To a distracted observer, your arguments and hers might have seemed plausibly interchangeable-you were writing about the hubris of geoengineering, she was posting pictures of suspicious clouds in the sky. Then, at some point in the two-thousands, her subjects began to drift from women’s bodies and sexual politics, and her work took a conspiratorial turn. You and Naomi Wolf have a few similarities, but, for a long time, you didn’t really share an intellectual focus. We blame others, but we don’t do something very politically important, which is to be self-critical and say, What can we do better? We’re terrified of admitting that we’ve lost, that we’ve disappointed ourselves. I think it’s more in the tradition of left melancholy, which is a real political tradition-Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote about it in her review of Sara Marcus’s book “ Political Disappointment.” In North America, we have an amnesiac, don’t-look-back perspective it’s always reboot, look forward, fail better. It’s not that same kind of rah-rah cheerleader role, but it’s also not defeatist-I hope you didn’t feel like I was giving up. You’ve always been an avatar of steadfastness and resolve for the left-and, in the book, you grapple with the ways in which those qualities became harder for you to access during the pandemic. And being an anti-capitalist writer on a book tour is an inherent contradiction, you know? I wanted to write about this as a system in which we are all inside and implicated. I do still use social media too much-it is a really valuable way for me to reach readers. I tried to be a terrible brand-no consistency, no repetition. I decided, “I’m not going to write about marketing anymore.” My subsequent books really didn’t build on “No Logo” at all. I recently spoke with Klein about all of this on Zoom our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Īnd I really tried to subvert it. The book uses the two Naomis as a guide to the strange contemporary intersections of the left and the right, finding, in conspiracy theories, an uncanny doppelgänger of political reality. “Doppelganger” is partly an admission-and an occasionally very funny one-that Klein is not exempt from the sense of runaway surreality that marks this moment. And everyone, in general, seemed to be losing their grip on what was what. Came COVID, and, if you squinted, the Naomis became slightly blurrier: Klein was angry at Bill Gates for defending corporate vaccine patents Wolf thought Gates was using the vaccine to track people’s movements. Oooof.” In 2019, Wolf’s book “ Outrages,” which had a premise that rested on a misreading of British law, got a humiliating reception after that experience, she sought out a new audience on the right-Tucker Carlson’s TV show, Steve Bannon’s podcast. A viral tweet offered a helpful rubric: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. The Naomi confusion got worse as discourse migrated onto social media, where both Naomis were, like everyone else, shrunk down to follower counts and tiny avatars. I can attest to the durability of this confusion: before I interviewed Klein at The New Yorker Festival in 2017, I received multiple texts from friends saying, “Good luck with Naomi Wolf!” (Klein’s husband, who in 2021 ran for office with Canada’s New Democratic Party, goes by Avi.) And though they had once had distinct areas of expertise, their specialties eventually began to converge. We’re both Jewish.” Both had partners named Avram. “We both write big-idea books,” Klein writes, and “have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting. . . . Its leaping-off point is not global warming or the expansion of government surveillance but, rather, the fact that Naomi Klein, for more than a decade, has been regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf. And so her new book, “ Doppelganger,” comes as something of a surprise. Klein’s books are serious, though not humorless she cuts a reliably resolute figure, modelling for her audience that one’s mind can be on dissolution and disaster while one’s person remains entirely poised, even cool. She’s been a prominent Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and public advocate for the Green New Deal. In 2008, in a Profile for this magazine, Larissa MacFarquhar described Naomi Klein as “the most visible and influential figure on the American left-what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” Klein became famous in 1999 for “ No Logo,” her manifesto about globalization and consumption she published “ The Shock Doctrine,” in 2007, about disaster capitalism, and 2014’s “ This Changes Everything,” about the climate crisis.
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