Naomi isn’t a terribly unusual name. There’s Naomi Watts. Naomi Campbell. Naomi Judd. There’s even a Naomi Biden—the president’s granddaughter. But it’s just unusual enough for the two most prominent Anglophone political writers with that name to be routinely confused for one another. And that confusion is the jumping-off point for Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.

Klein is a high-profile leftist who writes doorstoppingly massive books about topics like corporate branding (No Logo), climate politics (This Changes Everything and On Fire), and neoliberal economics (The Shock Doctrine). She’s a serious person who’s guided by a humane and egalitarian worldview. She’s also a fanatically meticulous researcher.

The Naomi who Klein is constantly mixed up with on the internet, Naomi Wolf, shares exactly none of these virtues. Wolf has traveled a long strange road from her beginnings as an anodyne liberal feminist who worked as a consultant on the Gore/Lieberman campaign to her final form as a deranged conspiracy theorist and close associate of Steve Bannon. And she’s always been a farcically sloppy researcher. (Google her name and the phrase “death recorded.”) Little wonder that Klein finds the confusion maddening.

Doppelganger first came on my radar last summer when Klein gave a talk to promote it at the annual Socialism conference in Chicago. I was supposed to meet a friend at the talk, but he walked out a few minutes before I got there—explaining later at the hotel bar that he found the premise gimmicky and ridiculous.

My reaction was different, perhaps because he left before the good part. What I heard intrigued me enough to want to pick up the book. It sounded like the Naomi-vs.-Naomi gimmick was a literary framing device Klein was using to make far more interesting points about political “diagonalism.” If the sense in which Wolf is Klein’s personal “doppelganger” is relatively superficial, there are much more interesting things to be said about how the piece of the political spectrum Wolf has come to represent is a collective “doppelganger” of the Left—a strange shadow version of it that leans into a lot of its characteristic rhetorical notes in the service of radically different political priorities.

The diagonalists are “anti-war”—if it’s the Democrats’ war in Ukraine—but they revere the president who tore up the Iran nuclear deal, assassinated Soleimani, and doubled the rate of drone strikes in Yemen. (And don’t get them started on China.) They’re “pro-free speech” and “anti-Big Tech,” but they don’t want to take big tech platforms away from their billionaire owners and make them public utilities. They just want the billionaires they like to run the show. (Less Zuck, more Musk.) They’re concerned about people being fired for saying the wrong thing, but they don’t want stronger labor unions. They just want to complain about cancel culture on podcasts. They hate the “uniparty,” but they agree with the bipartisan consensus in favor of free markets.

It is this political diagonalism that is the true “doppelganger” of the book’s title: an anti-establishment “radicalism” that apes some of the Left’s rhetoric but in the service of the bosses and the Republican Party.

In that talk in Chicago, Klein emphasized an important part of the book’s overall thesis—that the Left’s own multitudinous failures create openings for this shadow version of our project to flourish. In a section of Doppelganger where she writes about Bannon and Wolf pushing conspiracy theories about the dangers of vaccine apps, for example, Klein writes that:

The result is a troubling dynamic—one that sits at the heart of our doppelganger culture. Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—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.

It was more than a little strange to hear this kind of frank acknowledgment of the Left’s attachment to simplistic liberal narratives in a ballroom full of socialists who were all wearing Covid masks because no one was allowed in the room without one.

It had, by this time, been years since most Americans felt the need to mask every time they meet strangers indoors. I would be shocked if more than a tiny fraction of that audience was continuing—in August 2023!—to routinely mask in their day-to-day lives. Like the land acknowledgments and time-consuming pronoun rituals that start some progressive gatherings, the primary point of this kind of anachronistic Covid maximalism is to prove that everyone present has all the correct attitudes towards every question liberals and conservatives are culture-warring over at any given moment. “You can’t come to our meeting if you don’t wear an awkward and uncomfortable garment you haven’t otherwise put on in years” is a pretty clear cut way of making sure you don’t appeal to people who might be tempted by the siren song of Bannonite doppelganger-populism.

Even so, what Klein was saying sounded to me like a partial echo of the kind of intra-left critique that cranks like me have been pushing for a long time. The many pathologies of contemporary American left-liberalism, which are often replicated by what passes for a socialist Left, create an opening for people who should be in our camp to move to the right. Coming from a figure with Klein’s prominence and left credentials, even a partial echo is meaningful.

