(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Even though Canadian writer Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is overwhelmingly concerned with the great changes wreaked by the digital and online “revolution”, it starts with that most pre-digital of encounters: a conversation overheard in a ladies’ room. In the time of COVID, while truckers in Canada were staging city blockades, Klein, the agenda-setting author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, overhears two women talking about what they view as her appalling comments supporting the crazy blockade — “I hear Naomi Klein has come out in support.”

Mortifying, especially since these aren’t comments by Klein at all. They’re remarks by the other Naomi, Naomi Wolf, now famous as either a fearsome critic or a deranged conspiratorialist of the “deep state” — a place she got to from being a vociferous anti-vaccination campaigner during the pandemic, but formerly best known as the author of The Beauty Myth, and a hero to gen X progressives.

Klein can’t stand it, and bursts out of the stall to put the women right. Yet she knows all the while that the effort is futile; the confusion of the Naomis is common across the global infosphere. Not only has it done real damage to Klein’s reputation and capacity to do the sort of global activism she is a leader of, but it has also put her in real danger of being permanently and irrevocably associated with the noxious irrationalism that is, in content and approach, the very opposite of the massively researched, studies-with-action manifestos that Klein has been a major exponent of over the past three decades.

Klein, as she records in the first chapter of this beguiling and revealing book, responded to the other Naomi’s public obsessiveness by becoming obsessed with it. Knowing she should simply, repeatedly, tediously correct the record — as Wolf made pronouncements on the Soros-WEF-Disney-whatever axis, or the need for governments to separate the urine and faeces of the vaccinated — Klein went “down the rabbit hole” instead (here it’s worth remembering that phrase’s origin: the story of a girl escaping her assigned social role into magic), spending dozens of hours following Wolf’s calamitous trajectory across the past decade, and then thousands of hours exploring the right-wing wonderland of podcasts, conferences and rallies by which this world establishes its counter-reality.

At the centre of this is hard-right consigliere Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, on which Wolf becomes first a regular presence (“You’ll be surprised to hear from our next guest,” Bannon says, regarding Wolf’s first appearance) and then a virtual co-host. Klein meanwhile becomes a hapless, addicted listener, tuning in as she goes about her life in the progressive elite world — wryly, lightly self-satirically described — with her documentary-filmmaker husband, her Pilates classes, and the complex demands of contemporary parenting. Her friends are dismayed, her colleagues bewildered, her family concerned as this obsession consumes the time that could have produced another programmatic book. 

Instead, we have Doppelganger, an account of the world in which the smooth production of one political agenda-setter after another cannot be simply continued. It’s brilliant, mixing an account of the present with memoir; deep-historical, cultural and historical analysis; and an honest depiction of the moment every activist-interpreter faces: when the world, its full panoply, slips beyond you.

But it is also revealing, inevitably, by making visible the limits of Klein’s ability to understand and reframe the world that is upon us, why the progressive agenda has met such resistance and why it is going to meet much more. She admits throughout that, beyond her acute and forensic theorising, she cannot fully accept that basic rational action on climate change, capitalism and much else is not simply taken up by the majority, showing that she has not understood the degree to which “reason”, or a certain version of it, has become the master’s discourse for many millions, the great annihilator against which they must defend themselves to preserve their means of life.

Naomi is not a common name, as Klein notes in her account of the steady confusion of herself and other Naomis in the public sphere from the millennium onwards. Hebrew in origin, yet with a Polynesian twang, it was popular among a certain crowd: postwar, liberal-radical intellectual Jews of the Western diaspora. Wolf’s parents were humanist academics; Klein’s were draft resisters who left the US for Canada, her mother a well-known filmmaker.

