by Piotr Wciślik, piotr.wcislik@ibl.waw.pl
Review of Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (2023) by Naomi Klein
Piotr Wciślik –intellectual historian of dissent in postwar Central Europe, is assistant professor at the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His works include: Dissident Legacies of Samizdat Social Media Activism: Unlicensed Print Culture in Poland 1976-1990 (Routledge, 2021).
The tale of two Naomis, and many other tales
What makes a great essay, David Runciman explains, is a play of scales. A great essay takes something deeply personal to open up a whole world. It is an account of and invitation to a journey of self-discovery. Until now, Naomi Klein has been chiefly known for her sharp arguments and passionate manifestos. Her new work Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World reveals her to be a consummate essayist who takes you on along her personal adventure that starts with her regularly being mistaken for another controversial writer. Eventually, this adventure, during times of COVID-19 and the digital attention economy, leads us straight into the shifting sands of politics.
Naomi Wolf, the controversial doppelganger in question, established herself in the 1990s as a strong voice of third-wave feminism with her book, Beauty Myth. Later on, she became a conspiracy theorist, sounding the alarm about covert operations by an elite cabal to deprive Americans of their freedom. She used her talents to become an icon of protest against COVID mandates in the US and was even co-opted by Steve Bannon for his global populism project.
For Klein, following Wolf’s trajectory—in the capacity of a hostage more than a companion—was an unexpectedly transformative ride through a startling range of issues. These include the COVID poly-crisis, self-exploitation and self-surveillance in the digital attention economy, digital corrosion of the public sphere, the nature of conspiracy theories, populism, the powerlessness of the left, racism and indigeneity, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the Nazi roots of the wellness industry, and of handling neurodivergent children (but worry not, this review will not cover all of these issues).
What bridges all these diverse issues is the figure of the doppelganger, which Klein, inspired especially by the works of Sigmund Freud and Philip Roth, uses with considerable connoisseurship. The doppelganger, or the double (the polysemic meaning of which does the binding work), stands principally for two things: the mirror image of ourselves which sharpens undesirable qualities that are hidden or that we deny, thus producing the bewildering sense of a conflicted and partitioned identity; and the anxiety of the impostor who mimics your beliefs, actions, and agendas in order to hijack, ridicule, and turn them against you.
Wolf stands as a double of Klein, but there are also doppelganger movements (the alt-right versus the left), doppelganger cultures (the personal brands that hijack our lives in the attention economy), doppelganger economies (capitalism’s partitioning into frictionless markets and the “shadow lands” of extractivism and exploitation) and even doppelganger nations (Israel as a double of European nationalism and colonialism).
Doppelganger, or how the left learned to worry
Many of these threads converge in the person of Naomi Wolf. To Klein, reading Wolf’s charges against elite abuse of power during emergencies felt like “reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support” (p. 22). Yet, Wolf can’t be easily dismissed. Like in Roth’s Operation Shylock, the situation of being confused with her is “too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.”
Indeed, the difficulty of dissociating oneself from one’s double forms the central tension of the book. That difficulty concerns not only Klein’s personal story, but also for the nature and character of contemporary left politics. Supporters of the latter should also withstand the temptation to ignore people like Wolf, chiefly because
conspiracies in fact do exist and denouncing how the system is rigged against the poor has traditionally been the task of the left.
Not looking very far, Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is all about such closed-door arrangements in emergency situations that benefit the elite and go against the public’s interest. As if Gresham’s law operated in the realm of ideas, conspiracy theorists push investigative journalism and evidence-based activism out of the public sphere, flooding it with baseless allegations that put a cabal of paedophiles in the place of power structures and money flows. That same law seems to operate when conspiracy theorists put in their “bonkers blender” concepts that were once part of progressive vocabulary, such as “fake news” (which starts to mean “any statement unfavourable to Donald Trump”), “othering” (when referred to cancel culture), or “right to the body” (when used in support of anti-vax movement). Alt-right mockery in turn makes it easier for mainstream opinion to ridicule the issues at hand and to discipline the left, drawing on the horseshoe theory of extremisms that supposedly meet.
Ceding all that ground to the populists, the left is sawing off a branch of the political tradition that it is sitting on.
Klein shows how the efforts of the left to dissociate itself from its conspiracist double have triggered two rather devastating trends: one towards conformism, the other towards ideological purity.
