The New Yorker Radio Hour - Naomi Klein Speaks with Jia Tolentino about “Doppelganger”

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

For twenty-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She’s especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism: an analysis that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. She was often confused with another prominent political writer, Naomi Wolf—once a feminist on the left who has, in recent years, embraced conspiracy theories on the right and is now on good terms with Steve Bannon. Klein’s new book, “Doppelganger,” starts with this simple case of mistaken identity and broadens into an analysis of our political moment, which she describes as “uncanny” in the psychological sense. “Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that changes what was once familiar to something unfamiliar,” she tells the staff writer Jia Tolentino. “It’s that weirdness of ‘I think I know what this is, but it’s not what I think.’ ” Klein argues that the left and the right have become doppelgangers of one another—and that denialism regarding climate change has widened to any number of topics, including the claim that Joe Biden is dead and is being played by an actor. “Whenever you don’t like reality, you can just say that it’s not real,” she says. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. For 20-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She's especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism, an analysis that says that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. A few years back, Naomi Klein appeared at the New Yorker. Yorker Festival, and she was interviewed by staff writer Gia Tolentino. And Gia's friends texted her,

Good luck with Naomi Wolf. Hmm. Naomi Wolf was also a prominent writer on the left at the time, and apparently this confusion between the two Naomi's happened quite often on social media and elsewhere. Now, this seems pretty unsurprising and relatively harmless, and it was at first. With that case of mistaken identity, particularly online, and the way is that you, it's a lot of the way it's gotten weird as Naomi Wolf has moved rightward and taken up various conspiracy theories is the subject of Naomi Klein's new book. It's a fascinating book and it's called doppelganger. And the other day, Naomi Klein sat down to talk once again with Gia Tolentino. Here's Gia. When I first read the galley of Naomi Klein's new book, Dopplganger, I was kind of instantly

dying to talk to her about it. I have been a fan and I've read all of her work and this book seemed different. It starts in a stranger place. It addresses a stranger reality. So this book takes, as its premise, the doppelganger situation that Naomi Klein finds herself in. The book starts with the double Naomi situation, but it doesn't stay there. It takes that as a jumping off point to the world of conspiracy, conspiracy profiteering, of surveillance capitalism, of various other forms of political doppelgangers and strange. mirrors that we find in history and that especially we find in this extremely dizzying contemporary moment that we live in right now. The doppelgating or confusion with Naomi Wolf had started a long time ago, right? You were both like big idea, female writers on the left. You know, you both, you go through a list of categorical similarities in the book, which extend to your partners sharing the same first name. But a couple of decades ago, she started to, started writing about, her writing took a bit of a conspiratorial turn and your arguments could

seem plausibly interchangeable to a person who was very distracted, right? Or maybe casually anti-Semitic or, you know, all of these things that you talk about in the book. I had this particular experience in the pandemic because when I went online, I had like on some days, you know, hundreds or even thousands of people talking about a not-mey, talking about somebody else. else who was being sort of chronically mistaken for me, who was another Naomi writer, Naomi Wolf. And it became, you know, there was, there were a lot of genuine cases of identity confusion and this, and this partly had to do with the fact that during COVID, Wolf became a kind of industrial scale disseminator of medical misinformation. So she was

all over the place before she was deplatformed on, you know, on social media. And then she was all over other places, like Fox News and Steve Bannon's show. And like, why is Naomi Klein saying that, you know, vaccine apps are a fascist coup? It also became for a time one of left Twitter's favorite jokes. And I had a period of real vertigo. Right. I mean, you, there's, we should mention that great tweet with the rhyme, that if the Naomi B. Klein, you're doing just fine. If the Naomi B. Wolf, it's like, oh, baby, woof or something like that. But you, so you begin the book with this situation, this particular situation you find yourself in, and then you, you know, you're slowly broadening it out chapter by chapter to, to this moment in politics, in strange right-left alignments and the kind of marionette way the left and the left and the right relate to each other in various forms of conspiratorial thinking. But you note that it makes things even weirder that Naomi Wolf herself seemed like a doppelganger.

of she herself seemed like a doppelganger of the self that you had known as a self you had read as a college feminist, right? And that in itself captures something that's a real feature of this time, where so many people who have been radicalized one way or another, as you say, we all know someone who feels like they are a doppelganger of themselves. It kind of does feel like a distinct feature of today where so many of our worldviews are organized by by the sort of algorithmically escalating internet that, you know, within six months of going down any particular rabbit hole in the internet, there's, let's say, like, some normy southern sorority girl might reveal herself to be a radical police abolitionist, right, who's also queer, and maybe her

friends think, what happened to her? She's gone nuts. Some guy who's seen perfectly nice at work might suddenly reveal himself to be an in-cell obsessed with seed oils, you know, in the child custody system or whatever. Like, it's a feature of the internet that it makes people seem like bizarre doubles of themselves. Anyone can seem unrecognizable at this point. When we're looking at avatars, right? When we aren't rooting our relationships actually in any kind of embodied experience. And that's, you know, I do, I think I try in the books that I've written to be a bit of a kind of mapmaker of the political moment. And I think the reason why, I was excited about the literary technique of using my own doppelganger.

