themselves as “bred in at least modest comfort” — turned the left’s attention to foreign policy and national security in the Cold War, and to civil rights, and to feminism. By the 1980s, left-wing politics had withdrawn almost entirely into academia and other liberal enclaves, which it ruthlessly policed for any dissent from the verities of multiculturalist dogma and identity politics.
This evolution can be seen in Klein’s own family. Her grandfather was a Marxist fired by Disney in 1941 for trying to organize animators. Her father fled the United States for Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her mother directed the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. And Naomi Klein, like most campus leftists of the 1980s, directed her ideological energies toward the denouncing of various -isms within academia. (She later recalled, with admirable remorse, that she was known as “Miss P.C.”)
By the 1990s, Klein had come to realize, like some other campus activists, that off-campus there could be found worse depredations than the canonization of Shakespeare and other dead white males. And the new enemy turned out to be an old one — the original one, in fact: the corporations, and more generally capitalism. Klein set to work on her book No Logo, which appeared in 1999. That book wove together much of the new economic activism springing up in the precincts of academia into a withering anti-corporate manifesto. Her indictment had two main counts. The first was that many corporations profited from the cruel treatment of Third World labor. This observation was undeniable, and the publicizing of these evils has produced reforms of which activists can rightly be proud. The second charge was that corporations have encroached upon and monetized every aspect of modern life and culture. Klein wrote that she could envision a future “fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests.” This aspect of her argument needed a bit more thinking through.
The distinctive thing about Klein’s style was that it was very Old Left. She had a classic Marxist-materialist analysis, arguing that economic conditions, rather than bigotry or ideology, are what shape the world. Her interest in culture and in actually existing life under capitalism was somewhat derivative of the Frankfurt School, though not as intellectually sophisticated. Yet she managed to make the old notions feel new, and to capture the ethos of what was being called “the New New Left.” And her argument reflected the conviction of the new anti-globalization activists, the children of the “cultural left,” that they themselves — and not just workers in Nike factories abroad — were the victims of international corporations.