Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’ is a mirror to our world’s absurdity

In all this mayhem, the worst nightmare perhaps is the dread of identity theft—a central theme of Klein’s book. The difference in her case is there is no actual stealing involved. Rather, it starts as seemingly trivial confusion—people on the internet mixing up Klein with her namesake, Naomi Wolf, best known, once upon a time, as a liberal feminist and author of The Beauty Myth, her critically acclaimed first book published in 1990, which triggered new conversations around patriarchy’s manipulation of women’s bodies and psyches. But that was in another lifetime.

Although Wolf was never known for the soundness of her research, as Klein shows through close reading of passages from her books (including her much-lauded debut), her career underwent a watershed moment in 2019. On a BBC programme, while promoting Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, the book she’d published that year, Wolf was called out by the host Matthew Sweet for making an egregious mistake in her thesis—a misreading of the term “death recorded" that amounted to her mixing up child abuse with persecution of gay people in Victorian England. (The recording of the programme, for those who have the stomach for cringe, is available online.)

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Needless to say, the controversy blew up spectacularly, leading to Wolf’s publishers deciding to stall the appearance of the book in the US as the online community had a field day. There was no way Wolf would have recovered from this shocking unspooling of her career and credibility unless she had sought help from the dark side. And that’s precisely what she did by jumping on to the right-wing bandwagon, most notably on the one driven by Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s chief strategist (during his first term), who was sacked less than a year into his job.

Elevated to the high table of the far right QAnon movement, Wolf wasted no time in spinning conspiracy theories galore, especially about the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccines, which, as a self-proclaimed anti-vaxxer, she opposed vociferously. And so, as her star began to rise in the ecosystem of the ultra-right, Klein’s life, ironically, took a turn south. Overnight, it was no longer possible to shrug off the silliness of people conflating two Jewish women writers with the same first name and similar hair colour.

Instead, Klein’s focus became salvaging and protecting her reputation as a writer from the political left, an image built through the decades of careful research, reportage and activism, cemented by world-changing books like No Logo (1999) and The Shock Doctrine (2007). It became essential to reclaim her identity as a committed environmentalist from the hands of climate-change deniers. In time, her efforts expanded to rescuing political discourse from unscrupulous “buffoons" parroting their opposition to Big Pharma and sounding uncannily like a double of the left.

By jumping into this rabbit hole of the right, Klein unpacks the single-point agenda pursued by anti-vaxxers and their ilk, driven by self-interest and exclusionary politics, their intentions poles apart from the left’s wider agenda to bring about social justice for the masses. (It’s another matter that the left failed to uphold its mission, and Klein is critical of her own tribe, too.)

For anti-vaxxers though, as Klein explains, the problem of common people being vulnerable to covid-19 wasn’t one that concerned them. Many wellness gurus, who also live on the extreme right of the mirror world, sent out an overarching public message during the pandemic, Klein writes, “that individuals must take charge of over their bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge... those who don’t exercise that control deserve what they get."

This position is not substantially different from “a neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form," a problem of the so-called liberals, too. Case in point: air pollution. Liberals are perfectly satisfied with raising a storm on social media, but as long as there are air purifiers to protect them, they are unlikely to take to the streets and demand better quality of life from the government for people who are economically weaker than them.

For me, the highlight of Doppelganger was being introduced to the concept of “diagonalism"—a term coined by political scholars William Callison and Quinn Slobodian. It describes to the T a behavioural pattern widely familiar to us, be it the classic trope of the kebab-loving uncle, who, one fine day, began to bombard the family WhatsApp group with hate-laced forwards, or the lapsed journalist, who now spends her days in the studio extolling the cosmic power of faith while the poor are dying in stampedes.

It’s worth quoting from Callison and Slobodian at length: “Both in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of the left and right (while generally arcing towards far-right beliefs) to express (their) ambivalence if not cynicism towards parliamentary politics."

In this extreme avatar, diagonalists believe all power is conspiracy and conspiracy theories, as is well known, do not need the heft of reason and logic to take flight. Case in point, once again, the anti-vaxxer’s warped worldview. As Klein puts it: “Covid is a mild cold—chill out! Covid is a bioweapon (unleashed by China in collusion with Big Pharma)—freak out!"

Read Doppelganger not only for a guided tour into the topsy-turvy workings of the mirror world, but also to look into the mirror yourself, and recognise the demonic potential of social media to spawn monsters, among liberals as well as conservatives, who are deluded by the opiate of the masses: a sense of relevance given to them by likes, clicks and shares. Klein has a neat little equation to sum it up all: “Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social Media Addiction + Midlife Crisis ÷ Public Shaming=Right-wing Meltdown."

Now here’s another T-shirt slogan, handy to gift a diagonalist close to you.

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