An Interview With Naomi Klein

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L.G.: You hang a lot on Milton Friedman as the sort of creator and promulgator of this way of thinking and doing things—

N.K.: Well, I think Milton Friedman is incredibly important as a popularizer of the ideology, of this extreme version of capitalism.

L.G.: And he coined the "shock therapy" term, and he has advised nasty dictators in putting it into practice.

N.K.: But I think the major importance is his articulation of the post-New Deal extreme capitalism that has spread throughout the world—not in as pure a form as he would've liked, but he was the chief popularizer of that ideological campaign. And he also had some interesting tactics, including writing about the use of shock in crisis, but I think that's not his most important role. His most important role is as the popularizer of the ideology itself.

L.G.: Have you heard from his admirers and partisans about what you might be doing to his legacy, and are you perhaps afraid that the ghost of Milton Friedman will haunt you?

N.K.: Um, I have heard from some of them, I'm not-

L.G.: You don't believe in ghosts?

N.K.: When Friedman died [in November 2006 at age 94], the memorials, the stories that were told about his legacies, were so one-sided, so unbalanced. I would say 99 percent exclusively laudatory when we think about the mainstream U.S. press, which wasn't true in other parts of the world. There was a more critical examination of his role in the articles written in Latin America and Russia and so on. But in the United States, it was incredibly one-sided, and I think the book has been a corrective. And it was a corrective that was needed, which isn't to say that this is the only story, but given that the story that we had before was so incredibly one-sided, this is inserting some of the facts that have been missed from that official story. But Milton Friedman was personally very preoccupied with the question of legacy, and his followers and admirers know that. It's also a very difficult time for the true Milton Friedman fanatics, not because of my book, but because of George Bush. They have had this unfortunate problem of having had a president who hired straight out of the think tanks. The hallways of the American Enterprise Institute echoed; there was no one left after the Bush administration hired everyone.

L.G.: Would you say Bush is a 62-year-old intern in Dick Cheney's office?

N.K.: [Laughs] I like that. And he echoed the ideology, the spreading of free markets and free people throughout the world. They had Milton Friedman's birthday party on Capitol Hill when he turned 90, and so this administration, even though places like the Cato Institute are desperately trying to distance themselves from it now when they look at the disaster of the exploding budget and corporate welfare that this administration has come to stand for, now they need to distance themselves, but—

L.G.: Certainly Milton Friedman would be inveighing against that.

N.K.: Sure, but the problem is that this is the result of an administration that embraced wholeheartedly this ideology. The result is rampant corruption, corporate welfare, crony capitalism—it's really ugly to look at. So I think reality is really causing the crisis for the true Friedman fanatics. There's kind of a retreat going on into sacred text. They don't want to deal with reality because for a long time it was just about trying to get policymakers to accept their ideology. But now they had those policymakers and they've created such a disaster, and indicted the ideology with their legacy, now there's just a desire to go back to the sacred text and say that everything was a distortion. And what I see is a really striking similarity that I've seen on the left, on the far left, where you've had these kind of Trotskyite people who sell newspapers outside of my events, and they have no interest in looking at the reality of authoritarian communism in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, anywhere. These are all distortions and what they want to do is, they just want to go back to the sacred texts, and say that we have nothing to learn from these lived experiments. The Cato Institute now, essentially, they are Friedmanite Trotskyites.

L.G.: My view, as a member of the news media, is anybody who's able to sell newspapers in this day and age, God bless them. But Barack Obama, you have recently called him "one of the Chicago boys."

N.K.: No, no—

L.G.: As far as I know, you've tried to make some sort of connection between the University of Chicago way of thinking and Obama. As far as I know, he taught a bit in the law school, but how was he infected by the Chicago way of doing things?

N.K.: Well, he was associated with the law school, taught part-time for a decade. It's not a casual connection. But I think the major connection is Austan Goolsbee, who's a University of Chicago economist, his chief adviser.

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