Naomi Klein is a journalist and author who writes books of cultural criticism on subjects such as climate change, globalization, and predatory capitalism. Naomi Wolf is a journalist and author who writes books of cultural criticism primarily about feminism. Due to their similar names, ages, and professions, the two Naomi's are frequently mistaken for each other. This confusion bothers Naomi Klein because "the Other Naomi" has become a prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories and frequent guest on Steve Bannon's podcast. People often attribute Wolf's problematic views to Klein.
In this book, Klein thinks about how she and Wolf ended up in such different places after similar early careers. Her investigation gets her thinking about what she calls "the Mirror World" where hard-right commentators ape the vocabulary and rhetoric of the left to diametrically opposed ends. She argues that our entire society has a doppelganger, a double that arises from the problems that we ignore or suppress.
Klein travels far afield, with chapters about COVID conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination crusades, anti-Semitism, climate change, capitalism, and colonialism. The common thread of right vs left discourse on these subjects is that the right favors individualistic explanations while the left favors systemic explanations; for example, manipulation by a shadowy cabal of billionaires vs manipulation by the capitalistic system. Her "hopeful" conclusion is appropriately leftist (i.e. systemic):
We live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves... If we want more people to make better choices...we need better structures and systems.
Her idea reminded me of a book I read many years ago called Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. The authors of that book investigated situations where a person had to decide whether to obey authority that asked them to do bad things: the My Lai massacre, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and more mundane tasks at work. Like Klein, they concluded that we needed better systems to support making moral decisions.
Klein sometimes seems to get off track, but she made several arguments that I found compelling: that our doubles represent an irruption of issues we have suppressed, that conservatives and wellness advocates share concerns about purity and perfectability, that our visceral reaction to the Final Solution derives from a recognition of the (suppressed) fact that European colonizers treated native populations similarly, that we can adjust our institutions to promote the common good rather than ruthless advancement. She alternates between sounding naive and despairing, as befits a doppelganger.
