A confession: I thought Naomi Klein was Naomi Wolf. I knew that they were different writers–I saw Klein as being politically on the left, while Wolf is on the right. However, I learned as I began reading Doppelganger that the person who I physically appeared in my head was not Klein but Wolf. I had never seen a picture of Naomi Klein before.
It’s an odd thing. I knew that Klein had written No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Although I hadn’t read either book, I was familiar with their arguments. I was aware, also, that Wolf was a conspiracy theorist. How, then, did I conflate both people?
Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (New York: FSG, 2023) is a fascinating examination of contemporary North American politics. Klein takes the very scenario I described above as her starting point: she constantly experienced people mistaking her for Wolf, and vice-versa. On the surface, this is understandable: both were writers dealing with big ideas, both had their earliest books published in the 1990s, and both were initially anti-establishment figures. Where Klein has remained a part of investigative left, Wolf has diverged and fallen in with the conspiratorial right.
Because of these circumstances, Klein had come to see Wolf as a sort of doppelganger: one of those archetypal phenomena that seem to re-appear in our culture over and over again.
One of the interesting things about doppelgangers is that they are a sign that the psyche tends to have collapsed on itself. Take Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: One is the darker, mirror reflection of the other. Klein argues that the emerging North American extreme-right is a doppelganger of what we ostensibly liberal, well-educated North Americans think about ourselves. They take valid critiques about surveillance capitalism, state overreach, and hypernormal behavior and give them a conspiracy theorist’s twist.
Take the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. The pandemic was the event that saw the highest death rate from infectious disease in decades. At the time the pandemic began, we knew almost nothing about the disease, and our governments responded with lockdowns, quarantining, and–after a vaccine was developed–vaccine cards. Realistically, these things were not enough to curtail the rapid spread of the disease.
Yet, economic and political elites did profit enormous amounts from the pandemic, while smaller businesses were required to rely on loans to keep themselves functioning. The response to Covid-19 relied on what Klein had earlier called the “shock doctrine,” and anger towards vulture capitalists would actually be just. Unfortunately, Naomi Wolf didn’t blame capitalism, instead accusing elites of attempting to commit genocide against the general population, instilling Nazi-esque ghettoization policies, etc.
What?
One important thing about Wolf’s claims is that they are valid for some segments of the population, but not the middle class white America that Wolf seems to be defending. Indigenous people have experienced genocide, with infectious disease as a major tool. Black Americans are ghettoized by systems in place under racial capitalism. All of these issues are enormously important, but–in the “mirror world”–they are bastardized and, thus, delegitimized.
Naomi Klein is at her best when she discusses “diagonalism,” a technique in which the North American right attempts to carve out a new political coalition outside of traditional binaries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Bannonites managed to assemble a political group consisting of those passionate about holistic health, quack “medical professionals,” nationalists, and the white working class. In the past, wellness influencers tended to align with progressives and environmentalists, but that has begun to change.
Klein’s book is at its weakest when it goes into the dynamics of the Nazi coalition. She suggests that one of the points of confusion between she and Wolf is that they are both Jewish, which leads into a larger discussion of Nazism. If I can be frank, I initially actually didn’t realize either of them were Jewish although they’re both called “Naomi.” Additionally, Klein discusses various people also conflating her with Naomi Campbell, a mixed-race model that I suspect many would not readily assume is Jewish.
My concern with such extensive coverage of Nazism is that Klein risks falling into the same rhetorical traps that Naomi Wolf does. Nazis are the ultimate “shadow” of the contemporary Western world: they pushed the worst aspects of our society to their furthest extent, and we can’t really extricate ourselves from their project. The Nazi project was the colonial project, it was the racial project, it was the patriarchal project, it was the populist project, and it was the capitalist project. The Nazis are our social doppelganger, and that’s worth recognizing, but every single political misstep is tied back to the Nazi project, which is not helpful when there are real Nazis out there. I suspect that Naomi Wolf is not one of them, even if she is seriously lost and feeds into our worst impulses.
Altogether, Klein’s book is an outstanding–and original–examination of contemporary politics in the United States and Canada. Her prose reads like honey, and she effectively ties together numerous threads, emphasizing the Covid-19 pandemic as ground-zero of the emerging political re-alignment. It’s well worth the read.
