I have a friend that identifies as a "liberal, not a libtard." This is a book about language, too, and examining these differences matters, Klein has taught me. I think by "libtard," (a term I'd rather not use, but am parroting for the sake of simplicity) he means the fractured left, the loudest voices shaming and cancelling people for their failures at various purity tests. I would almost say "for not being woke enough," but that word has become weaponized. I never liked the word when people first started saying it back in 2016 or 2017 or so, because it smacks of anti-intellectualism on top of being a grammatical nightmare, as if "conscientious" was too difficult to spell (or wasted too many characters for Twitter). It's been weaponized in particular by Ron DeSantis, and a multitude of comedians and other "content creators" seeking to expand their audience. Naomi Wolf is just one of them.
I was touched to see Klein write about Wolf's blog, DailyClout, because of the numbers:
"I checked the traffic: in April 2021, the month she started regularly appearing on Bannon's podcast, DailyClout broke 100,000 unique visits--up from a mere 851 one year earlier." (86) [Earlier, Klein notes one month saw "a mere thirteen visitors."]
Miracles can happen when we are willing to accept Faustian bargains, it seems.
Flying Houses has 264,726 views as of this morning. While "all time" stats only go back until January 2011, I cannot find one month with less than 500 visitors. And so I question whether it is possible that DailyClout had less. I am not a very popular person and reviews of old books are not hot topics and total earnings for this blog since April 1, 2008 amount to $38.17 (yet unpaid). Things could be worse, I guess.
[FWIW, all of the usual items remain inscrutably popular, with the Beautiful and Damned review towering over all others with 6.04K views (query how the blog itself can have 264,000 views if the most popular post only has 6,000 of those, and the #2 entry--a review of Deerhunter's Microcastle--has 2.44K--I don't trust these numbers).]
For a moment, Klein does address a phenomena of which I am guilty:
"I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column--'as I wrote here [link] and here [link].' Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: 'As I wrote here'....'See my earlier tweet'.....'Just bumping this up.' We have to do it, or so many of us believe--we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don't remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus." (70)
Yes, we are all too well aware of our superfluousness, our disposability, and the inaudible murmur that we emit from the back alleys of Blogspot. Sometimes we need to lift ourselves up and remember what we have accomplished and what we have said before, to note what has changed and what has not.
Klein need not grapple with such fears. She has already made her mark on the world as an investigative journalist and activist, and her books (she puts particular emphasis on No Logo and The Shock Doctrine) are not in danger of falling out-of-print. Doppelganger is likely her greatest success to date, and because it is such a huge book in terms of ideas and sheer righteousness, one imagines greater successes to come (though we might predict it will take the shape of an even bigger statement on the Climate Change, which she has spent the majority of her career analyzing). Yet even though she "made it" as a writer, she acknowledges, she still does grapple with these fears of being "outshouted," ignored and forgotten.
*
Wolf "made it" as a writer, too, with the publication of her debut The Beauty Myth, when she was 29 (which also gave her the same rival as a previous subject). Klein also put out her debut, No Logo, at age 29, albeit 8 years later. The differences do not stop there:
"The logical leaps were bad enough. What made it worse for me was that, with Wolf's new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was not yet confused with my doppelganger all that often, I knew that some people would credit me with Wolf's theories. It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest [during the Occupy Wall Street protests], and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: 'Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.'
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
'What the actual fuck?' he asked.
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
'What the actual fuck?' he asked.
'I know,' I said. 'It's like a goddamned conspiracy.'
Then we both just burst out laughing." (20-21)
Klein is playing a bit here, because she doesn't write about Avi's films (perhaps because of her collaborative aspect in them), but his political campaign for a position in Parliament representing West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. What makes Doppelganger much more interesting than the usual book of social criticism is Klein's willingness to make herself a major part of the story. (This is often seen as one of the worst things a documentary can do, but if it's in a book, it can be a great thing.) This comes to the fore in her chapter on autism, detailing her experiences raising a neuroatypical child, one of the several unusual tangents the book takes, which feels like veering off course until she wraps everything up and reveals the basic idea at the bottom of all human discord: Manifest Destiny (and later, "killing the brutes").
