by Will Boisvert
In Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, progressive thought leader Naomi Klein sees rampant fascism in the resistance to COVID mandates—but reveals the Left’s profound lack of self-awareness.
Few things have alarmed the Left recently as much as the populist Right’s resistance to COVID regulations, which to progressives epitomizes epistemic anarchism, disdain for science and social irresponsibility. In her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, progressive pundit and meme-maker Naomi Klein tries to understand populist COVID politics through a personal lens, framing the book around her ”doppelganger” Naomi Wolf, the feminist author turned anti-vaxxer with whom she is often confused. Through her encounter with a woman who could be her twin yet has starkly different politics, Klein sets out to explain the ways of the anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vaxx movement, address its concerns, and think herself into the minds of right-wing resisters in an intimate and empathetic way. And here’s what she discovered: they are all fascists.
That grim, reductionist conclusion is disappointing, because Klein might have offered a more perceptive take on the COVID upheaval thanks to her long inquiry into the political economy of catastrophes. In The Shock Doctrine she introduced the idea of “Disaster Capitalism,” by which corporations allegedly take advantage of natural and political disasters to impose austerity, privatize government services, and cram down other neoliberal nostrums on a stunned populace. In This Changes Everything, her best-seller on climate change, she suggested a project that could be called Disaster Socialism, making the case that the climate crisis requires us to abolish industrial capitalism and thus rid the world of consumerism, inequality and exploitation along with fossil fuels
The COVID outbreak sparked the Public Health Revolution of March, 2020, which saw a self-consciously progressive class of medical academics and public-health bureaucrats seize power across the West and impose unprecedented state control over society.
The pandemic was a real-world exercise in Disaster Socialism on an epic scale. The COVID outbreak sparked the Public Health Revolution of March, 2020, which saw a self-consciously progressive class of medical academics and public-health bureaucrats seize power across the West and impose unprecedented state control over society. Large swathes of the capitalist economy were shut down and thousands of businesses bankrupted. Workers were divided into “essential” and “non-essential” categories. Millions of people were placed under virtual house arrest while millions more lost their livelihoods and became helplessly dependent on government handouts. Vaccine mandates compelled citizens to take medications against their will. These measures provoked sharp opposition and protest as well as profound economic dislocation, soaring rates of mental illness and drug overdoses, and long-lasting setbacks in learning among poor students kept home from school.
So it would be interesting to see Klein scrutinize these pitfalls in the Disaster Socialism project in a serious way, but she doesn’t; instead, she doubles down. Her main complaint about COVID restrictions is that they weren’t as radical, comprehensive and utopian in their reordering of society as she wanted. She defends mandatory vaccination, masking and lockdowns while saying almost nothing about mainstream scientific critiques of these measures or studies that cast doubt on their effectiveness. For all her alarm at the vitriol of the anti-vaxx crowd, she tars everyone to her right—and sometimes left—with ridiculous comparisons to antisemites, fascists and Nazis. And she advances a misleading politics of Disaster Socialism that invokes existential risk to justify state coercion while spinning utopian visions to distract from its failures. Her book is therefore a telling indicator of how little progressives have learned from the COVID episode, either about their opponents or themselves.
Klein’s awkward entanglement with Wolf makes an intriguing hook. It started in the 2010s when people on the internet began mistaking Wolf, famous for her feminist manifesto The Beauty Myth, for Klein just as Wolf veered into conspiracy theories. (The two women spookily resemble each other, Klein notes: both are middle aged, Jewish writers of “big-idea books;” at one point Wolf’s partner was a film producer named Avram Ludwig while Klein’s partner is director and producer Avram Lewis.) At first Wolf’s theories leaned left, decrying American corporate “fascism” in language that recalled a less-hinged reprise of Klein’s books. Soon the confusion between the two became so complete, Klein writes, that in the public mind “we’re just a blur of opinionated Naomis saying stuff about states of emergencies and Bill Gates.” Twitter began autocompleting “Klein” when people started to type “Naomi Wolf.”
This is all pretty funny as Kafkaesque social-media comedy, but for Klein it grew horrifying as Wolf’s ideas, often ascribed to her, grew nuttier: Wolf has suggested that ISIS beheadings might have been covert ops staged by crisis actors, that 5G networks cause mental dysfunction and that NASA might have caused dementia and autism by spraying aerosolized aluminum into the atmosphere. When the pandemic arrived, Wolf’s conspiracy theorizing accelerated and lurched rightward. She speculated that both the “plandemic” and the vaccines were a plot by the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization and Bill Gates. She called vaccine passports a form of slavery, and suggested that the excretions of the vaccinated were biohazards that should be sequestered from public sewage systems and waterways. She became a regular on Trump svengali Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she took up election denialism as well.