And I want to stress that this book is not about my doppelganger. It really is, it's using her as a case study for those people who have changed. But it's also using the figure of the doppelganger to understand the uncanniness of our political moment. Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that changes what was once. familiar to something unfamiliar, right? It's that weirdness of like, I think I know what this is, but it's not what I think, right? You know, people used to be very distressed by wax figures. Now we have a whole doppelganger world, right? Where a world of wax figures. So I think there are ways in which political movements feel like

doppelgangers of each other, of themselves. Like, you know, Bill McKibben wrote a book. about a decade ago called Earth, but he added an extra A in it. And basically he was making the argument that climate change creates a doppelganger of the planet in the sense that this is not the planet we grew up in, right? And we are experiencing uncanny weather, right? Right. So it's a deep, deep, deep uncanniness. And the figure of the doppelganger, interestingly, historically, often emerges during moments of collective vertigo.

So the first piece of theoretical writing about doppelgangers was in the first year of the First World War in 1914, written by Otto Rank, who was a student of Freud, who was trying to make sense of why there were doppelgangers all over the place in the culture, including in film, like early films, like a student of Prague. And he argued that doppelgangers stood in for what we can't look at in ourselves, right? And repressed desires, what we're afraid of, what we want most, what we fear ourselves to be most, right? And then, you know, the Holocaust in the Second World War and the rise of Nazism becomes another moment where artists turn to the figure of the doppelganger because it's, because reality is so very hard to look at. I think about Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator and he made it in 1940. And he cast himself as both the persecuted Jewish barber and the, the, the, the, you know, the, the Hitler-like dictator, and they trade places. And the Jewish barber, dressed as Hitler, gives one of the greatest anti-fascist speeches of all time, you know? So I think doppelgangers can be

useful, I guess is what I'm saying, to wrap our minds around very, very difficult things to look at. And I think we are in one of those moments. Right. We were talking about the weather being so uncanny, right? And we look around, we wake up every day into this denatured, strange earth. And then, you know, one thing that you say is that conspiracy gets the facts wrong, but it gets the feelings right. And, you know, then there's this kind of ambient conspiracy that the sun has somehow been replaced, right? That the sun looks different. The sun isn't yellow like it was in my childhood. This is something that, have you, have you seen this kind of discourse crop up online? You're way more online than I am. I have not seen, like, I know, I know the Biden is played by an actor in a mask. I know a lot of them, and I don't know that one. But, yeah, there are more and more, you know, semi-playful, but the instinct towards them is very telling. There are these semi-plateful theories that various celebrities have been, you know, this is the iteration of the Charlie Chaplin movie. Like, we're now at the point where it's just Wikipedia articles about the conspiracy theory that Avril Levine was replaced by an actress, you know, decades ago. We're actually making a thread of these. There's so many of them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's going on with Brittany, even with Kanye right now. And it's, and yeah, this is another doppelganger moment. But you speak really.

Well, whenever you don't like reality, you can just say that it's not real, right? And as you know, I've been, my main area of research is the climate crisis. I had a research center about climate justice at university. And my research there into climate change denial. You know, I've gone to the conferences where all the climate change deniers converge and trade theories. And it's very clear that they are fleeing from the science of climate change or just refusing to accept it and throwing whatever they can at the wall because the implications of the science are too challenging to the worldview that they hold. Right. I mean, it's overwhelmingly

like a very right-wing anti-government, you know, pro-deregulation subculture. And so if climate change is real. We and I have talked about this. It means we need to do all of those things. So rather than confront those hard things, you just deny the reality. And I think that that impulse has now generalized to basically everything, including Havril Levine. Right, right, right. That's Naomi Klein, speaking with the New Yorkers, Gia Tolentino. We'll continue in a moment. You bring up in this book the way that this other form of mirroring and kind of inverse relationships, where once some issue became important to the far right, like the minimal but real cases of adverse effects from the COVID vaccine, right, for example, the left had a way of automatically dismissing, in some cases, even just the inquiry about it. And there were all of these ways that you write about that the kind of tortured balancing relationship between the left and the right. Like you had for so long urged your readers to be suspicious of moments of crisis being taken.

