Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

The very premise of Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is the kind of absurdity that validates the idiom that truth is stranger than fiction. Naomi Klein, who I am ashamed to admit I last read about twenty years ago (Fences and Windows), has been continually conflated with Naomi Wolf, an ex-feminist who has become an alt-right figurehead largely associated with the likes of Steve Bannon. There’s a number of peculiar surprises in that sentence alone. The fact that a prolific feminist has gone to what appears to be the opposite extreme is strange enough, but the fact that Naomi Klein and her have taken on the same identity to casual observers is even stranger.

Thus we find ourselves in Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World. Taking on a largely narratological approach that I tend not to associate with political non-fiction and not with Naomi Klein in particular, Klein leverages the identity confusion imposed upon her as a compelling angle for exploring political phenomena: namely, why politics so often resembles its own grotesque double. Klein traces this effect through a range of sub-topics, starting with an exploration of literary history and criticism with double-narratives, then discussing the transition of ex-leftist figures finding home in the alt-right, then into more precise topics like our collective treatment of autism, the Covid-19 pandemic, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict.

It’s interesting to see a crossover of literary and political interests, namely Klein’s exploration of Dostoyevski’s The Double and Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock—I feel like it’s pretty rare to see people actually turning to literature as an appropriate resource for political discussion, so it was a refreshing approach running opposite fact-based infodumps. Further, Klein’s discussion of her own double reads like a novel. There are all kinds of moments that stand out as a twist in a would-be novel. For instance, after a confusing interaction on Twitter, another user apologizes that Twitter autocompleted Naomi Wolf’s name: “Autocomplete?” Klein writes, “I felt blood rush to my face.” She notes that “the confusion was now so frequent that Twitter’s algorithm was prompting it, helpfully filling in the mistake for its users to save them precious time.” While the moment has an impact at the personal level, Klein then expands to the political layer in discussing how machine learning works:

the algorithm imitates, learning from patterns. So if my name is repeatedly mixed up with Wolf’s, even in jokes, then my name would start being suggested instead of hers, leading to even more mix ups, which also meant that anything I did to correct the record or state my own position on what had become her pet topics, would just train the algorithm to confuse us even more. This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate text platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us, but were always about extracting from us.

This bridge between the personal and the political serves as an effective anchor for the text, making each moment feel as impactful as it is enlightening. It also serves as a nice supplement to the recently-reviewed Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Our Culture. In both texts, we see that machine learning serves to flatten identity, in this case with the extreme example of two people literally being fused into one. In Klein’s case, this renders her into speechlessness. Parallel to Dostoyevski’s double novel, “the double replaces the original, while the “original fades away or worse.” In fearing to become the other, to have your identity usurped from under you, Klein notes a trajectory towards speechlessness and silence, not wanting to be confused or to fuel the conflation any further. Essentially, even when we don’t act against our doubles, it affects us.

There are two notable instances where Klein withdraws from offering comment, recognizing the capacity for her position to be co-opted by the right or recognizing that the position has been preemptively tainted. In one case, Klein (a climate activist herself), wants to offer comment on an ecofascist future “in which ecological fears are harnessed to rationalize violent security crackdowns against those deemed “lesser humans”, often immigrants and the poor.” Klein says that “Ecofascism is a real threat and it is becoming more explicit on parts of the right” and yet in writing her piece she sanitizes “ecofascism” into “ecoauthoritarianism.” She makes the change knowing that “throwing the term fascism around is what other Naomi does—and hadn’t she helped make the very word absurd?” Klein recognizes that the right has co-opted the term “fascism” and through imprecise use has rendered it less meaningful. Yet, “ecofascism is the accurate term to describe the threat. And how convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused and pippicked that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world?” It’s a fascinating phenomenon and Klein helps to give language to something I noticed throughout the rise of Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic. So many of the valid critiques of the left have been distorted through imprecise application—more on this momentarily.