All of this is, of course, anathema to Klein. Throughout her book she endorses, with few reservations, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, school closures, and lavish “wage replacement” policies that would have supported the idling of even more workers by even tighter lockdowns. Suitably amped up, she writes, “[a] successful COVID response would have set a precedent for a modern, activist government.”
Klein is certainly right to find Wolf’s conspiracy theorizing appalling. Anti-vaxxers’ claims that COVID shots caused mass death or sterility are unfounded—side effects are rare and usually mild—and Wolf and like-minded commentators bear a heavy burden of blame for convincing people to forego vaccination. Klein cites estimates that a quarter of a million Americans died who could have been saved had they gotten vaccinated, which could well be true. Still, Klein’s case against the populist opposition to the COVID regime is itself unfair and distorted.
The logic of vaccine mandates—that we must get vaccinated in order to avoid catching the virus and spreading it to others—proved to be wrong, because the vaccinated still caught COVID and spread it to others. Indeed, vaccine mandate policies could be as irrational as anything the anti-vaxxers believed.
To start with, wrong as they were and are, anti-vaxxers got a lot right about vaccine policy. They were right that healthy children and young adults don’t need to get vaccinated because they are at vanishingly low risk of serious illness from the COVID virus, a fact that was well-known from the start of the pandemic. They were right that natural COVID immunity is at least as strong and durable as vaccine immunity, and that it made no sense to force people who have recovered from the virus to get shots, as many were forced to do. And while the vaccines are good at preventing hospitalization and death, anti-vaxxers were right in doubting their ability to prevent transmission. Immunity from infection waned quickly and new COVID variants soon arose that were readily transmitted to and by the vaccinated. Thus, the logic of vaccine mandates—that we must get vaccinated in order to avoid catching the virus and spreading it to others, especially the immunocompromised—proved to be wrong, because the vaccinated still caught COVID and spread it to others. Indeed, vaccine mandate policies could be as irrational as anything the anti-vaxxers believed. After New York State’s vaccine mandate led to the mass firing of thousands of health-care workers, many of them with natural immunity, the resulting staff shortages caused the state health department to decree that vaccinated workers with active, symptomatic COVID infections could return to work and treat patients.
Moreover, Wolf and other right-wing influencers the only vectors of anti-vaxxism. In the United States, leading Democratic politicians, including vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and California Governor Gavin Newsom, publicly questioned the safety of vaccines developed under the Trump Administration. Stating that they did not trust Trump’s FDA to ensure vaccine safety, Newsom and Cuomo convened their own expert panels to vet them before allowing them to be distributed in their states. Klein dubiously blames the memory of the Tuskegee Experiment for vaccine hesitancy among black people, but says nothing about the anti-vaxx alarmism spread by establishment liberals.
Nor does Klein explore the structural anti-vaxxism of the regulatory state. The FDA’s endless, precautionary sifting of test data on the vaccines delayed their approval for months; in the United States they weren’t approved for young children until June of 2022. The fanatical safetyism of government bureaucracies obsessing over the infinitesimal risks of everything from vaccines to genetically modified foods is more to blame than Wolf and company for the dread of undetectable toxins that powers the anti-vaxx movement.
There is thus a measured, well-supported critique of COVID restrictions and mandates from the scientific mainstream; but centering Naomi Wolf allows Klein to sidestep it and paint the opposition as a menagerie of nutjobs. She never mentions the Great Barrington Declaration signed by prominent scientists who opposed lockdowns. She never mentions Sweden’s policy of eschewing lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates, which yielded a lower death toll than was suffered by the United States and many countries in Europe. She never mentions the substantial literature showing that lockdowns and mask mandates had little effect in curbing the spread of the virus, or that prolonged masking exposed people to heightened carbon dioxide levels that induced headaches and cognitive impairment. While she derides Wolf’s demonization of Anthony Fauci, she never probes Fauci’s wild pendulum swings as he went from dismissing the need for masks in March, 2020, to an insistence on masking and then back to a grudging acknowledgment that masking might have been just “ten percent” effective .
Klein doesn’t try to debunk the mainstream critique of the COVID regime because it’s serious and well-evidenced, and raises major questions about the emergency panics that drove mandates and are the essence of Disaster Socialism. Instead, she debunks Naomi Wolf, which is easy; it doesn’t require a searching assessment of science and policy and medical politics, and lets her relax into a more comfortable register of paranoid dudgeon.
Doppelganger’s intellectual core isn’t a reasoned engagement with right-wing opponents, but a reflex that’s now common on the Left: pure shock at the possibility that someone who is sort of like Naomi Klein disagrees with her politics.