In this subculture, the injunction to make something of oneself is necessary but not sufficient. It is not enough to be a doctor, or even a doctor running free clinics — one must come to understand, and through it change, the whole conditions of injustice in which doctoring occurs. Ditto for the law, government, etc. This deeply embedded ethical injunction propelled both Naomis to early ground-breaking success. Wolf as a Rhodes scholar, and author of founding “third wave feminist” text The Beauty Myth, whose impact on publication in 1990 is difficult to overstate, arriving in a post-’60s world where capitalism had captured the content of the cultural revolution — the freedom of, and injunction to, fashion oneself — and discarded the form, that of decommodifying everyday life for a true liberation.

Soon after, Klein burst on to the global scene with No Logo in 1999, a book that reconnected the 1990s activism around image, representation, gender and race with the political economy of globalisation that was supplying and producing this insatiable demand to make and remake ourselves.

Both used the intellectual tools they had inherited from the post-’60s humanities academy, a mix of Frankfurt School cultural analysis, semiotics, second-wave feminism and developmental social psychology to give liberating critiques of the present. Life is high school forever — Doppelganger is in part an exploration of that — and the confusion of the two Naomis was a product of the very process of identity construction they explored: two smart Jewish women, streets ahead of the rest of us, telling everyone how it is and what they should do it about it. One a cargo-pants leftie; the other ambitious, establishment-bound. The doppelganger theme to which Klein repeatedly returns registers the uncanny nature of the contemporary: social media has turned the open-horizoned society of globalisation into a closed village of the famous, in which it is no longer possible — save by never being well known — to subtract yourself from the sum of fractured images of you that are now walking around forever.

That effect was exacerbated by the immediate divergence of the roads taken by the two Naomis. Wolf’s focus on the collective and individual liberation of Western women from their cultural sequestration led easily to a vestigially left version of lean-in feminism, joining the boards and foundations of the patriarchy to change it, with Foucault-lite sexual historical genealogies along the way, as in her later bestish-seller Vagina: A New Biography.

As Wolf’s strikingness and originality steadily lessened towards the market non-fiction middle, Klein’s grew exponentially; Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything each resituated her previous books in a larger and compelling account of the present, generating numerous downstream works and shifting global movement strategy and self-conception. By the 2010s, an intellectual evolution standard to modernity was appearing: Klein’s account took in every greater abstracting theoretical framings and syntheses, while Wolf’s simpler and limited conception, lacking a structural critique, began to decompose into a simpler narrative of liberation frustrated by mysterious, malign forces.

This was becoming a real problem for Klein. She and Wolf were both offering worldviews that questioned the Economist-style liberal-conservative consensus, but Klein’s was through what one might call “process conspiracy” — oil companies and others spend enormous sums on disinfo and vast fabrications out of obvious and “rational” corporate self-interest — while Wolf was becoming increasingly idiosyncratic in her suggestions as to who was doing what.

Then with COVID, for Wolf catastrophe struck — disaster squared. Mourning the death of her father, without grief lifting, Wolf became sceptic, then critic, then fierce opponent of vaccines, a cause to which other familiar obsessions, from chemistry to 5G, quickly attached themselves. Then that shattering event, the nightmare of even the most modest public figure: while doing an interview for BBC Radio on a new book on queer persecution in 19th-century England, Wolf was told by the expert interviewer that her assumption of dozens, hundreds, of executions for sodomy was the opposite of the truth, a product of her misinterpretation of the case record concluding with “death recorded”. This in fact meant the opposite: a way of preserving the spirit of the ultimate punishment that it was now morally and culturally impossible to enact.

Wolf’s response live on air is heartbreaking, void of chutzpah, simply accepting the correction (which the very British jerk of an interviewer could have made off-air). And thus, more uncanny, Wolf was literally recorded, dying figuratively as a progressive thought-leader. She wandered between worlds for a time, and then committed to the fall into the alt-right. 

Klein is sympathetic to what brought Wolf to that choice: the growing kitschification of her image as her powers diminished, a loved father’s death, the relentless, ecstatic pile-on that occurred. As she notes, some of Wolf’s pronouncements — such as the idea that cities full of vaccinated people seem full of dead souls — appear to be evidence of deep and conventional mental disorder. In this case, Capgras syndrome, which regularly appears among those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of attachment to loved ones, and thus come to conclude that they have been replaced by robots or aliens. 

