Naomi Klein, an old-fashioned leftist, writes a book about being confused with deranged former liberal Naomi Wolf:
Doppelganger opens with a scene in a public bathroom near the Occupy protests in 2011, when Klein overhears some women misattributing to her something Wolf had said. But it was during the isolation of the Covid pandemic that being chronically mixed up with Wolf, or “Other Naomi,” went from amusing to utterly bewildering. In the spring of 2021, Other Naomi started floating the conspiratorial fiction that vaccinated people might somehow endanger the unvaccinated. Wolf was suspended from Twitter in June 2021; despite self-identifying as a “liberal democrat,” she was becoming a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.
But it would be a mistake to say that Doppelganger is “about” Wolf, who serves as Klein’s entry into what she calls the “mirror world” — a realm both familiar and strange, where the anti-establishment critiques of the far left become co-opted by the far right, and where what once seemed like a yawning gulf between ostensible opposites has narrowed into a tenuous line. She meets neighbors in solar-paneled homes who switched allegiances from the left-wing party in Canada to the insurgent far-right party, “without so much as a pit stop” at anything in the middle. She encounters a bizarre blend of immigrant-hating, conspiracy-mongering, electric-car-driving and supplement-hawking. The inhabitants of the mirror world are so intensely dubious of anything the establishment says that their reaction to restrictions during a deadly pandemic is to want to burn everything down.
People were losing their political bearings, and none of it made sense. Klein had spent a lifetime analyzing the dominant power as oligarchic: relentless, resolute, delivered from on high. She was used to connecting dots, to mapping out cause and effect in the capitalist system — from Hurricane Katrina to proliferating charter schools; from Sept. 11 to the “homeland security industry.” But it was becoming increasingly hard for her to map out what she was seeing, let alone plot it on the old left-right axis. Here was a grass-roots movement that was demanding not egalitarianism, but nativism; not solidarity, but discord. Klein was trapped inside a hall of mirrors, and she was trying to find a way out.
What I find interesting here is Naomi Klein's shocked reaction to seeing her critique of big capitalism and neoliberal government being thrown back her as an attack on every kind of authority, including the kinds – environmental science, medical science, economic statistics, research in general – that she relies on to make anti-authoritarian arguments.
Which raises what I think is an important question: if you think the American government is basically a front for the interests of Big Capital, why do you believe anything it says about, for example, DDT, or climate change, or the median income? Would a government entirely in thrall to corporate interests be honest about any of those things? How, really, can you argue with someone who says, "How do you know that anything you think about America is true? Because the government says so? Ha. Because the big companies who control the media say so? Ha."
Skepticism, as everyone who has thought seriously about it knows, is a dangerous tool, and it absolutely can lead you into a house of mirrors. It you want to be politically effective, as Naomi Klein does, you have to know when to stop using it.
Which raises what I think is an important question: if you think the American government is basically a front for the interests of Big Capital, why do you believe anything it says about, for example, DDT, or climate change, or the median income? Would a government entirely in thrall to corporate interests be honest about any of those things? How, really, can you argue with someone who says, "How do you know that anything you think about America is true? Because the government says so? Ha. Because the big companies who control the media say so? Ha."
ReplyDeleteThis perfectly illustrates a bizarre form of American myopism I seem to encounter everywhere, in which people seem to simply forget that there's more to the world than America.
If you are worried that the US government is lying to you about climate change, all you have to do is see what other countries are saying about climate change and compare notes.
It turns out, the entire world agrees on the reality of climate change and the immense dangers it poses - not just America, not just America's allies, but even America's enemies. When Russia and China and Iran, etc., all agree with what the US government is saying, you have to be a complete lunatic to think it's not true.
If your fear is that you are being lied to by "the government" or "the big companies that control the media", go read some goddamn international news! The US government and media companies don't somehow magically control what people are saying in Pakistan, or The United Arab Emirates, or even in places like France or Britain!