*
This is likely a highly controversial and potentially divisive stance, but I have to imagine that most readers will be fans of Klein's and not Wolf's ("hate-watching" could be a thing, but "hate-reading" is far less common, and the Wall Street Journal did not review this book so I cannot see how the commenters feel about this idea that colonialism is at the heart of our deepest societal ills). The point will not be misconstrued. Exponential growth and expansion are hallmarks of the capitalist framework, and we have been conditioned to see this as a good thing to aspire towards, and while we are told to love our neighbors, the unspoken underlying truth is that we care most about the protection of our own families, and everyone else takes lesser priority.
"The trouble is, we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way. So, [Sally] Weintrobe [a psychoanalyst who specializes in the climate crisis] argues, if we want more people to make better choices--not to shop for useless stuff as a source of solace, not to spread disinformation for clicks and clout, not to see other people's vulnerability and need as a threat to our own interests--we need better structures and systems." (336-337)
*
Unmistakably, Doppelganger posits the Covid-19 pandemic as the moment when trust in our structures and systems crumbled along party lines. We all had our own unique Covid Experience, but Klein captures the feeling I had about 46 months ago. This was new, and it felt like 9/11, except without the unparalleled death and destruction and horror in the space of a single morning, and spread out across the planet. There was a precedent in the Spanish Flu in 1918, and we saw eerie call-backs to that era, with old photographs of families in masks and old newspaper items about "social distancing." Most conspicuously, we got money, "fake money," and the stimulus propelled the economy through most of 2021 until it arguably created outsized inflation and the raising of the federal interest rate.
"It seems so distant now, but there were a few months in 2020--a good half a year--when there had been a widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for a great many of the structural changes our societies had been collectively procrastinating and avoiding. Many of us even let ourselves dream that the emptiness of our highways, the rest the skies were receiving from planes, and all of the talk about missing nothing more than one another would actually lead to a meaningful change in how we decided to live when the pandemic finally eased. These were the weeks when so many of us shared and quoted and posted Arundhati Roy's essay 'The Pandemic is a Portal,' imagining that a global calamity might take us somewhere not just different but better." (149)
I never read this essay at the time, but I have now, and it's hard to imagine the disparity between what we experienced here in the U.S. and the extraordinary impact the virus had on India and its people living under already deplorable conditions. It was as if their pain was magnified. For hospital staff and other essential workers here, that was also the case. If there was ever a time for a raise for the cashier at the check-out lane, this was it, and I don't believe many got that (though one recalls, this was a watershed moment for debate on what truly constitutes a "living wage," particularly in the hospitality industry).
For the great masses beyond those essential workers here, the pandemic was a reprieve. And while too many Wall Street Journal commenters would berate me for the fact, I happened to be a contingent worker, and more often than not took the "boosted" unemployment income that had been implemented.
I had been waiting my entire life for something like this. It was a return to childhood. The drudgery of life had been apparent to me since I was 10. It is an endless cycle of tasks and accomplishments and events and exams and tests and established consistencies and challenges and pressure to achieve something "meaningful." You have to keep working to survive, and the rent is high, and everything is more expensive in the places that have the best opportunities.
Covid came, and someone in government waved a magic wand and gave us what they deemed "enough" money to live (and it was a living wage, and probably more than that), if we were lucky enough to be unemployed. For about 18 months, the tables turned, and us have-nots were envied for our freedom. We could stay up til 3 AM and sleep til Noon. We could play video games all day and no one would really care. If we were bold, travel was suddenly cheap. Of course, it also allowed us to give in to our basest instincts. We had to learn self-control, and how to peacefully co-exist with our housemates and families in a more claustrophobic atmosphere. Mostly though, it was a break. While some people might have accused me of being a lazy worker, experience knows that is not so. I simply worked too many s***ty jobs over the previous 15 years, relentlessly. Any time off in that span could not be fully enjoyed, because it was almost never Paid Time Off. And so here, finally, I had PTO, and a lot of it.
