INTERVIEW: Naomi Klein on how the left creates the vacuum that the right fills

The author and activist talks about how right-wing activists became a mirror image of the left, the politics of emotion, and why it’s still worth writing — and acting — in a time of despair

Naomi Klein’s most recent book, Doppelganger, begins with a case of mistaken identity: she overhears people confusing her with Naomi Wolf, the former feminist turned conspiracy theorist. At first, she shakes it off as an annoying but unimportant mistake, but as she encounters it in more and more online and IRL spaces and begins to unravel the threads of misogyny and antisemitism that feed the confusion, she uncovers a deeper problem: she’s not facing just a specific confusion of Naomis, but a global problem: if you maintain a personal brand, an online avatar, a public self distinct from your private identity, you’ve got doubles out there, and their proliferation means we’re all increasingly alienated from ourselves and one another.

As she traces her own doppelganger’s transit from the left to the far right, she builds on the notion of doubling to explore how conservative activists have taken advantage of progressive failures and adopted the analyses, language, and tactics of the left. Over the course of the book, she traces the construction of a “mirror world” of parallel political critiques and strategies  — a truly powerful doppelganger, often an evil twin, that challenges all of our political identities.

Doppelganger is a far-reaching book, and it sparked this equally wide-ranging conversation below. In this first of two parts, we talked about the political implications of the book’s diagnosis of modern life, how political shortsightedness and messaging failures on the left gave right-wing activists an opening to take political territory, why the left hasn’t been able to counter right-wing gains effectively — and what progressive forces need to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Trust us — you won’t want to miss this interview.

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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?"