But the partiality of the critique also matters. Klein gets a great many things right in Doppelganger. The problem is that her interpretation of those “humane and egalitarian values” I praised her for earlier leads her to affirm every piety of radical-liberal identity politics. The basic insight that eludes her is that this too is one of the mirror worlds.

A Tale of Two Naomis

One of the funniest moments in the book comes at the very beginning. Klein is in Manhattan for the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. She hears two women at the sink talk about how they can’t believe what “Naomi Klein wrote” about the protest. She freezes, “flashing back to every mean girl in high school, pre-humiliated.” Then she realizes that they’re talking about Naomi Wolf.

At the time of Occupy, the long arc of Wolf’s political evolution had come about as close as it ever would be to intersecting with Klein’s straightforward leftism. The Gore/Lieberman campaign consultancy was a distant memory. Now, she was a passionate defender of Julian Assange, whom Vice President Biden had infamously accused of “high-tech terrorism.” Wolf’s commitment to civil liberties was matched by a friendliness to the protesters in Zuccotti Park, but there were nonetheless hints of where she would end up. The paranoia and choose-your-own-adventure approach to reality on display every time Wolf appears on Steve Bannon’s War Room were already present in her hysterical warnings that the crackdowns on Occupy showed that the United States was on the verge of becoming a police state.

Nine years later, Covid turned Wolf from a conspiracy-minded but vaguely left-wing commentator to a “diagonalist” par excellence. She’d lost much of her remaining credibility with the liberal mainstream after her major misinterpretation of court evidence in a 2019 book, and she’d burned up the rest with her ultra-conspiratorial response to the pandemic. She wasn’t just the kind of conspiracy theorist who believed Covid originated in a lab (which might even be true) or that it was intentionally released from a lab as an anti-western bioweapon (which is definitely false). She was the kind who speculated about vaccines delivering nanoparticles that traveled through time. She said that children who wore masks had lost the ability to smile, and that vaccines were a “software platform that can experience uploads.”

Even in her most left-wing phase, Wolf had never been ideologically grounded in a worldview that gave her a clear picture of the fundamental problems with the society she lived in. Beyond baseline feminist stuff about unfair beauty standards, the need for women to be more assertive, and so on, Wolf’s worldview seems to have started and ended with “governments can be bad and scary and authoritarian.” She thought the response of governments the world over to the pandemic wasn’t just the result of institutions fumbling in the dark as they tried to figure out how to blunt the damage from an unprecedented health crisis based on constantly changing scientific information, but a “plandemic” designed to empower the same police state she was worried about in 2011. This analysis lost her whatever friends she had left on the broad Left and, like many people undergoing similar transformations, she started to soak up a worldview from the people who were still willing to talk to her. Before she knew it, she was a fixture on War Room, someone who could always be counted on to say, “As a liberal feminist, I never thought I’d say this, but…”

This was all maddening for the other Naomi, who was constantly confused with her by casual onlookers. Beyond their common first name, the coincidences mounted. Both have “brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting.” Both were in romantic relationships with film producers named Avram. And then of course there was a sense in which Wolf’s “plandemic” nonsense rhymed with the very real tendency of rapacious capitalist institutions to exploit emergencies to ram unpopular ideas down the throats of their populations—which Klein had written about in The Shock Doctrine. The former isn’t an instance of the latter, but it does, well, run diagonal to it. It’s a little too easy for casual observers to get the two mixed up.

Pipiking

The best and worst thing about Doppelganger is that Klein casts a very wide net. She mixes and matches bits of memoir with history lessons and political analysis, covering everything from doppelganger fairy tales to movie plots involving double or mistaken identity to the rightward drift of fitness influencers to the treatment of autistic children in the Third Reich. Damn near anything can be understood as a “shadow” or “mirror” of nearly anything else if you hold it up at just the right angle, and some of these literary and historical expeditions tie in better than others to Klein’s core themes.

One of the most pleasant surprises was her extensive discussion of my favorite novelist. Philip Roth doesn’t get a lot of love from left-wing commentators these days, and Klein acknowledges that she has some mixed feelings about the man and his work. She rehearses the usual accusation of sexism, and admits beyond this that her past attempts to read Roth’s work had felt “less like fiction than fraught visits to the New Jersey wing” of Klein’s own family. But she clearly loved Roth’s doppelganger-themed novel Operation Shylock, and she frequently uses it as a reference point when exploring the mirror world of the diagonalist Right.