The trend towards conformism hit new lows during the COVID pandemic. The left has fully fallen in line with the liberal mainstream response which shifted all responsibility on the individual (via lockdowns, vaccination, mask and social distancing mandates) and responded to all forms of doubt with scorn. Importantly, Klein does not share the position (articulated also on the pages of RevDem) that the defence of the poor and the defence of the above-mentioned mandates had to be mutually exclusive. From the perspective of the bio-justice she pursues, that is a false dilemma. The mandates were fair since they put the interest of the most vulnerable (sick, elderly, overexposed or lacking access to quality health care) ahead of the interest of the strong and healthy – categories that do not always overlap with the class divide, though they often do. However, in her opinion, the left should have demanded a more collective response to this crisis with a more evenly distributed burden in terms of paid lockdown leaves for all categories of workers as well as for the universalization of access to, and increased public investment in, health infrastructure whose deterioration due to years of neoliberal mismanagement was precisely the reason why the lockdowns had such an dreadful scope. Moreover, the left should have been more considerate with those who challenged particular policies. In Klien’s opinion, the concerns about the side-effects of a new experimental drug on say pregnancy was fully legitimate, and so was the stir caused by the Chinese lab leak hypothesis. Curiosity about and suspicions of Big Pharma and Big Tech acting in concert with one another could also be considered as rather healthy reactions. Falling in line with the liberal mainstream, the left abandoned its constituency to the embrace of conspiracy theorists and populists who gave a warped explanation to their legitimate concerns – warped but better than none.
While Klein’s focus is on the current poly-crisis, the conformism problem that she writes about was there before as well and follows from the nature of any common front politics. One is reminded of what Cold Warrior historian Martin Malia once wrote about popular fronts of the 1930s: these are inherently asymmetrical and abusive arrangements in which the declared unity of progressive forces in practice amounts to one hegemonic actor forcing conformity on subaltern actors through background suspicions of being “soft on” or “playing into the hands of” the enemy. While the liberals subordinated themselves to communists within the anti-fascist popular fronts of the 1930s, the tables have turned since: as the Cold War was giving way to the neoliberal era, the left became afraid of its historical shadow (Stalin, you doppelganger!). The situation today does not differ in kind, but it does differ in degree.
The current levels of political polarisation do favour common fronts and exacerbate pressure on the left to denounce conspiracy theories and abandon key parts of its political agenda tainted by the extreme right.
The other trend Klein focuses on is towards ideological purity which takes the form of the much-discussed cancel culture. While this trend seems to be pulling the left in contradictory direction to that of conformism, in fact there is
a loop between ceding some ground to the alt-right under the pressure from the mainstream, while radicalising identity issues in other areas. According to Klein, that loop is a vicious circle.
Following bell hooks, she recognizes the importance of naming things for what they really are (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy), however, she believes that byzantine debates and internal culture wars have not only diminished the capacity of progressives to form broad alliances, but also estranged many of the previously converted.
In the book, the left’s drive towards purity stands in stark contrast to the strategic promiscuity of the populist right, as illustrated by Wolf’s alliance with Steve Bannon. While the left is busy dividing itself, the Bannonites are bent on creating broad alliances that go beyond their own bubble. While many progressives assume that Bannon’s star has faded since 2016 and the spectre of the illiberal international he has strived to establish is not particularly haunting, having spent hours listening to his podcast, Klein has concluded that the actual danger comes not from the prospect of an illiberal international, but from Bannon’s effort to enlarge the original 2016 MAGA coalition by intercepting the left-wing agenda and coopting social groups radicalised during the current crisis. The nodal role in this new coalition is played by diagonalists, that Callison and Slobodian define as people who “tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties. At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.”
It is not like Wolf stopped identifying as a feminist, but as long as Bannon prefers to keep his sex and reproduction agenda to himself (as he does), she is happy to converge with him on the conviction—based on circular reasoning—that the winter of big-tech and big-pharma totalitarianism is coming and that everyone who sees this happening should unite, and that such unity wouldn’t be fostered without an emergency.
Not all diagonalists are outcasts from the progressive universe in the way that Wolf is. The term itself originated in the German public debate (as querdenken) to refer to the constituency of protests against COVID mandates, bringing together neo-Nazis, angry parents, SME owners, and wellness and alternative health communities. Klein devotes a full chapter to this alliance of the “the far-right and the far out”, in which she sees the resurrection of the ideological mix of eugenics and occultism that was adopted by the Nazi movement in the 1930s, while in the correlated idea of “the survival of the fittest” resounds the darkest episodes of Western colonialism (here she adopts the argument of the Swedish journalist Sven Lindqvist and Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck). She believes the resurgence of these ideas, despite their ‘hippie detour,’ has helped solidify Bannonite populism as much as the identification of power and conspiracy that Callison and Slobodian foreground. Klein evokes Barbara Ehrenreich’s understanding of the obsession with the body and healthy lifestyle as a form of retreat by progressives, powerless against growing injustice in the neoliberal world, to a space they can still control – the space of their own body. A trend which was a testimony to failure from the outset has turned out to be destructive.
