Summary

Prompted by the complexities of the U.S. occupation of Iraq under George Bush after September 11, Klein embarked on an extensive research initiative determined to expose how governments and corporations use “crisis to ram through policies that would never have been feasible in normal times,” or what she calls shock politics (133). Klein claims shock politics were “first deployed in the service of neoliberalism in the early 1970s” and have been employed around the world since, everywhere from Latin America, to Russia, and to the United States even before Trump’s election in cities like Flint and Detroit (134). Worldwide, and especially in the U.S., decade’s worth of far-right, pro-corporate, neoliberal policies have put the populous in a state of “collective vertigo,” making it difficult to follow the whirlpool of chaos and near impossible to effectively...