Unless you're a "One World" conspiracy theorist, at which point there's literally no helping you because you'll believe anything, including that the world is flat, there's no actual issue here. Just open your eyes and look beyond your tiny little corner of the world to realize that there's an entire planet of people out there, and that it's actually quite remarkable when they more or less all agree on something.
It seems to me that asking Klein about her skepticism is pretty much beside the point. The point was never skepticism as a way of approaching the world, but anti-capitalism as a principle. That's where she starts (and, as her ultimate answer to her predicament, getting back to anti-capitalist basics is her answer in the article). She knows capitalism is bad--that is the rock she lives by--and, perhaps as a corollary or a slightly less central principle, environmentalism is good. Therefore, government pronouncements in favor of capitalism are to be met with skepticism, while government statements that serve as backing for environmental causes are to be embraced. And that's it.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, anti-vaxxism and conspiracy thinking generally has become right wing, and she knows that is bad. So when Naomi Wolf goes that route, it's bad.
I thought the whole article was cloying and overdone, with its melodramatic presentation of Klein's seeming mental breakdown because sometimes people confuse her with Wolf, the horror. But I don't think there's anything surprising that Klein embraces skepticism in one place and not in another. These are sectarian, identity-based, us-vs-them conflicts, as much of our politics is today. People embrace methods and approaches--skepticism, strong government, democracy, the rule of law, encouraging change, discouraging change, whatever--when they further the very specific allegiances they identify with. And if not, not.
I suppose you could say that that's Klein's answer to John's question: she realized skepticism isn't essential; anti-capitalism is.
ReplyDeleteAs many have said, this ties in with Douthat's left and right changing places theme. The 2010s and 20s have shown that a lot of post-modernist critique, the social construction of reality and so on, can be used by rightists and well as leftists. I suspect many of the people who came up with those ideas or spread them in the 60s-80s, never imagined they could serve anything other than leftist causes. All critique, they were sure, was leftist. How wrong they were.
@David
ReplyDeleteAt the time, most critique -was- leftist. There's a reason why they called it the counterculture.
And again, there was more than just America involved in the counterculture. It was a global movement, in which a post-war world rejected the norms of establishments everywhere.
In the aftermath of World War II, a great many people just wanted "normalcy", stability, predictability, and the maintenance of the status quo. But as the postwar East / West rivalry solidified into an unending stalemate of Cold War, many people began to chafe under that very "normalcy" being enforced on them from above.
Women who went to work in the factories resented being sent back into suburban kitchens. Minorities who had been called up to war to fight alongside majority groups resented being sent back into the social fringe of minority oppression.
Young people growing up in a post-ware age of relative affluence and stability, accompanied by rapid technological progress, wanted the freedom to experiment and innovate in virtually all things - but felt smothered by the older generations who seemingly wanted to move backwards, and return to a pre-war mentality.
The obvious absurdity of nuclear brinkmanship led many people to question the sanity of the establishment leaders that had promulgated it. The ballooning global population led people to question the future feasibility of feeding everyone, and to question industrial exploitation of nature via the emerging schools of thought of ecology and environmentalism. The achievements of the space race led people to embrace futurism over more retrograde philosophies.
Leftism in general shifted away from labor activism, and toward social activism - in part because conditions for labor had improved considerably compared to the pre-war period. Unions were strong and the global economy was booming, so more people than ever had the kind of financial security which is necessary to enable championing causes beyond their own welfare.
Meanwhile, the Rightism of the day was concerned with two things - waging the Cold War, and maintaining the general prosperity of the era. Conservatives didn't really want to change anything - they mostly wanted to prevent things from changing. They liked the world the way it had wound up, and didn't want those pesky liberals ruining it for them by demanding things like "justice" and "democracy" and "peace" and "multiculturalism".
The difference between then and now is that societal progress has occurred in the intervening years, and the conservatives now dowant change - retrograde change. They want to roll back the clock to the 1950s, when they were riding high on the hog, and the liberals were still just a bunch of powerless nobodies - before the "dirty hippies" and the "bleeding hearts" and the "commie sympathizers" began demanding things like clean drinking water, and not having to live under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, and a world where no one has to go hungry because they can't make ends meet, etc.