In Roth’s novel, the main character (“Philip Roth”) is trying to track down an impersonator who also calls himself “Philip Roth.” The false Philip is using the novelists’ name to give speeches advocating “diasporism”—the oddball idea that Israeli Jews should move en masse to the countries where their ancestors lived before Zionist settlers arrived in what would become Israel. This is a disaster for “real” Roth (the main character), not least because this idea runs diagonally to (and is a bit of a caricature of) some of his own genuinely mixed feelings about Zionism and defense of diasporic Jewish life.

As Klein summarizes:

In Operation Shylock, Real Roth attempts to exercise some kind of control over his “preposterous proxy” by refusing to call him by their shared name and instead renaming him Moishe Pipik–pipik being the catchall diminutive given to naughty kids and schlemiel-like characters in his childhood home; the name literally means “Moses Bellybutton” (fitting for all this navel gazing.

The problem is that “pipikism”—Real Roth’s term in the novel for “the antritragic force that inconsequentializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializing everything”—doesn’t stop being maddening when you’ve given it a ridiculous name. Klein muses:

Is it possible to escape a tractor beam like pipikism? Once an idea has been pipiked, can it ever be serious again? This, in some sense, is the trouble with all the monstrous clowns that have reshaped modern politics in recent years: Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. And then there is Putin casting himself as a global truth-teller about the crimes of Western colonialism and an upholder of anti-imperialist, anti-fascist traditions—Putin as Pipik. These figures spread pipikism everywhere they go. And it doesn’t just farcicalize what they say; it farcicalizes what many of us are willing and able to say afterward.

All of this strikes me as exactly right. The alleged populism of the Trumps and Johnsons and Dutertes is not just terrible in its own right; it also farcicalizes genuinely pro-people and anti-elite political impulses that can lead to socialist insights. Someone like Putin telling some truths about western imperialism and posturing as an anti-imperialist as he prosecutes a brutal imperial war of his own makes it harder to put forward a genuinely anti-war message without being confused (intentionally or otherwise) for a Putinist. These things are very real problems.

But the central contradiction of Doppelganger is that Klein is unwilling or unable to see that pipiking of left-wing themes isn’t only a phenomenon of the Right.

Is Naomi Klein a “Settler”?

One of the book’s best chapters is about Israel/Palestine and Klein’s straightforward rejection of the Zionist project. She rightly abhors the violence and oppression directed by the Israeli state against the non-citizen Palestinian population, and she rightly bristles at the suggestion that her Jewish identity should lead her to be an apologist for this form of apartheid. She even gives her shadow-Naomi due credit for having taken a courageous stand against Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2014. (I’m fairly confident that Naomi Wolf hasn’t repeated that stand in the aftermath of October 7^th.)

This sounds like one more entry in the list of creditable egalitarian positions from Klein—and it certainly is that—but what’s particularly interesting to me is that she grounds her rejection of Zionism in an exploration of the history of Jewish radicalism. In a typically sharp passage, she acknowledges a grain of truth in antisemitic tropes about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” It is true that an awful lot of socialism’s early leading lights were Jewish. (Leon Trotsky! Emma Goldman! Rosa Luxemburg! Even Karl Marx came from a secular Jewish family who’d recently gone through the motions of converting to Lutheranism to evade legal discrimination.) A fascist would respond to this list with, “See! I told you so.” Alternatively, Klein writes, you could go with one of the “flattering lefty stories” she herself grew up with—that Jews, having been subject to so much oppression themselves, were more motivated to combat the oppression of other people. But she suggests an interesting third option:

...that Jewish interest in the theoretical side of what we now call Marxism—with its sweeping and scientific explanations and analyses of global capitalism—is an attempt to compete with those conspiracy theories that have dogged our people through the ages.

In other words, it’s not hooked-nosed Jews ripping off hard-working goyim. It’s economic structures that, quite apart from the subjectivity of the people located in them, are geared to “extract maximum wealth from working people.”

She singles out the Jewish Labor Bund in Tsarist Russia for praise:

One of the Bund’s core principles was doi’kavt, or “hereness”—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived, in what was known as “the pale of settlement,” and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and as workers, alongside non-Jewish members of their class. They should not have to place their hopes in a far-off Jewish homeland, as the early Zionists had begun to argue in the same period. Nor should they have to flee to North America, as hundreds of thousands of German and Eastern European Jews had already been forced to do. Doi’kayt proclaimed that Bundists would stay here—and make here better.

