On Doppelganger

A confession: I thought Naomi Klein was Naomi Wolf. I knew they were different writers — Klein on the left, Wolf on the right — but as I started Doppelganger I realized the face that came up in my head for “Klein” was actually Wolf’s. I’d never seen a picture of Naomi Klein.

It’s an odd thing. I knew Klein had written No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, and though I hadn’t read either, I knew their arguments; I also knew Wolf was a conspiracy theorist. So how did I conflate the two? Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World is a fascinating examination of contemporary North American politics that takes exactly this scenario as its starting point — she was constantly mistaken for Wolf, and vice versa. On the surface it makes sense: both are writers working with big ideas, both published their first books in the 1990s, both began as anti-establishment figures. But where Klein stayed on the investigative left, Wolf drifted into the conspiratorial right, and Klein came to see her as a doppelganger — one of those archetypal figures that keep recurring in our culture.

One interesting thing about doppelgangers is that they signal a psyche collapsing in on itself. Think of Jekyll and Hyde, each the darker mirror of the other. Klein argues that the emerging North American far right is a doppelganger of what we ostensibly liberal, well-educated North Americans believe about ourselves: it takes valid critiques — of surveillance capitalism, of state overreach, of hypernormalized behavior — and gives them a conspiracy theorist’s twist. Take Covid-19. It produced the highest death rate from infectious disease in decades, and at the outset we knew almost nothing about it; governments responded with lockdowns, quarantines, and, once there was a vaccine, vaccine cards — none of it really enough to curb the spread. Meanwhile economic and political elites profited enormously while smaller businesses survived on loans. The response ran on what Klein earlier called the “shock doctrine,” and anger at vulture capitalists would have been entirely just. Unfortunately, Wolf didn’t blame capitalism; she accused elites of attempting genocide against the general population, of imposing Nazi-style ghettoization, and so on. What?

The important thing is that Wolf’s claims are valid for some segments of the population — just not the middle-class white America she seems to be defending. Indigenous people have suffered genocide, with infectious disease a major tool of it; Black Americans are ghettoized by the systems of racial capitalism. These are enormously important, but in the “mirror world” they’re bastardized and, in being bastardized, delegitimized. Klein is at her best on “diagonalism,” the maneuver by which the North American right assembles a new coalition outside the traditional binaries. During Covid, the Bannonites pulled together holistic-health enthusiasts, quack “medical professionals,” nationalists, and the white working class; where wellness influencers once aligned with progressives and environmentalists, that has started to shift.

She’s at her weakest on the dynamics of the Nazi coalition. She suggests that part of the confusion between her and Wolf is that both are Jewish, which opens onto a longer discussion of Nazism. Frankly, I hadn’t initially registered that either of them was Jewish, despite both being named Naomi — and Klein notes that people also confuse her with Naomi Campbell, a mixed-race model few would assume to be Jewish. My worry about the extensive Nazi material is that Klein risks the same rhetorical trap Wolf falls into. The Nazis are the ultimate shadow of the modern West: they pushed the worst of our society to its furthest extreme, and we can’t fully extricate ourselves from their project, which was at once the colonial project, the racial project, the patriarchal project, the populist project, and the capitalist project. The Nazis are our social doppelganger, and that’s worth recognizing — but tracing every political misstep back to them isn’t helpful when there are actual Nazis around. I suspect Wolf isn’t one of them, even if she’s badly lost and feeds our worst impulses.

Altogether it’s an outstanding and original examination of contemporary politics in the United States and Canada. Klein’s prose reads like honey, and she ties the threads together well, with the Covid-19 pandemic as the ground zero of an emerging realignment.