Such psychopathies are rational in every step except the first, and Klein can make the obvious point, though with great originality of development, that the right as a whole works off this principle, offering an imaginary assuagement for the traumatic disaster befallen Western working- and middle-classes over the recent decade, as the postwar social compact was trashed, and nothing was offered except the steady decline of everything except inequality.

She also notes the derangement it occasions in herself. As Wolf’s ever-expanding, all-encompassing conspiracies join to those of her new rightist chums in the paranoia-sphere, and start to lead her to sympathy to, erm, post-democratic solutions to the encroaching forces of globalisation she sees about her, Klein notes that she herself is ducking key fights, and failing to name actual conspiracies as such, even in the face of troves of documents from ExxonMobil detailing decades of engineered climate denialism. Fear of getting absolutely and finally identified with Wolf leads Klein to withdraw to the very sort of ineffectual reformist liberalism she has spent decades criticising on the left — the mainstream rejection of naming any conspiracy, no matter how blatant, as real, and the consequent inability for that broad left to name an enemy as such. 

That leads Klein to the part of the book that is most interesting because it’s least successful, the point at which the inquiry collapses. Wolf’s wild success in the otherworld, and that realm’s Dionysian, aleatoric progress — essentially its establishment of a continuity with the ’60s spirit that Klein and others have sought a continuity with — has occurred at the same time as the global left has seen its own stagnation. The successes in turning global institutions to climate change and the wider structural change that This Changes Everything hoped for have been so mild as to be counterfeit. The rupture in routine created by COVID produced a hope that they might create a wider questioning of how we lived, as the arbitrary acceleration and directionlessness of global capitalism were made visible. But the system’s capacity for self-reproduction proved vastly stronger, and the disappointment of that, edging on despair, takes Klein herself to a limit.

To a limit but not beyond it — the book’s telling fault. Confronting the right’s endless revival — regnant across Europe; triumphant in India; and with Donald Trump, the zombified doppelganger of the era shambling towards the White House once again — Klein cannot think around a model of political occurrence that is strong on a propaganda model, and weak on a more materialist/Marxist account of ideology. In other words, Klein can see how corporations can pump out an alternative reality, but she cannot understand — not really, fully understand — the general processes of culture that make whole classes so receptive to these simplistic fantasies of easy solutions and deep, deep states. In one section she chides herself and others in the 2010s left for falling into the trap of endless recrimination over the differing priorities of various causes, the denunciations rather than debates between different camps, and the prospect of success that would come should the creation of “unity” be possible. 

The trouble is that Klein’s unity is still one that excludes many of the people flocking to the right. It is an idea of “inclusion” that simply extends the social movement notion of multiple centres of progressive action — derived from the new left — towards a horizon of ultimate autonomisation of the politically determined self. That is, it’s an inclusion of all those who accept certain notions of gender, borders or their absence, multiculturalism and its moral necessity, gender affirmation and the like. Klein seems genuinely unable to see that adopting this ever-expanding coalition of rights, and then joining it to an action program based on a green critique of capitalism, feels to many, many millions like a mass exclusion. The exclusion is of all those who might want their communities, including at the national level, to be somewhat bounded and stabilised; to have a cultural and even ethnic centrality of sorts; to anchor a culture; to raise children with certain older ideas of what bodies, sex, gender and identity are; and so on. The disregard of these mass values — their treatment as symptom, and the construction of their defence as nothing other than the expression of a fear of the new and the possible — is what has kept the global left in the Klein bottle, visibly going round and round without hope of exit from its predicament. 