This is great stuff. But it’s a very odd fit with another section of the book, where she discusses the aftermath of the discovery of evidence of mass graves at the sites of Canada’s old “residential schools” for native children. In the countries ensuing racial reckoning, Canadians were, she says, “digging deeper than ever before” in her lifetime. Of this “national excavation,” she enthuses:

In place of the ephemera and boosterism of national mythmaking and official histories, a solid idea seemed to be forming about where we live and how this land came to be available to settlers like me—and what it might take to finally be good guests and neighbors….

The premise that the dispossession of the natives by early European settlers was a terrible thing—a grave violation of rights all humans should have—is certainly correct. It’s similarly true that various forms of discrimination continued long after the initial settlement, and that any such history tends to drag a trail of continuing material disparities in its wake.

But Naomi Klein isn’t even descended from anyone who could sanely be described as a “settler” of Canada. As I understand it, her parents emigrated from the US to Canada so that her father could avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Klein’s self-identification here (“settlers like me”) is a prime example of identity politics making otherwise very smart people stupid. Beyond that, though, there’s a contradiction here that should be visible from space. Jews in Tsarist Russia “belonged where they lived,” but the Klein family apparently doesn’t “belong” in Canada. They’re only “guests” of the ethnic group entitled to be there by a suitable blood-and-soil connection to the territory.

If you called a family of Guatemalan immigrants who’d been naturalized as Canadian citizens last week “guests” rather than fully paid-up members of Canadian society because their ancestors didn’t live there a hundred years ago, Naomi Klein would presumably call you a fascist. So how is it that someone like her who was born in Canada is nevertheless a “guest” because she’s white and her ancestors didn’t live there before the first wave of European settlement? And, come to think of it, why isn’t she a Zionist? After all, wouldn’t Jews be mere “guests” everywhere in the diaspora—always having to mind their Ps and Qs in front of the various gentile groups who actually belong in their various ancestral lands?

This is more than a simple instance of an otherwise very careful thinker so convinced that she has a moral and political obligation to check every identitarian box that she temporarily lapses into incoherence. It also says something about exactly why this kind of identitarianism is so radically inconsistent with the cosmopolitan, egalitarian universalism that historically formed the normative bedrock of the socialist Left—and which thoroughly informs the best parts of Klein’s own work.

Not All Radicalisms Are Created Equal

Identity politics revolves around many poles—gender, sexuality, disability and so on—but for the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with the single core case of racial identity. In her critique of Wolf, Klein faults her doppleganger—even in an earlier and far saner phase of Wolf’s commentary—for promoting a version of feminism that’s not “linked with anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and socialism.” But what precisely does “anti-racism” actually mean here?

“Racism” itself has at least two meanings. It can be used in its man-on-the-street sense, to mean racial prejudice, or in an “institutional” or “structural” sense revolving around on-average material disparities between different populations. Both are real phenomena.

So what then is “anti-racism”? If it’s a commitment to neither expressing nor interpersonally tolerating the expression of racial prejudice, “anti-racism” is of course a laudable thing. If it means supporting anti-discrimination laws, or making sure no one likely to act in a racially prejudicial way is elevated to a position of power, then anyone who cares about baseline egalitarian values should obviously be an “anti-racist.”

The problem—and it’s not a small one—is that in the mouths of the people I’ve been calling “identitarians,” or who might less polysyllabically be called “woke,” “anti-racism” has come to name something else. It means, to begin with, an analysis of contemporary society that collectively classifies white people as “oppressors” and members of disparately disadvantaged groups as “oppressed.” To the extent that this analysis is tied to any sort of concrete vision of what victory-over-racism would look like, it’s the overcoming of inter-group disparity. 

In her critique of Wolf’s version of feminism, Klein casually links “anti-racism” with “socialism,” but this kind of racial identitarianism really is deeply inconsistent with a socialist worldview.

Historically, the Left has been adamant that working-class white people don’t benefit from racism. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery, for example, he talked about how the South’s Democratic establishment had essentially told poor white people they could eat Jim Crow. In other words, Dr. King claimed that the region’s poor whites had been sold a false sense of identification-with-power in order to stop them from pursuing their real interests—which would have put them on the same side as the black section of the working class.

Contemporary racial identitarians, by contrast, talk about Jim Crow as if it really were something that benefited white people in general, and that both it and the prejudices and disparities that have lingered since it was abolished are simply two phases of a trans-historical phenomena called “white supremacy.” They posit a kind of endless historical cage match between different racial collective entities. Jim Crow was something white people as a category did to black people as a category, and so is police brutality and so is the racial wealth gap. Unlike the division between capitalists and workers, which could be ended by expropriating capitalists, it’s unclear how anyone could get out of this particular cage.