Indeed, Doppelgänger’s intellectual core isn’t a reasoned engagement with right-wing opponents, but a reflex that’s now common on the Left: pure shock at the possibility that someone who is sort of like Naomi Klein disagrees with her politics. That realization brings her close to a nervous breakdown. She finds it “[u]ncanny” and “unsettling” as she is publicly assimilated to the ubiquitous Wolf, and asks, “[d]id I need to start screaming more in order not to be deprived of my own identity?” Writ large, this doppelgangerism has created the Mirror World, Klein’s term for a political discourse in which ostensibly progressive values like human rights and bodily autonomy are invoked by right-wing populists to oppose COVID restrictions that progressives support—an inversion that induces “that feeling of disorientation we tell one another about…everything so familiar, and yet more than a little off.”
The eeriest aspect of the Mirror World is the way the Right appropriates, subverts and reflects back leftist concepts and language, especially her own. This is where fascism enters the picture—by robbing the Left of its monopoly on denouncing fascism:
“Wolf’s exaggerations, speculations, and baseless claims get conflated with the shock doctrine—not because it’s a brand in need of protection, but because it’s a framework that has given people some language to guard against profiteering and attacks on democracy during confusing periods of emergency. When that concept is mangled by association with unhinged conspiracy theories about global cabals, it becomes harder for it to serve that purpose….Wolf has similarly twisted the feminist movement’s core tenet that all people have the right to choose whom they have sex with and whether to carry a child. Now she was distorting that principle to cast Covid tests and vaccine mandates as violations of “bodily integrity” akin to those endured by women who underwent forced vaginal exams, claiming that all are examples of “the state penetrating their body against their will.” …[A]busing such terms is dangerous: it drains them of their intended meaning, their legibility, and their power. Most gravely, Wolf and her fellow travelers have spent years mangling the meaning of the fight against authoritarianism, fascism, and genocide—nothing less than humanity’s worst crimes. And they have done it at a time when we are in dire need of a robust anti-fascist alliance, in large part thanks to their own relentless inflammation and misinformation and the resentments they have sown.“
In other words, Klein warns, Naomi Wolf’s absurd claims that we are besieged by fascism just drains the meaning from the concept of fascism, which is dangerous because we really are besieged by fascism, and the anti-fascist alliance needs the term “fascism” to land with full legibility and power when they hurl it at fascists. Klein fights back by reclaiming the word “fascist” from those who would trivialize it, framing her analysis of society around it, and generally throwing it around like a fourteen-year-old anarchist: “This is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me: the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising.”
Anyone who departs even slightly from any progressive orthodoxy is at least fascist-adjacent in Klein’s eyes–including gender-critical feminists, whom she likens to Russian pogromists.
But when Klein maps the fascist clown state, it turns out to be a mish-mash of Trumpian delinquents and random bystanders whom she ties in with little more than free association. At its center, Klein intimates, is Steve Bannon, the architect of the Mirror World thanks to his infernal skill at twisting leftish memes to appeal to both ultra-MAGA extremists and disaffected liberals. Then there’s the wellness industry of herbalists, yoga therapists, gym owners and the like, who touted healthy living and supplements as protections against COVID and got angry when their businesses were locked down. (“Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements,” Klein darkly observes, adding that “[t]he Nazi Party was riven with health fads…marshaled in the project of building an Aryan super race.”) A few Confederate and Nazi flags were spotted near the Canadian trucker convoy, Klein notes, so she spends a chapter laboriously linking that protest to the “cultural genocide” of indigenous peoples and the purported discovery of mass graves at Indian boarding schools in Canada. Pretty much anyone who departs even slightly from any progressive orthodoxy is at least fascist-adjacent in Klein’s eyes, including gender-critical feminists, whom she likens to Russian pogromists.
In an especially bitter chapter, Klein, whose son is autistic, attacks the claim that vaccines cause autism. Not content with simply debunking this false belief, she associates its adherents with Nazi Germany’s program of murdering people with mental handicaps. (Dr. Hans Asperger of Asperger’s Syndrome fame was involved in that.) This is crazy, of course—anti-vaxxers want to prevent autism, not kill autistic kids—but Klein relentlessly tars them, and opponents of school mask mandates and other COVID measures, with a Hitlerian animus against the unfit and impure:
“Every night when I doomscroll, I encounter more people tossing around chilling language about their good genes and their strong immune systems and their “pureblood” and their perfect children as an argument against taking simple actions, like putting on a mask, that would protect people a little less strong and perfect than they imagine themselves to be. Largely unknowingly, they are the inheritors of the barbaric traditions that once sought to rid the world of children like mine. When glowing influencers spew fatphobic bile at people daring to ask them to consider their impacts on others, they are tapping into deep supremacist logics about which lives have value and which lives are disposable. When parents refuse to give their children vaccines that have controlled viruses like measles for generations because they are gripped with the terror of having the kind of child that the Nazis declared unworthy of life, they are feeding into these logics, too.”