Klein, as a thinker, is in deep trouble here. Her social analysis is in conventional Marxist economic-class terms — so she cannot see her own social strata as a genuine ruling class (of culture), rather than a mere elite — but yet she is not, in the last analysis, a Marxist. Her model of social action is that of the radical liberal, building coalitions of groups, to be sure, but through a mass call to rationality and conscience. Seeing the new world of the digital revolution as having unleashed armies of doppelgangers, stalking the spheres, as the world moves from the era of the “public” to something else, she misses the rationality of those many millions who feel, and are, excluded, bewildered and negated by the new world of technology and human possibility, the sort of techno-optimism that manifests ideas of Green New Deals and Inflation Reduction Acts. To millions this feels like, and is, the extinction of the more concrete and parochial limits on life that give form to their culture. They will give their support to anyone — a Trump, a Modi, an Orbán, and now a Sunak — who will offer some protections to the takeover of the world by the abstractors, the solutionists, the great changers. 

The more comprehensive this vision becomes, the more it demands total acceptance, the greater the number of people drawn to its other — an excessively simple and concrete account of the reasons why life seems to be slipping from their control. Some, like Trump, cannot think outside of their concrete beliefs. Others, like Steve Bannon, are trickster figures, devoted to building a nationalist “right international” by encouraging the exceptionalist and super-patriot sentiments in a dozen different countries. And other Naomi? Is she sheeple or Wolf? Given her most recent pronouncement — that women seated next to vaccinated people get increased menstrual cramps — it is impossible to tell absolutely. But if it’s a culture-war grift, it’s an extraordinarily sustained performance. It seems more likely that Wolf has become an elite resonator for a mass appetite for such paranoic explanations.

Klein’s inability to see the distortions of her own thinking while scrutinising those (far greater ones) of Wolf is recorded in her honest expressions of near-despair such as this:

One of the sources of my speechlessness is … in recent years left social movements have won huge success in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues — billionaires and oligarchic rule, climate breakdown, white supremacy, prison abolition, gender identity, Palestinian rights, sexual violence — and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost… ‘we did change the discourse, we did’, a friend remarked … but we appear to have done so at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation…

What an incredible coincidence for that to happen! A less spooky-action explanation would be that such words communicated to millions that the wordmakers were pleasing themselves in what they said, creating a take-it-or-leave-it program joining universal concerns with specific causes, and claiming that each implied support for the other. 

The result has been the opposite of what Klein and others hoped for. It is difficult enough to sell green new deals to many sections of the industrial working class in any case — the post-mechanical black box tech of solar and electric is the master’s discourse par excellence, the intellectual habitus of the college-educated — and when you yoke it to subjects like prison abolition and trans rights, you make rejection of green tech a handy way of rejecting the whole package. That’s what Trump did. That’s what AfD in Germany is doing; that’s what Rishi Sunak is doing in the UK, to try and keep working-class seats gained during Brexit.

The more the right wins — and it has returned in force — the more that Klein’s class double down on their beliefs that are propelling people into the arms of the right, as concrete, particular, and conspiratorial as they wanna be. The doppelgangers that Klein and others play to are the left’s imagined majority, the one they claim they would have if the information reaching “the people” was not so systematically distorted.  

For those who want to build a genuinely mass movement around the climate and biosphere emergency, what is demanded is a genuine inclusion based not on the ever-greater synthesis of causes, but its opposite: a minimal pluralism. Not only should there be no suggestion that one has to support prison abolition to be part of a green revolution, the pluralist notion that one can actively support, and campaign for, traditional gender concepts, strong borders, etc, should be actively encouraged. That is the task required of leaders like Klein, and is not without cost, for it demands that they talk back to those parts of the left pushing for a total synthesis.

Sometimes standing with the many against the few has to happen even though the few have their own claim to right. Only when the mass of people feel the cause is for them, without conditions, will the attractions of easy myths lose some of their appeal. Part of the reason that this book is so compelling as a read is that it wanders, doppelgangeresque, across the landscape of the present, crossing and recrossing its own path. Possibly it does that because the author cannot yet fully accept the conclusions to be seen in the mirror world. 

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (Penguin Books Australia)