FREE FOR ALL: Naomi Klein on dopplegangers, diagonalism, and how the right steals the left’s causes

Looking back on our conversation with the author and activist on how the left let the far right build a mirror world of negative politics -- and how it can change

For Thanksgiving weekend, we’re making a few of our favorite interviews with some of the most brilliant thinkers we know free for all to read. We hope you enjoy these conversations — and find yourself challenged and changed.

Last year, we had an extended conversation with the visionary author and activist Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger. That book begins by exploring the mystery of why people confuse her with the feminist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf, but turns into an exploration of how most significant political challenges of our time also come down to doubles: fascist forces make a play for the emotional needs of followers that mirrors the approach of the left, social networks demand that we construct and alienated public self, communities and societies tell stories that look at history in a funhouse mirror, distorting the past to construct a “mirror world” that’s the evil political twin of our own. And that’s the situation we face as we enter the new year.

This is a powerful conversation with a major thinker that will challenge some of your most deeply felt assumptions about how we understand history, how societies and communities process trauma and build identities, and what the way forward is for democracy.

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In Doppelganger, you explore this notion that there are real unaddressed issues, many of them, that progressive and liberal forces fail to adequately speak to or connect with, real things people are feeling. And that leaves open territory that’s very ripe for the right to come in — though the right doesn't actually help on these things. Can you talk about that dynamic, unpack it a little bit, and maybe pick a few of the areas specifically — whether it’s evolving masculinity or billionaires or racial change — where that territory is left open, how it's left open, and then how it's claimed?

This is a dynamic I've been interested in for a long time. And I think there is always this kind of dialectic between the rise of a fascist right and the failures of a center-left, a far left, a failure to make alliances but also this opening up of vacuums.

Politics hates a vacuum. Somebody is going to fill it. If there are powerful emotions out there that are being unaddressed, if you're a smart strategist, you will study your opponents and you will speak to those feelings even if you don't actually have serious policy responses to them.

So we saw this move very clearly in 2016 around free trade, which is an issue that I kind of came up in. My first book, No Logo, was in the alter-globalization movement and was part of this mass mobilization around the failures of corporate free trade. There were mobilizations outside World Trade Organization summits, outside World Bank and IMF summits, outside of Davos. And it was very much an anti-corporate and increasingly an anti-capitalist movement. It brought together farmers from India, trade unionists from Ohio, and environmentalists from Seattle. I mean, that was the sort of Teamsters and Turtles alliance in Seattle, right? Saying, "Okay, everyone's getting screwed by this deal." It's a bad deal.

And we were increasingly talking about campaign finance and corporate rule and so on. And I think post-9/11, post-invasion of Iraq, increasingly the left became simply anti-war. And I was part of that left, too, and that was important. But there's a way in which that structural analysis, that analysis of corporate power dropped off the agenda. And then what we saw in 2016 was Steve Bannon advising Donald Trump to speak directly to the de-industrialized belt of the United States and promise to renegotiate trade deals and so on. And so that's just a smart strategy.

You look at who and what your opponents are neglecting. And that's where I work with this figure of the doppelganger, what I think we're seeing on the far right now, on the Trump right. But it's not just Trump. It's Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It's Marine Le Pen in France. It's the Vox Party in Spain. It's Bolsonaro. What we see is this kind of mix-and-match of neglected issues on the left. I mean what you've written about — the billionaire class hijacking democracy — but they twist it and turn it into its kind of evil twin.

So it's about the Davos elites, but they're not talking about the conspiracies that we can prove. They are pivoting to QAnon-type conspiracies, or they're pivoting just to xenophobia and racism. But they're using the emotions. We could go down a list of all kinds of other issues that are being neglected.

You’ve talked about this with Heather McGhee. We need to map a future where everybody sees a place for themselves. If we're only doing the hard work of reckoning with the past and not bringing people along on a journey of, "And here's where we're going to go, and it's going to be actually better than where we are right now," then I think the territory is really ripe for that. Actually, let's just go off into fantasy land. Let's just go off into a nostalgia for a world that never was. Let's have those comforts.

During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time listening to Steve Bannon for various reasons. And listening to Bannon a little bit later on when he was really focused on the vaccines, I was so struck by how he was doing this evil twin of the analysis of corporate media, that movements that I've been a part of used to do but no longer really do.

And I would add, probably, of corporate drug companies that have undue influence in Washington, which, again, you and I would agree with, but it gets misused.

Exactly. I mean, Steve Bannon has no plans to take on Big Pharma. What he's taking on is a rightful suspicion of the influence of Big Pharma in Washington, the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on media. So he would do these mashups of all these cable news shows — brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Moderna.

That's where I would get this feeling of, "Wait, why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't we screaming from the rooftops about pandemic profiteering? And why it is that this is a profit center at all?"

I mean, these vaccines were developed with public dollars. It was basically a fee-for-service. Why were we allowing these huge fortunes to be made off of suffering? And so whenever something like that is happening in broad daylight, somebody is going to speak to it. And so if the right is doing this doppelganger of what the left used to be and the left is kind of saying, "Actually, just roll up your sleeve and get your vaccine and listen to the government," that's just jet fuel for the project, which isn't to say that we shouldn't have been telling people to get vaccinated, but that shouldn't have been all we were saying.

We also should have had, I think, an expansive agenda for addressing the many crises that Covid unveiled: a broken healthcare system, a healthcare system that was built to maximize profits and had no slack in the system to deal with the shock that had long been predicted, a healthcare system where nurses had to go to work in garbage bags where — or a school system that couldn't deal with the pandemic because class sizes were so enormous that a virus was going to tear through it. I mean, you look at Scandinavian countries that were able to handle it much better because they had smaller class sizes to begin with. So some of what I did in the early months of the pandemic was look at models of the New Deal era in the United States where you had a crisis, not just an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, the Dust Bowl. You also had a lot of infectious disease, TB. And you had these huge jobs programs where millions of [laughter] young people were put to work planting trees, building public infrastructure, hiring nurses, hiring teachers, improving well-being. And so where was that kind of expansive agenda? And so yeah, I think the right just feeds off of left failures — it always has — and it's scary.

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Click on the links below to read our full interview, in two parts.

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