We could do anything, except not en masse. I loved it. It was occasionally terrifying, but for the most part, I felt safe (I did not get Covid myself until May of 2022; I got it again about a year later; it seems like a lot of us are getting it now). But by September 2021, when the UI "party" ended, it was scary, but it was time. And I motivated myself to get into a real job and prove myself as a capable person in this world, and I got lucky. If it weren't for the pandemic, I'm not sure where I would be.
So it was a portal for me, at least, and maybe a few others--but not for our society. We backslid into the established ways of treating one another. The crazy people came out quickly.
*
Now, I know, they think I am crazy, they think we are all crazy, they think we are "sheeple," they think we are idiots for getting vaccinated. Naomi Wolf is one of them. This book is about them. The problem here, is that I am using "us" and "them." This divisiveness is potentially giving way to a 2nd Civil War. Nobody wants to say that, but that's the undertone. Even Nikki Haley was recently asked about what caused the 1st Civil War, and did not want to upset anyone by talking about slavery--but her answer was likely meant to apply to the present moment: "How government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could, and couldn't do." Sure, it was about people having slaves or not being able to have slaves, and "freedoms," in 1860, but which ones today are truly at stake? Klein acknowledges the absurdity of "freedom protests" from masking and vaccination mandates. Ron DeSantis is running his entire platform on his handling of Covid-19, and Trump and Haley and other conservative candidates want to get these voters that seem, well, stupid.
But aren't we the stupid ones? They're right, in a way. Epstein did have Clinton to his island (and Clinton doesn't seem credible--and the fact that Naomi Wolf had a role in his White House is another example of her fascinating trajectory). Biden is potentially losing his mental faculties (though they are blind to Trump's own unraveling). Homeless drug addicts are multiplying in cities with "liberal" mayors (and migrants welcomed here stoke further contempt for nanny-states, symbolizing cities in decline, of which San Francisco is the poster child).
What's refreshing about Klein is that, as an "anti-capitalist," she doesn't endorse the Democratic party, either. She wanted Bernie. Now, I wanted Elizabeth Warren (and could anything better represent the 'fractured left' than that refusal of a handshake between them after that one debate?), but after reading this book, I better understand the appeal of Bernie and the power behind his campaign--it wasn't about us:
"Though rare, I have seen this happen. I have been in factories taken over by their workers and squares occupied by the people and cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor--moments when everyone you meet is your political comrade and lifelong friend rolled into one. And it was there, too, in that U.S. presidential campaign that united millions with three that began as a slogan and became a kind of social justice prayer: 'Not me. Us.' The campaign's pivotal moment took place at a rally in Queens, New York, in October 2019. That's when Sanders, in front of a crowd of twenty-five thousand people, did something he hadn't done before. He exhorted everyone there to look to someone in their midst, someone they did not know, 'maybe somebody who doesn't look kinda like you, maybe somebody who might be of a different religion than you, maybe they come from a different country....My question now to you is are you willing to fight for that person who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?'
Would they fight to end student debt, even if they had no debt? Would they fight for the rights of immigrants, even if they were citizens themselves? Would they fight for the rights of people who hadn't been born yet to live a life safe from climate breakdown? In the road of the crowd, people were more than moved--they were altered. Altered by the power represented by the idea of standing up and fighting beyond the narrowest conception of self and identity.