Another example of the limitations on Klein’s discourse emerge when she is asked to review Bill Gates’ book about climate change. She “made some notes about Gates’ interference on Covid-19 health policy, how he had shown his bias towards protecting corporate profits over human safety, and that we shouldn’t let him do the same to our climate responses.” All of this is valid critique, of course, “But then, [she] remembered that anything [she] wrote about Gates would likely fuel my “other Naomi” problem. In the speed-glossing of the Internet Age, wouldn’t it all blend and blur together, sound like one big conspiracy?” I find the moment to be chilling in its implications. My context for understanding the phenomenon emerges from being a part of the 90s and early 2000s punk scene. So much of the leftist discourse revolved around questioning authority, being distrustful of government officials, refusing to conform to standards, not trusting mass media, and so on. I saw each of those get co-opted by far right discourse, as if they recognize the truth in certain of those claims, but steal the kernel and twist it into something less nuanced. Wearing a mask, for example, suddenly came to be “conformity” to a government plot. (What’s that line from Ginsberg…“I saw the best minds of my generation appropriated by madness, starving hysterical naked”?).

Klein recognizes this, herself. She discusses the response of conservatives to “technofetishism” that largely goes unquestioned by mainstream liberals. Steve Bannon “recognized a similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma.” Klein notes that “drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left. They’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against.” During the pandemic, though, “there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering [...] and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed, but once again via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than real scandals.” Klein offers a surprisingly moderate position on Covid-19 protocols, recognizing that perhaps they were overblown—or at least manipulated—to serve larger interests. But, isn’t that exactly what the conspiracy theorists said? Klein even notes that Bannon would play clips from major news outlets like MSNBC and CNN with “the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of [pharmaceutical] companies.” She notes that “he sounds like Noam Chomsky or Chris Smalls, the Amazon labour union leader known for his Eat the Rich jacket, or for that matter, [Klein herself].” I recognize the exact phenomena, especially with respect to Chomsky. Having read his discussion of how the media industry works and its structural composition which inevitably produces a conservative bias, it’s hard to disagree with his lack of trust in mass media. Yet, I feel like the election of Trump and the subsequent pandemic galvanized more rigid divisions. Suddenly, I had to trust CNN more because my enemies were against it. The same is true of Trudeau—sure, he’s a disappointment, but I can’t criticize him as much as I’d like, lest I be perceived as being pro-Polièvre or fuelling a conservative alternative.

Klein offers a passage that I think summarizes the issue incredibly effectively. I’ll present it here in its entirety as worthy of deep consideration: 

we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of big tech, its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us, the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like “crazy people stuff”. Once an issue is touched by them, it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention. All of this helps me to understand my doppelganger, but not in a way I find at all reassuring, because it means she represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring: a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.

I have been pretty critical of conservatives for having no other platform than “liberals bad,” but Doppelganger makes me consider if we’re substantially different in our approach. I’m glad that, despite recognizing the failures of the left, Klein still notes that there is not a moral equivalent (even if that moral high ground is sometimes what makes us falter in the double-standards of politics). I, too, recognize in myself the aversion to any issue that I perceive as “crazy people stuff” and the untouchability of certain discourses. I see a lot of truth in this passage and a lot that is worth striving to fix.

I think one of the main benefits in reading Doppelganger is seeing how that process works. Conservatives “follow a similar playbook” to Bannon. They capitalize on real fears, but through a strange backward rationale. In effect, it plays into the double-standard we’ve seen time and time again. For instance, Klein talks about the press conference Trump held  a few hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton where he paraded a lineup of women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual crimes. Klein notes that Bannon was “smirking on the sidelines as if thoroughly enjoying the show.” We’re placed in a position where on principle we have to agree with Trump—we believe victims and believe we should hold Bill Clinton to account. Meanwhile, he doesn’t care about his own sexual assaults, which he himself described in that famous audio recording. We care about the principle and he does not: it puts us in a disadvantageous no-win position. Klein describes the approach as “mirroring, deflecting, and projection” and notes that they work well “especially when you’ve got a point.” The mechanics of conservatives appropriating leftist values for their own use, making our values imprison us to certain forms of action, is actually a pretty genius move, as much as I hate to admit it.

The other side of the coin is that the right fabricates outrage over the things it itself is doing. Klein refers to Putin in particular, whom “throughout Russia’s illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, [...] would accuse the Ukrainian government of the precise crimes he was busily committing or considering committing himself.” If you operate with no shame and skirt any issues of internally contradictory ideology, it’s a very effective strategy. Plus, the context allows us to believe it:

if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror-imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras.

