September 25, 2023

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

I first found out about the Naomi problem in 2019 when I read No is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, and my best friend was horrified, and I was confused about why she was horrified, and then when she figured it out, she told me to google “Naomi Wolf” and “chemtrails,” so I did, and finally understood, or at least kind of, because what actually explains what happened to Naomi Wolf?

And so that question, “Whatever happened to Naomi Wolf?” is something I have periodically wondered about ever since then, the question becoming more and more relevant as Wolf’s own influence grew and the stakes got higher, as she spouted Covid misinformation through 2021 and onward. A question that seemed also relevant as so many apparently intelligent and curious people disappeared down conspiracy rabbit holes (ie the UK book blogger DoveGreyReader who went full QAnon before disappearing from the internet altogether, or the bestselling Canadian historical fiction writer who, as of Saturday but not thereafter [once someone had flagged it in their Stories], was following something called Gays Against Groomers on Instagram).

Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Naomi Klein’s latest, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which is a consideration of “No Logo” Klein’s own personal branding problem as she has frequently been confused with Wolf over the last decade or so, but also an investigation of how the trajectory of liberal-darling turned far-right poster-child Wolf has a lot to teach us about radicalization, misinformation, political stratification, and the failures of political systems of countries like Canada and the US whose vacuums bad actors like Wolf and her comrade Steve Bannon, and so many others have rushed to fill. [Please note that I called referred to Wolf as “Klein” throughout this whole paragraph, and just had to go back and change it. The struggle is…weird?]

Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Doppelganger because the Mirror World of conspiratorial thinking was front and centre after supposed “parents rights”/anti-LGBT protests across the country on Wednesday that really were Convoy 2.0 with the same PPC signs and Fuck Trudeau flags (and I fear that well meaning people responding to these ding dongs with sincerity and heart are letting conspiracy nutjobs set the rules of engagement, like, it’s only a “culture war” if the other side mobilizes right back, playing right into their hands, which is exactly what they want, especially *play,* it all being just a game to these people anyway, rather than any of their ideas being worth responding to with consideration and logic. It is not irrelevant that, as Klein notes in her book, Steve Bannon dreamed up his ideas for world domination during a period in which he was working for an online gaming company)

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein comes as closer as I’ve ever seen anyone come to explaining just what the heck is going on here, connecting the dots on a vast canvas, making sense of the nonsensical, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Klein’s work before, but also weaving in elements of memoir that are new to her work and which add a real sense of humanity to these stories in which so many of our fellow humans have come to seem almost alien.

Because of this book, I think I know finally (kinda, sorta) understand what was happening at the house I drove by in Norfolk County during the summer of 2022 that was flying a swastika out front, apparently a protest of the federal government. An anti-authoritarian protest that has one running authoritarian propaganda on one’s flag pole, the guy who hates Nazis so much that he’s appropriated their symbols, which is how it happens in the mirror world.

Doppelganger is a study of doubleness, and doubles—Klein and Wolf; left and right; self and avatar; who Wolf was and who she’s become; of how each “side” in this situation is imagining the other is living in a crazy dreamworld; of Israel and Palestine; of foundlings and how some parents of autistic children describe their offspring in similar terms, seemingly “normal” children replaced by another; about how so much far-right rhetoric employs language and ideas from progressive causes and can also thereby render language as meaningless. She writes about buffoonish monsters like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and even Putin, and describes “pipikism”—a term borrowed from a Philip Roth novel—”the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.” She writes, “It doesn’t just farcicalize what they say; it farcecalizes what many of us are willing and able to say afterward.”

But of course any mirror is not just about its reflection, but also about what it tells us about ourselves, and Doppelganger is also a fascinating self-examination, as well as an actually kind and sympathetic study of what might have happened to Wolf and what particular aspects of her character make Klein a bit uncomfortable for what they suggest about Klein herself (and the last chapter, in which Klein describes them meeting in the early 1990s when Klein was a reporter for the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, The Varsity, is generous, weird and extraordinary). She also makes clear that social movements are the way out of this mirror world nightmare we find ourselves in, acknowledging that some conspiracies are indeed quite real (ie disproportionate power in the hands of a few unelected dudes who have too much money, for example) and showing that collective efforts are the only way to meet the pressing challenges of future (ie climate change, fear of which is provoking all this terror in the first place, such refusal to look reality in the face).

“Calm is resistance,” Klein writes in Doppelganger, quoting John Berger’s response to her earlier book, The Shock Doctrine, and I thought about that line too in the context of last week’s hateful demonstrations, how responding to panic and terror with panic and terror is simply a perpetuation of a narrative I don’t want to be a part of.

“The effect of conspiracy culture,” writes Klein in her new book, is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.” In Doppelganger, Klein suggests a deeper, more thoughtful way of acting (and thinking) in response.