The trouble is, a presidential campaign isn't capable of making good on a promise like that. By definition, an electoral campaign has a finite life span, and it ends when the candidate wins or loses. When Bernie lost and that end arrived, the unselfing we felt so powerfully on the campaign trail seemed to end right along with it. Shut in our homes by the first wave of strict lockdowns, severed from the movement that had held us together, so many of us who had been overcome by the power of 'us' felt as if we had just been summarily dropped into a deep sea of 'me.'" (333)
I should have ended that excerpt a paragraph early and added, "Would they fight for the right of people to party?" but I liked the next one too much because it captured that distinct moment so poignantly. It's perhaps worth asking, though, because with a new election season well underway, it is important to derive counterpoints from predictable arguments: inevitably, San Francisco will be referenced in the coming months as the leading example of a failing city overrun by homelessness and drug addiction (Klein writes about similar problems in her near-hometown of Vancouver, BC). Candidates will be asked how they have managed that in their home constituencies, and how they would on a federal level. What has been done in Reno, NV could be a step in the right direction, the type of intervention that is most effective in curtailing housing insecurity, unemployment, addiction and mental illness. There is a menu of social issues on a growing list of topics for debate, and this is one of the most complex, apart from how to address climate change.
Immigration and abortion are also political flashpoints, because you want to vote for a candidate that aligns with your values. Student debt....should we really get into it? That was an odd issue for the intense emotions it unleashed. If I ever want to get depressed and question my life choices, I read a WSJ story on student debt relief and read the comments. Nobody that paid off their loans wants younger people today to get a free pass. (Nobody also talks about how to appease such individuals, whom I believe could be "massaged into" a tax credit.) "My tax dollars shouldn't bail you out," they say.
And yet who receives a tax bill? For property, maybe, or for certain corporate matters--but people don't get tax bills for yearly individual filings. We get W-2s. And we see how much we owe based on our income. It's 20%, or 25% (maybe more in a higher bracket). People seem to think raising taxes is the inevitable measure necessary for the forgiveness of student debt. They are jumping to conclusions and catastrophizing (they ask where we will find the money for it, and recoil in horror at the thought of cutting back on Defense spending). We don't even know what our taxes are going towards now anyways. Another great idea that no one seems to float is the reporting of what percentages or amounts of our taxes paid have been attributed to which programs, which departments, which initiatives, so that we could more effectively vote for the interests we hold most dear. Don't bet on that happening. It can be dangerous to give the people too much information. It is prone to misinterpretation. We have more information than ever on the Internet, and we are also misled down rabbit holes, more than ever, by conspiracy theorists looking for angles, views, likes, donations, and clout.
*
While Doppelganger is teeming with fascinating tangents, one other merits mention before we close out this review, and it is the lengthy screed on antisemitism, which has permeated global culture for thousands of years, and is experiencing something of a comeback. Doppelganger was published on 9/12/23. Four weeks later, she probably wished she hadn't made her deadline.
We could go back and provide a roadmap of all of the examples from history she analyzes, or the pages she devotes to exploring the utopian ideals of Red Vienna, post-World War I and pre-World War II, but for the present moment, her statements on Zionism and the issues building towards terrible events that were yet unknown, felt quite prophetic indeed.
The sub-chapter "Erez from Erez," within the larger chapter of "The Unshakable Ethnic Double," is something I would excerpt in full, but I have to set some kind of limit, maybe three paragraphs (as above). In any case, this may be a misleading episode to represent the current state of affairs, because it took place in 2009, but regardless...
"With the aid of many beers, the three of us deconstructed the levels of gaslighting that Erez from Erez appeared to have orchestrated. No, we did not buy that the Israeli military was about to open a ground war in Gaza to rescue three Jews who were not lost. Nor did we believe we had been in imminent danger from Hamas. They had questioned Avi in a makeshift checkpoint inside a shipping container for about fifteen minutes, mainly to find out why he had an Israeli first name if he was Canadian (his mother's youthful labor Zionism). But they were satisfied with his press credentials--and it was the Israelis who had left us on the Gazan side for hours before allowing us through the checkpoint.
