Doppelganger — Naomi Klein follows her double down the rabbit hole

The Canadian “eco-socialist” Naomi Klein is known for her big-idea books. Her bestselling debut, the anti-corporate No Logo (1999), became a bible for anti-globalisation activists. The Shock Doctrine (2007) critiqued free-market “shock therapy”. This Changes Everything (2014) blamed the climate crisis on capitalism.

In Doppelganger, her ninth book, the political gets personal. Throughout her career, Klein has at times been confused with Naomi Wolf, who made her name with the feminist treatise The Beauty Myth (1990). These mix-ups used to be occasional occurrences that Klein could laugh off. By the time of the pandemic, however, when “Other Naomi” was spouting anti-vax conspiracy theories, it was not so funny any more.

How had a liberal “media darling” become a regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News? In a spectacularly public humiliation, Wolf’s 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, about John Addington Symonds and the persecution of homosexual acts in Victorian England, was discredited live on Radio 3. She had misunderstood “death recorded” in court documents to mean that men convicted of sodomy had been executed, rather than released. The book was pulled and pulped by her US publisher; an amended version released in the UK still came under fire.

Condemned by the left, Wolf ran into the arms of the far right — who are all too eager to welcome leftist exiles such as Wolf and Robert F Kennedy Jr, who position themselves as deplatformed truth-tellers. Having dabbled in conspiracy theories about Ebola, Edward Snowden, 5G and Isis, she hit pay dirt with Covid, tweeting that vaccines “let you travel back in time” and that vaccinated people could “shed” and endanger the unvaccinated (leading Twitter to suspend her for spreading medical misinformation). As Wolf’s wheelhouse got more political, the conflation between the two Naomis accelerated, further exacerbated by life going online during lockdown.

The word “doppelgänger” is from the German: doppel (double) and gänger (goer, or walker). Freud called the feeling of walking alongside a double “uncanny”, Hitchcock “vertigo”. Beyond the unease caused by the blurring of her “personal brand”, Klein expands the metaphor of the doppelgänger to examine what she calls the “mirror world” — the polarisation of politics.

While “Wolf and her fellow travelers . . . are now in open warfare against objective reality”, liberals are also at fault. By not pushing hard enough against the system, Klein argues, the left has allowed the far right to co-opt anti-establishmentarianism. She also covers the advent of “diagonalism” — “strange-bedfellow coalitions” such as the wellness influencers and neo-fascists who waged war against vaccines and have moved on to targets such as “wokeness”.

Klein cautions against mocking conspiracy theorists, who “get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right”. While Wolf and others demonise individuals such as Anthony Fauci, the real conspiracy, Klein holds, is structural: “the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed,” but by capitalism rather than “a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals”.

The book is most engaging when Klein is essayistic rather than didactic. She deftly weaves in cultural representations of the double — from Dostoevsky and Graham Greene to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Jordan Peele’s film Us — to frame her thinking. The peek down the rabbit hole is elucidating, saving the rest of us from “a master’s degree’s worth of hours” immersed in “extremely prolific and editing-averse” podcasts. Klein (or her on-page doppelgänger) is companionable and self-deprecating. Reading Doppelganger is like being seated next to someone really interesting at a dinner party . . . but that doesn’t stop the reader from beginning to check their watch before dessert.

About midway, the book begins to become repetitive and lose its focus. Klein’s argument that Nazism was the doppelgänger of western colonialism feels retrofitted to the theme; an entire chapter devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is superfluous given it’s one of few issues the two Naomis agree on. Klein, who advocates boycotting Israel, applauds Wolf’s incendiary reference to “genocide” in Gaza in 2014.

Klein’s amiable company can start to feel like a Trojan horse: I found myself wondering how I had gone from chuckling about Roth’s “mommy issues” to reading about Red Vienna.

The book ends not with a bang but a whimper, with Klein reporting that “the confusion with Other Naomi has died down”. The conclusion is not atypical of big-idea books but disappointingly wan after the more nuanced reflections that open Doppelganger. “We must begin, at once, to build” a “world different from the way it is now”, Klein exhorts, with little by way of a blueprint.

In a post-truth era in which political speech often goes unactioned, it “might be time to admit that words are no longer doing what we expect them to do”, Klein concedes. She nonetheless likes to think of her words as “ammo for activists”. Whatever one thinks of Klein’s political views, time will tell if her words hit their mark.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein Allen Lane £25/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $30, 416 pages

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