Publisher's Synopsis
SHOCK: THIS WORD CONTINUES TO COME BACK since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. To qualify electoral results which have made the polls lie. To evoke the feelings of all those who followed his rise to power. To describe his conception of politics as lightning war.
"The system is in a state of shock" it is in these terms that his advisor Kellyanne Conway tirelessly presents the change of epoch.
For nearly twenty years, I have studied the large-scale shocks that societies experience, their genesis, their exploitation by politicians and multinationals, the way in which they are deliberately aggravated to dominate a population which loses its bearings. I am also interested in the reverse of this process: how societies that come together around a shared analysis of the crisis manage to change the world, to make it better.
Watching the rise of Donald Trump, I had a strange feeling. This man does not content himself with applying a policy of shock to the most powerful and best armed country in the world. He goes further. In my books, documentaries and surveys, I have described a number of trends: the development of super-brands, the growing power of large private fortunes over the political system, globally imposed neoliberalism, which often uses the racism and fear of "the other" as levers, the devastating effects of free trade dictated by large corporations and the denial of climate change, now deeply rooted to the right of the political spectrum. When I started researching Trump, he struck me as some sort of Frankenstein,