taken advantage of by those in power. And many on the far right during COVID began to understand COVID as exactly that, but just with things that weren't true, such as the fact that the government was tracking us all with microparticles and, you know, vaccine passports, you know, likening vaccine passports to yellow stars in Europe. And then as you write during COVID, and you, you write that you yourself had begun to worry that those of us on the left had in fact been too complacent about what did happen during COVID, which was consolidation of power to the wealthy and corporate profiteering and billionaires doubling their fortunes and, you know, vaccine apartheid, that there were kind of real, I don't want to say conspiracies, but there were real examples

of profiteering and power concentration that had somehow fallen by the wayside. Well, yes, and what worried me was hearing Steve Bannon take issues that I knew to be very powerful, traditionally left-wing issues that had been kind of left unattended, that had been, that were not being deployed as much, where it was sort of like, we all just need to kind of like if they are anti-vax and anti-mask, then we just need to be the people saying, get vaccinated and wear your mask and not make too big a deal about all the other things that our governments could have done, like lift the patents on those vaccines, like make sure that every classroom had, you know, proper air filters, that classrooms were smaller, that we had more

teachers, that we had more nurses, that they had PPE, you know, bans on pandemic profiteering. And we were not ambitious in calling that out. You know, obviously there are exceptions. But I believe we dangerously ceded political territory. So when I would hear Bannon, you know, doing like cosplaying chomsky or you know my own politics um it's not that i think he believes it it's that he is a strategist and his um political move that he has used to great effect is looking at the people and the issues that the democratic party has abandoned um who feel betrayed who feel um unrepresented you know he identified that this was fertile political territory to bring a portion of the traditional democratic base over to the Maga right. And now he is doing

the same things. You know, it used to be like the kind of forgotten every man. Now it's the angry every mom. And that is who my doppelganger represents to him, right? Is sort of frazzled COVID moms who are, feel like mocked and dismissed. And, and, and he's saying, come on over. And then, you know, moving very quickly from masks and vaccines to critical race theory and transphobia. Transphobia. So, you know, we can get angry about that. But parts of this agenda that come from the left and the center left that were not being used effectively, where we had become too timid, too silent, too afraid of seeming like them, right? Right. That is something we can do about. There are ways that we can take those issues back, but we have to get over this fear of sounding too much like

Bannon because he sounds like it's, we're worried about that because he's sounding more like us, and he doesn't really mean it. They're doing it because it works politically, and it's a root to power. There's this other thread running through the book that I loved. You write about Daisy Hilliard's formulation of the shadow self that you and I are sitting here talking, well, kind of. There are pictures of little pictures of us are sitting on the screen talking to each other, but we're talking. But there are other versions of ourselves that are, as she writes,

in the sky causing storms and in the ocean, nudging whales towards the beach, right? That as we who are Western consumers, you know, have these lives, that there are shadow versions of ourselves, there are doppelgangers of ourselves in rare earth minds, you know, alongside 14-year-old. who are being poisoned, right? And that we, that life asks us the narrative of success in a good life and even just everyday mental functioning perhaps asks people to suppress the reality of those shadow selves and those doppelgangers. But they are with us and they're sort of growing,

our sense of them is becoming unavoidable. That because of the reality of climate change, because of the reality of, you know, all of these accelerating systems, they're not going to be shadow cells for long, we are going to have to confront the flip side of the economic systems that fuel our lives. And I think, well, I think it is the work of our lives to try to look. So it isn't just that it's hard to look at things that are hard. It's also that we are implicated in those hard things, right? We are not apart from them. And that's what she, I think, articulates really beautifully with this idea that we have two bodies. The body, that is sitting here in this chair, you know, the body that is going to go for a walk with my dog

later and my kid. And then there's the body that is hovering over whose tax dollars fund drone warfare, who is implicated in oil wars, who is implicated in plastic in the ocean and all of that. Like, that is not other people. That is me. That is us. And that is the hardest thing to look at, right? Like we're implicated in those storms that are hitting us. We're implicated in the history that's coming at us. And we're implicated in the exploitation of those workers in the clothes that we wear. And oh my God, that's hard. Like, is it any wonder that people are finding ways to look away? And the argument I make about conspiracy culture and what's going on with my doppelganger and Steve Bannon is they are creating these fake scandals that are actually

an amazing way to not look at the real scandals. But I guess the flip side of that and because, you know, a doppelganger book, you know, it's every, you know, I went, I, I, I dove deep into doppelganger novels and short stories and, and, and films. And I think I can say with certainty that pretty much all the storylines start with you thinking you're confronting your doppelganger and ending up confronting yourself. Right. So I would just say to those of us who might feel a little bit smug about, oh, those ridiculous people who are choosing to take a flight into fantasy conspiracy theories instead of doing the hard work of looking at reality. I mean, I went to Barbie. Did you? I know. Right. I mean, there are different ways of fleeing from reality.

Thank you for writing this book. I just loved every bit of it. And I'm so glad we got to talk today. I am so glad to. There's no one I'd rather discuss this with. It's such a pleasure. Naomi Klein's new book is called Doppelganger. And you can find a longer version of her conversation with staff writer Giotolentino at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to the program today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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