It seemed clear that they wanted us to sweat, to wonder if we were being abandoned behind "enemy" lines. And then they wanted to send a very clear message: that whoever we thought we were, and whatever we thought we were doing, here, on these blood-soaked lands, we were nothing but our ethnic doubles, nothing but our Jewishness. That Jewishness would get us kidnapped or killed by Hamas in Gaza, never mind my foolish support for Palestinian rights, and then it would only be the Israeli army that would ride to our rescue, its soldiers risking their lives to save ours, even though they hold us in utter contempt. Because, like Hamas, they don't care about who we think we are as individuals; they care about our Jewish doubles. So, when Hamas attacked us as Jews, Israel would be there to save us as Jews." (314)
I heard a lot about Israel and Palestine all throughout my life, and it was something that would come up in the news every few years or so, and every time I would throw my hands up and say I didn't understand it, and not look into it further. This time it was different. And it hurts my brain to think about the ways we are supposed to feel and the way we actually feel, and the safest way to protest is to protest killing in any sort of guise. Having read the entirety of Doppelganger, I trust that Klein is not losing the thread. I have to think she saw all of this coming.
*
Doppelganger simply goes too many places to neatly summarize in any review. I could write something twice as long (there should be an entire section of this review devoted to the word "genocide") but I would just say to read the book itself. We all know that liberals and democrats are basically done, because they can't get anything done, and conservatives have banded together, formed a more unified ideology, agreed on most issues, strategized and packed the Court with their appointees (three young enough to spend several more decades on the bench) and remained persistently aggressive and passionate and engaged about their beliefs. It's clear that Klein is tired of the weak and half-hearted activism, i.e. "virtue signaling" and nothing further, that has branded the liberals as ineffectual lemmings. Her journey down the rabbit hole does bring some surprising suggestions:
"Though I hesitate to suggest it, this is a place [Greta's 'blah-blah-blah speeches on climate change] where we could stand to learn a little from Steve Bannon. From his bloody-minded approach to strategy and building winning coalitions despite differences. From his transformation of listeners and watchers into highly organized doers. From his focus on 'Action! Action Action!'" (157)
Is James Carville the doppelganger to Steven Bannon? I cannot tell but I do not see him as the leader we need, or deserve. If anyone besides Trump is responsible for Trump, Bannon is at the very top. And though Trump is gone, kind of, for now at least (maybe), Bannon remains a key organizer of several subsets of conservatives rallied around the idea of MAGA. I think it's still clear that the closest thing liberals have gotten to Bannon is Bernie (and he's not doing his own show every week for two hours, riling up his compatriots). (Ralph Nader + Bernie was a missed opportunity, but maybe that would have been Too Soon.)
So this year is important. It's unfortunate there won't be serious democratic contenders (Biden will not step down) to have the kind of debate we had four years ago, but Biden has been "buying" votes from the radical wing of the party and is likely to appear as progressive as possible (without alienating his core centrists). For now it's more interesting to watch DeSantis vs. Haley. For the record, the only thing I really care about is his relationship with Disney, and I appreciate that both Trump and Haley have called him out as being "destroyed" by Disney. Even they respect the right of corporations to have free speech, and to stand against what they see as hate and intolerance. "Desantislies.com," but the conservatives lie in general all the time, and many of the problems they seek to correct are fake ones meant to rile up and attract voters.
It's a tall task to "explicate" all of the problems of our current world, but Klein does a damn good job of connecting seemingly disparate events with one another. In Doppelganger, she draws out these connections that maybe we have felt at various moments, but haven't been able to articulate. I can't explain it better than that, but if you read it, I think you'll get it, and I'm sure she could put it better but also wouldn't want to toot her own horn, or go for Too Much Clout.
Like I said, though, this is a depressing book, and I didn't want to say it was one of the Best Books, until the Epilogue. I won't spoil the Epilogue but it was definitely the most powerful part of the book for me (also, those other spare moments when Klein praises Wolf). Wolf did not participate in this book, but perhaps she knew, it would be better that way. Now, the ball is in Wolf's court. Perhaps a third act to her career is around the corner, and the publication of her comeback volume, The Antagonist, will bring us all to a new moment of unity. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I am not holding my breath.
Grade: A
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