The contrast between these two perspectives is made vivid by a story told by socialist scholar Adolph Reed. On a black nationalist radio show, he argued to the host that it’s unhelpful to use the wealth gap as one’s primary prism for thinking about black poverty. After all, the majority of that gap pertains to the top decile—between rich white people and the much smaller cluster of rich black people—and closing it wouldn’t do much to help the great majority of black people. The host responded that the important point was that white people had so much more “collective wealth” than black people. Recounting this later, Reed asked his readers to try to imagine “a white nurse down on her luck and in danger of eviction trying to dip into the collective pot of white wealth for a subsidy, or maybe texting Elon Musk to pitch in.”

Perhaps You Can’t Have Both

All too often, the contemporary Left has tried to conjoin two incompatible worldviews, each of them complete with entirely different analyses of what justice would mean and how to achieve it. Is the problem economic inequality or economic inequality between the races? Should we be trying to make sure black people aren’t less likely than white people to be disempowered in the workplace or to struggle to meet their material needs, or are workplace and material empowerment things to which all humans are entitled? Is poverty unjustly distributed, or is poverty simply unjust? And in seeking a better society, are different racial segments of the working class natural enemies or natural comrades-in-arms?

One problem is that so many contemporary socialists form their politics in academic and media environments mostly dominated by various forms of left-liberalism. In a milieu like that, if you say the kinds of things I’ve just been saying, you will be accused of “class reductionism”—the sin of not caring about “race” and similar factors independently of “class,” and thus failing in your duty to combat your own internalized oppressor-ness and to become an anti-racist “ally.” Eager to avoid this, many leftists will try to come up with some intellectualized way to square the circle and claim, as Klein does, to accept both “socialism” and “anti-racism,” as that latter concept has come down to us from liberal intellectuals. (Some people interested in developing a more Marx-flavored version of this synthesis find it useful to throw around the word “dialectical” a lot, so that things that sound like inconsistencies can be recognized as profundities.)

The late bell hooks, for example, is one of four people named in the “In Memoriam” dedication at the beginning of Doppelganger—along with socialist writers Mike Davis, Leo Panitch, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Professor hooks popularized the long compound phrase “imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” as her name for the source of all that ails us. The inclusion of “capitalist” lends the whole expression a radical edge, but it’s hard to avoid the impression that opposition to capitalism is a bit of an afterthought in this combination.

And all this, it seems to me, is a perfect illustration of Klein’s own thesis that the failures and stupidities of the Left create space for far more unsavory forces to gain traction. To whatever extent the tribe gathered at that Socialism conference in Chicago joins mainstream liberals in telling people whose economic interests align with the Left’s project that they were born oppressors, that they thus need to constantly question their own privileged impulses, and that they should defer to those who were born oppressed, we shouldn’t be surprised when the reaction is eye-rolling and disengagement. A taste for self-mortification is relatively niche. By contrast, Steve Bannon’s message—that they are actually hard-working Americans whose economic precarity is a symptom of the machinations of “globalists”—seems much more appealing.

While Klein is a bit too promiscuous in her use of the word “fascism” to describe anything right-wing and unsavory, it’s reasonable to worry that the long-term consequences of militant particularism could create space for forces significantly worse than the current form of Bannon/Wolf diagonalism. As my friend Kuba crisply puts it, “It may be a bad idea in the long run to encourage white people to spend quite this much time thinking about being white.” 

Maybe these strategic concerns don’t bother you. I think they should. But on a basic intellectual level, you should at least acknowledge that coherence matters. Consistency is not the “hobgoblin of little minds.” If you’re saying two things that can’t both be right, at least one of them must be wrong.

No matter how much social friction can be avoided at faculty parties by pretending otherwise, the truth is that worldviews can be, and often are, incompatible. You can either see every white person in the nation of Canada as a “settler,” who can at best undergo a moral reformation and become a better “guest” of the native population—always listening, always learning, always worried that their privilege might be warping their judgments—or you can believe in universalistic “hereness.” You can lean into eternal culture war, or you can try to realign our politics around the class war. You can see non-disparity as your holy grail and form your politics around that, or you can aim for universalistic economic democracy and act accordingly. Bluntly: You can be a socialist, or you can be a liberal. But pick.

Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.