So, two big takeaways so far: 1) conservatives are able to capitalize on issues under-addressed by the left and 2) by appropriating the thoughts and tactics of the left, conservatives can garner support and undermine us by our own principles.

There’s a third tactic: acceptance (kind of ). Klein persuasively outlines just why Naomi Wolf went from prolific feminist to alt-right conspiracy nut. When Wolf started questioning Covid protocols or started offering other objectionable views, the left that had once supported her dropped her. People became increasingly critical. I can only help but imagine her inner monologue: So much for the tolerant left. Yet, Bannon welcomes the outcasts to his show, actually modelling the supposed principle of inclusion that governs the left. The implicit conclusion is that we have to do better when our fellow leftists disappoint us or hold questionable stances.

In fact, one of the other big takeaways from the book is a quotation Klein includes from civil rights scholar John A. Powell: “We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people.” The left, admittedly, is not always soft on people—going for personal attacks (a failed attempt to co-opt the tactics of the right) rather than acting from a spirit of love and support. So, while Klein focuses on the divisiveness of our world, the need for strategic alignment emerges as the solution. There are essentially two steps to this process: 1) to unself and 2) to find strategic alliance, even when we find groups unpalatable.

We are often wrapped up in ourselves. In one insightfully amusing moment, Klein challenges the practice of self-citing (now commonplace in discourse): ““Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time. As I wrote here, see my earlier Tweet, just bumping this up. We have to do it, or so many of us believe.” There’s a sense that we need to continually update our identities and push our way to the front. We double ourselves as a tactic: “We are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don’t remind people of what we’ve said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus.”

Yet, this desire to protect our identities is counterproductive for genuine change. Instead, Klein encourages us to go through the process of “unselfing.” For instance, when talking about what was once known as multiple personality disorder, she notes that “the capacity to have internal discussion [...] is healthy and human.” Moreover, she cites how for Hannah Arendt, “it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes that great evil occurs. So too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or, as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics”: ‘Making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.’” It’s funny how often the solution to issues is to be less dogmatic and rigid about them. How, exactly, to cultivate a capacity for considering others, is more likely a more challenging matter. It appears that we need to challenge the rigidity of our own identities and become multiple — i.e. less individualistic and more multifaceted in our being. The discussion about Hannah Arendt continues that, “ In that state of literal thoughtlessness, i.e. an absence of thoughts of one’s own, totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads, we should fear their absence.” When we are able to create a more permeable boundary of self, we resist the impulse for the oversimplification of reality.

The discussion occurs within the discourse of branding, including the fact that our identities are all brands now. Klein points to the “deepest danger of our era of branded humans” by noting that “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes. They demand fixedness, stasis, one singular self per person. Human statues. The form of doubling that branding demands of us is antithetical to the healthy form of doubling, or tripling, or quadrupling that is thinking and adapting to changing circumstances.” 

This bridges into a discussion of bell hooks, who refers to “amnesiac habits” that we tend to hold. bell hooks is ever an inspiration, and no less so when Klein draws on her work. As noted above, we need to be soft on people and hard on systems. Drawing on hooks, Klein notes that the process “starts with naming [...] the systems that have carved out the shadowlands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, White supremacy, patriarchy.” She continues, “It requires teaching those words and their true meanings to the people in our lives so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews, or the Chinese, or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better.” Once again we return to language and its ability to render experience more precisely. There is always the risk, though, as Klein discusses in an earlier chapter, of the language being co-opted: the right using the word fascism to the point of absurdity, for example. In this I experience some concern, too, for leftist discourse online and TikTok in particular. Certainly, most of the world’s problems emerge from a White supremacist, capitalist system, but when the discourse is so vaguely defined it might render the terms less meaningful and less pragmatic when we’re trying to combat their effects.

Klein notes that as things are today, we are “hard on people and far too soft on structures.” In order to push back at systems, the issue becomes once again an issue of “unselfing.” We cannot do the work alone as individuals. Capitalism thrives on individualism and convinces us that we can “solve climate change with an electric car, transcend your ego with a meditation app” and so on. We can “fix massive crises on our own through self-improvement.” While Klein acknowledges that some of these actions can help, the “truth is that nothing of much consequence in the face of our rigged systems can be accomplished on our own, whether by our own small selves, or even by our own identity groups. Change requires collaboration and coalition, even, especially, uncomfortable coalition.”