Critique, conspiracy, complicity
Doppelganger will be an essential read for all those who are interested in the condition of the left today, even though Klein’s diagnosis is not without blank spots. While her arguments against both conformism of left-wing centrist strategies and purism of the identitarian left sound convincing, Klein spares the tradition closest to her own approach, i.e. the structuralist critique of domination. For Klein, at the end of the day, conspiratorial populism is just another “socialism of fools” which gets the popular grievances right, but it gets the facts wrong.
Instead of wielding a critical theory that sheds lights on those facts, populism indulges in scapegoating minorities and globalist puppet-masters. While this argument remains compelling, the critical theorist may find something more unsettling still in the conspiracist’s mirror: the unintended consequences of the kind of critical theory to which Klein subscribes which has dominated sociological thought of the left since the 1970s.
As the French sociologist Luc Boltanski proposed in his 2009 book On Critique, critical theory was predicated upon the idea of reflexivity, the capacity of the people to incorporate knowledge about domination in order to achieve emancipation. However, it actually undermined the belief in reflexivity, let alone emancipation, by presenting domination as so total and pervasive that it could not be lived or experienced as such by the social actors, with the illusion of freedom of choice being the greatest mechanism of domination of them all. In the eyes of Boltanski, it was the sociology of his former mentor Pierre Bourdieu that best illustrated this deadlock.
To escape it, one could take the path towards pragmatism, like Boltanski himself did, thereby abandoning the distinction between hidden structures and surface illusions and look for ways of transcending one’s condition through actually existing critical and ethical capacities (and not by means of a theory that would yet need to be adopted).
The conviction about the primacy of hidden structures—the cognitive fulcrum that critical and conspiracy theorists share—comes with certain gratification for those who believe they know how to decode reality. Hold on to that gratification and in the moment of frustration with emancipatory outcomes you might be tempted to switch to more actionable, if false explanatory patterns.
A good example of such a trajectory is Paul Piccone, the founding editor of Telos, one of the most influential journals of the New Left in the US. Piccone travelled the path from fervent critique of “artificial negativity” in the 1970s (the Marcuse-inspired view that the civil rights, feminist, and other social movements allow monopoly capitalism to regenerate rather than perish) to the embrace, in the 1990s, of paleoconservatism and the Italian Lega Nord on the basis that only anti-modernists can offer real resistance (the “organic negativity”) to a totalizing modernity. A similar road was travelled by Jadwiga Staniszkis in Poland.
The larger point here is that by presenting the battles as unwinnable and lacking a clear endgame that the idea of revolution once provided, structuralist critique engenders despair that creates in effect the fertile ground for diagonalism.
Double games of ideas
The meanders of left-wing strategies aside, Doppelganger will be an inspirational read for practically anyone interested in the world of political ideas more broadly conceived. Klein drives the important point home that ideas transcend their genealogies and enjoy life independently from the “legacy bodies” of thought, and that one of the ways in which intellectual trespassing is made possible is through hijacking, mirroring, and doubling of ideas. Her second major point seems to be that to understand intellectual change in the realm of political thought, one must pay close attention to emergent coalitions of sociopolitical forces for which a certain ideological constellation makes sense, even though that constellation may look ridiculous from the current mainstream.
Both these arguments put Klein in very good company. Klein’s Steve Bannon, a doctor Frankenstein of the right who has been stitching together a new ideological platform for the next MAGA coalition, could easily belong to the gallery of realigners as studied in the eponymous book by Timothy Shenk (2022). And it is Shenk’s argument about reciprocity of shifts in intellectual and political hegemony that makes Doppelganger a truly expedient read; Klein makes the point about the ascent of a new MAGA coalition in a compelling and eye-opening way.
Closer to home, an example that comes to mind is Kacper Szulecki’s 2011 article about how Eastern European dissidents hijacked ideas of human rights, peace, and environmentalism of the Western social movements to deploy them against Soviet imperialism. Reading Klein alongside Szulecki or Michal Kopeček, one can see the good old dissident “politics of consensus” in a new and rather disturbing light: could populism in the region be the bastard child of that politics?
More recently, in The Light that Failed: Why the West is Losing the Fight for Democracy (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argued that East European populism is driven by resentment towards the copy-cat liberalism of the 1990s, while Vladimir Putin is presented as no less than the doppelganger-in-chief, mocking liberal ideas and latching into every instance of liberal hypocrisy.
Indeed, by reading Klein, one comes to appreciate the difficult position of post-Cold war liberalism in this broad region, which proudly imitates “tried and tested models” while being scandalized by the populist doppelganging of the rule of law and the rules-based international order (which is how illiberal constitutionalism could be described). In other words: populists make liberals defend the argument that not all copies are equal!
Who is not afraid of the doppelganger now?
In collaboration with Rohit Sarma.
