Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World" is a difficult book to describe. I'll cut to the chase by saying that it stands alongside Klein's bestsellers "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" as a crucial study of the ways that identity, image, ideology and economics become intertwined in the bewildering conditions of 21st-century consumer capitalism, and is in many ways a subtler and more challenging work than either of those. It's a book that could only have emerged from the pandemic era, but is only indirectly about the multiple crises of politics and public health caused by COVID. More fundamentally, it's an exploration of a cluster of disturbing and poorly understood phenomena that the pandemic revealed or accelerated, but were already there: The division of our politics and culture into incompatible realms of perceived reality, not unlike the mirror universes of "Star Trek," and the merciless commodification of the individual self, which in Klein's reading has undermined community, social movements and the possibility of collective action.
If you've picked up the idea somewhere that Klein has written a book about the experience of being repeatedly confused with someone she sometimes calls "the other Naomi" — meaning Naomi Wolf, onetime feminist crusader and now, bafflingly, an adjunct member of far-right conspiracy culture — that is both true and untrue. It's untrue at the most important level; no one could actually read "Doppelganger" and come away believing that its real subject is Klein's sense of narcissistic injury, or an attempt to defend her personal brand from the damage inflicted by a less desirable Naomi. But it is undeniably where the book starts, and also approximately where it ends: Klein writes with considerable humor and honesty about the contradictions and challenges created by the perceptual blur between her image and Wolf's. They are both outspoken Jewish women and bestselling authors. They are generically similar in appearance, especially when encountered as social media avatars. Over the course of their careers both have been associated, broadly speaking, with left-liberal-progressive politics. (Yes, Klein is familiar with the social media mnemonic used to differentiate them, which she traces back to 2019: "If the Naomi be Klein/ you're doing just fine/ If the Naomi be Wolf/ Oh, buddy. Ooooof.")
As Klein observes, it didn't help matters that she and Wolf were both vocal critics of certain aspects of official policy early in the pandemic, and even had overlapping targets: Klein "was furious when Bill Gates sided with the drug companies" on vaccine patents, and argued "that this lobbying helped keep the shots out of the arms of millions of the poorest people on the planet." Wolf "was furious that people were being pushed to get vaccinated at all and boosted conspiracies about Bill Gates using vaccines to track people and to usher in a sinister world order." Klein confesses that it sometimes felt as if Wolf had fed Klein's ideas into a "bonkers blender" and then spoon-fed the resulting incoherent mishmash directly to Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
I would take the analysis one step further than Klein does: In our conversation, she describes Naomi Wolf as the White Rabbit who led her into the irrational, counterfactual "mirror world" that lies below the surface of normative cultural and political discourse, and mockingly reflects or magnifies all its failures, evasions and silences. The problem for Naomi Klein, however, is that to many people who yearn to return to some (largely imaginary) pre-Trump, pre-COVID state of normalcy and shared reality, she too resembles a denizen of the mirror world. Klein is an unrepentant leftist and anti-capitalist, a former Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and frequent critic of the Democratic Party mainstream. She blames the corrosive spread of the Wolf-Bannon-Carlson mirror world — the "fascist clown-state" beneath our purported democracy — largely, if not entirely, on the failures of mainstream politics in general and liberalism in particular.
I largely agree, for the record. But that isn't the kind of opinion that gets you on MSNBC or helps build broad pro-democracy coalitions, and I suspect that amid the societal attention-deficit disorder of the last several years, a vague sense emerged that both Naomis held troubling or uncomfortable or unpalatable views, which contributed to their chameleonic identity collapse. That points toward the real challenge Klein confronts in "Doppelganger," which is not about her and Naomi Wolf but something much bigger. When we come face to face with a double or doppelganger or mirror image — of ourselves, of our society, of our system of thought — and find it disturbing or repulsive, do we push it away and deny any kinship with the reflection? Or do we look straight at it and ask ourselves who we really are?
Watch Naomi Klein's "Salon Talks" episode here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about the dark "mirror world" of right-wing influencers, capitalism and the "personal brand" and why Klein prefers the term "conspiracy culture" over "conspiracy theories."
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I had really interesting reactions from two people I like and respect when I told them I was reading your book. One of them basically said, "What a hilarious concept for a book. You go ahead and read that if you want to." The second person was like, "Well, that's the most New York thing I've ever heard."
By New York, did they mean Jewish?
Well, I hope not. I think they meant "media insider." But what struck me was the willingness to leap to the assumption that you had written some intensely narcissistic account of your possibly-obsessive relationship with this other person who shares your first name and certain other characteristics. Have you run into that before?
I don't think people necessarily share those reactions with me, per se. [Laughter.] But I was aware that this book would be misunderstood as a concept until it entered the world, which is part of the reason why we didn't tell anyone about it for a much longer time than is the usual case with publishing. Usually a book is announced as soon as it's signed........