The Shock Doctrine

Klein argues that the dominant economic model of the last fifty years — deregulation, privatization, slashing the public sphere — has never been able to win a democratic vote. So it wins through shock: disasters, coups, terror attacks, any crisis that makes a population pliable enough to accept what they'd never accept otherwise. The Shock Doctrine traces the doctrine from Pinochet's Chile through Hurricane Katrina, and September 11 is one of its central case studies — Klein shows exactly how the political window created by mass grief got used to restructure the U.S. security state in ways that had been waiting on the shelf. You've watched this pattern. She names it.