I think that’s the biggest challenge with the highest yield that Klein offers in the book. I’m thinking about strategic alliance over common issues and setting aside other particular views. For instance, I think the trucker convoy in Ottawa was a ridiculous and morally reprehensible movement. Yet, perhaps we could find strategic alliance and protest together over something like the cost of groceries (surely that is as harmful to the common man!). There are a number of examples that Klein offers towards decentering of the self. She recounts, for example, the story of a man who lost his daughter to drowning prematurely and then dissolved himself into the reef he studies to “feel like coral, or a fish.” There’s a sort of escapism here, but also potential for connection. Klein discusses Iris Murdoch’s “description of observing something beautiful, whether a bird or a painting, as ‘an occasion for unselfing.’” Rather than being something passive and contemplative, though, Klein sees this as something urgent—”people who are the exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first, unable to unself even for a moment” and the climate change crisis is as much about a “surplus of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere” as it is “a surplus of self.”

As you can see, Klein connects the deeply personal to the more broadly political. This happens in the case of climate change, of course, but she links it to a range of politicized phenomena. The weakest part of the book, in my mind, is when she links explores the treatment of autism through this framework. She discusses the symptoms of autism and draws on the historical co-optation of autism treatment and diagnosis by the Nazis. The section feels insufficiently connected to the rest of the book and somewhat superfluous.

One of the other major issues that Klein draws on which seems more immediately relevant is the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Throughout the book, Klein draws on her own Jewishness as a framework for talking about issues. It was particularly interesting to hear her discussion of being educated about the Holocaust as a young Jewish woman. She talked about how its aim was “re-traumatization” and how “re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state.” It’s a perceptive commentary on the instrumentalization of the Holocaust for unjustified ends. She describes her Holocaust education as “a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible” and continues, “Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others and to figure out how to resist them.” Instead, she says, “It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us and to stay in that state.” In reflecting on the experience, she says that the purpose of this mode of education was to freeze the pupils because “the Holocaust was a plot-point in a larger, pre-written story we were not only being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that begins in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ends on the hilltops around Jerusalem.”

I think the most relevant comment in terms of current discourse is that “for the most part, the goal of these teachings was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide, wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.” Thus, when Klein talks about the contemporary issues in Israel-Palestine, she sees the separate sides of the issue and has a clear moral stance. Again, she focuses on the language of the issue and Palestinians referring to Israel as an “entity.” She describes how Israel’s leaders demand Palestinians to answer whether Israel has a right to exist. In this narrative, Palestinians often refuse to answer the question, “knowing that conceding Israel’s right to exist would change nothing about its actions and would uphold an idea of an exclusively Jewish homeland that they contest on principle.” Klein notes that she understands their refusal because “it is one of the few tools available to an occupied and vastly outgunned people.” By the same token, though, she says that for Jewish people, “who have been treated as inhuman for so much of our history, being called an ‘entity’ is a wounding thing, and wounding in a way that may not be particularly constructive.” Klein again calls for a kind of de-personalization of the issue. She advocates for greater contextualization, like, for instance, that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were refugees who had survived a genocide but simultaneously settler colonists who “participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people” or that they were victims of White supremacy but became White in Palestine. She notes that “contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer-colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (White-racialized).” Ultimately, she explains that binary thinking “will never get us beyond partitioned selves or partitioned nations.” That said, she is clearly against the practice of Israeli settler-colonialism but is attempting “to go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.” Again, decentering ourselves becomes an imperative to better consider context and attempt to move forward productively.

All things told, as you may guess from the length of this review, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger proves an illuminating piece of work. It’s non-fiction that exists in a strange literary-political scope that I rarely see enacted by contemporary scholars. I gleaned a lot of benefit from this book and find myself thinking about it often when seeing news reportage, social media discourse, and when engaged in interactions with others. Some books can change what you think, but it’s rare for a book to change how you think, and I think that’s pretty darn commendable.

Now, let’s go save the planet. Collectively.