She was the last clear expression of capitalism-as-usual. And if we waste this chance, it will be back to drill-baby-drill
Naomi Klein guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 July 2009 19.30 BST
The US bailout is a robbery in progress, the greatest heist in monetary history. But consider for a moment: what if it actually works, what if the financial sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world look like?
The answer is that it would look like Sarah Palin. Hear me out – this is not a joke. We're so busy laughing at her we may not have given sufficient consideration to the meaning of the Palin moment. Think about it, Sarah Palin stepped on to the world stage as vice-presidential candidate on 29 August 2008 at a McCain campaign rally. Two weeks later, on 15 September, Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the global financial meltdown.
So in a way Palin was the last clear expression of capitalism-as-usual before everything went south. That's quite helpful because she showed us – in that plain-spoken way of hers – the trajectory the US economy was on before its current meltdown. By offering us this glimpse of a future, one narrowly avoided, Palin provides us with an opportunity to ask a core question: do we want to save that pre-crisis system? Or do we want to use this crisis, and the electoral mandate for serious change delivered by the last election, to radically transform the system? Progressives need to get clear on our answer now because we haven't had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this opportunity, or we lose it.
So what was Sarah Palin telling us about capitalism-as-usual before she was so rudely interrupted by the meltdown? Let's first recall that before she came along, the US public, at long last, was starting to come to grips with the urgency of the climate crisis, with the fact that our economic activity is at war with the planet, that radical change is needed immediately. We were actually having that conversation, and polar bears were on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And then in walked Sarah Palin. The core of her message was this: those environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You don't have to change anything. You don't have to rethink anything. Keep driving your gas-guzzling car and keep going to Wal-Mart. The reason is a magical place called Alaska. Just come up here and take all you want. "Americans," she said at the Republican National Convention, "we need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska, we've got lots of both." And the crowd at the convention responded by chanting: "Drill, baby, drill."
Watching that scene on television, with its weird creepy mixture of sex and oil and jingoism, I recall thinking: "Wow, the RNC has turned into a rally in favour of screwing Planet Earth." Literally.
It's not a question of whether Americans are nuts enough to elect Palin in 2012. What Palin was saying is what is built into the very DNA of capitalism: the idea that the world has no limits. She was saying that there are no such things as consequences, or real-world deficits. Because there will always be another frontier, another bubble, another Alaska. Just move on and discover it. Tomorrow will never come.
This is the most comforting and dangerous lie that there is: the lie that perpetual, unending growth is possible on our finite planet. And we have to remember that this message was incredibly popular in those first two weeks, before Lehman collapsed. Despite Bush's record, Palin and McCain were pulling ahead. And if it weren't for the financial crisis, and for the fact that Obama started connecting with working-class voters by putting deregulation and trickle-down economics on trial, they might have actually won.
The president tells us he wants to look forward, not backwards. But in order to confront the lie of perpetual growth and limitless abundance that is at the centre of both the ecological and financial crises, we have to look backwards. And we have to look way backwards, not just to the past eight years of Bush and Cheney, but to the very founding of the US, to the whole idea of the settler state.
Modern capitalism was born with the so-called discovery of the Americas. It was the pillage of the incredible natural resources of the Americas that generated the excess capital that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
Early explorers spoke of a New Jerusalem, a land of such bottomless abundance, there for the taking, so vast that the pillage would never have to end. This mythology is in our biblical stories – of floods and fresh starts, of raptures and rescues – and it is at the centre of the American Dream of constant reinvention. What this myth tells us is that we don't have to live with our pasts, with the consequences of our actions. We can always escape, start over.
These stories were always dangerous, of course, to the people who were already living on the "discovered" lands, to the people who worked them through forced labour. But now the planet itself is telling us that we cannot afford these stories of endless new beginnings anymore. That is why it is so significant that at the very moment when some kind of human survival instinct kicked in, and we seemed finally to be coming to grips with the Earth's natural limits, along came Palin, the new and shiny incarnation of the colonial frontierswoman, saying: Come on up to Alaska. There is always more. Don't think, just take.
This is not about Sarah Palin. It's about the meaning of that myth of constant "discovery", and what it tells us about the economic system that they're spending trillions of dollars to save. What it tells us is that capitalism, left to its own devices, will push us past the point from which the climate can recover. And capitalism will avoid a serious accounting – whether of its financial debts or its ecological debts – at all costs. Because there's always more. A new quick fix. A new frontier.
The question that we face is whether our job is to bail out this ship, the biggest pirate ship that ever was, or to sink it and replace it with a sturdier vessel, one with space for everyone? One that doesn't require these ritual purges, during which we throw our friends and neighbours overboard to save the people in first class. One that understands that the Earth doesn't have the capacity for all of us to live better and better. But it does have the capacity, as the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, said recently at the UN, "for all of us to live well".
Because make no mistake, capitalism will be back. And the same message will return, though there may be someone new selling that message: You don't need to change. Keep consuming all you want. There's plenty more. Drill, baby, drill. Maybe there will be some technological fix that will make all our problems disappear.
And that is why we need to be absolutely clear right now. Capitalism can survive this crisis. But the world can't survive another capitalist comeback.
This is an edited version of a speech from The Progressive's 100th anniversary conference. A longer version is in the August edition of the Progressive magazine
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