Indeed, fascism is the cornerstone of Klein’s theory of history, starting in its primordial guise as Western colonialism and white supremacism. She notes that Nazi mass sterilization programs were modeled on the U. S. eugenics movement, that the Nuremberg Laws copied Jim Crow, and that Hitler’s drive for Lebensraum was a reprise of the expanding American frontier. The Nazis viewed the Jews as evil doppelgangers of Aryans, she asserts, and the Israelis in turn view Palestinians as the evil doppelgangers of Jews. Everything now ties together in a spreading web of fascism. “Our various fascist doppelgangers grow bolder by the day,” Klein writes, their “supremacist, annihilatory logic….surging along the diagonal lines that connect the people with ideas about the supremacy of their race to the people with fixations about the supremacy of their immune systems and the perfection of their kids.”
In time-honored socialist fashion, Klein steers every conversation around to a critique of capitalism, even when the topic under discussion is the government’s coercive COVID measures.
Almost no one on any side of COVID debates is a fascist. But it’s fair to say that Naomi Klein is a socialist, and Doppelganger opens an illuminating window onto Disaster Socialist principles—and how they distort the progressive worldview.
A basic rule is to always blame capitalism. In time-honored socialist fashion, Klein steers every conversation around to a critique of capitalism even though the topic under discussion is the government’s coercive COVID measures. Thus, the biggest problems with the COVID regime are that opportunistic corporations fattened on corrupt PPE contracts, that Big Tech seized on lockdowns to sell remote telecom links, online courses and smart-city surveillance gadgetry, and that Pfizer was indeed a nefarious villain, but for profiteering off of its vaccine patents rather than, as the anti-vaxxers have it, for profiteering off of vaccine mandates.
She even titles one of her sections “The Conspiracy is…Capitalism,” working through the profit motive to foment exploitation everywhere. This idea lets her reframe right-populist discontent with a nanny state run amok as an inchoate outcry against corporate dominion. Wolf’s claim that vaccine-passport apps would let the government track and eavesdrop on you is false and dumb, Klein contends, but it expresses a justified dread of “surveillance capitalism,” under which Alexa and your smart phone really are tracking and eavesdropping on you, one that “tapp[ed] into deep and latent cultural fears about the many ways that previously private parts of our lives have become profit centers for all-seeing Silicon Valley giants.” Social media platforms are constrained by advertiser dollars and frantically monetize our data as well, she notes. Distrust of vaccines, while illegitimate, is understandable in her eyes because they come from Big Pharma, a corporate cabal that pushes opioids for profit. Contemplating these and other “crimes of our oligarchic elite” again pushes Klein close to a breakdown:
“I go through periods when the impunity of it all gets the better of me. The sweatshops and oil spills. The Iraq invasion. The 2008 financial crisis. The coups that threw a generation of idealists out of helicopters in Latin America. Washington’s coordinated attack on Russia’s nascent post-Soviet democracy that created the oligarchs and paved the way for Vladimir Putin….My throat constricts. My breath becomes shallow. On bad days, I feel like I might explode. Impunity can drive a person mad. Maybe it can drive a whole society mad.”
But this was not the stuff that was driving the Right mad. Klein’s socialist tactic of trying to redirect right-populist anger at left-populist bogeymen ignores the substance of the opposition to the COVID regime. Anti-vaxxers had a specific animus against vaccines, not Big Pharma in general; they happily swallowed Big Pharma’s Ivermectin. They weren’t upset that Big Tech was beholden to advertisers and monetizing their data, they were upset that platforms censored posts that disputed COVID restrictions and mandates, often at the behest of government officials. The main concern with vaccine passports was not ambient surveillance but the explicit threat made by the authorities to use them to ban people from jobs, travel, college and restaurants if they didn’t get the shots. Capitalism didn’t scare COVID resisters; it didn’t make their throats constrict or their breathing shallow. They were scared of the governments that were bankrupting their businesses, shuttering their schools and churches, and criminalizing them for not taking vaccines. By painting capitalism as the underlying disaster, Klein tries to hide how obnoxious COVID Disaster Socialism was and how upset many people were with it.
Klein does concede that mistakes were made around the edges of the COVID regime. She allows that she and the Left at large were too dismissive of the lab-leak hypothesis, that there should have been more discussion of vaccine side effects, and that school closures had serious negative effects on kids. She sometimes glosses over these issues as messaging problems—vaccine risks “could have been easily explained by medical experts skilled in helping the public weigh the pros and cons of health decisions,” she chirps, side-stepping the fact that plenty of medical experts explained it all and were ignored by anti-vaxxers. Often, she just shrugs them off. (“The solution was not to fling open school doors where the virus was still surging and before vaccines had been rolled out,” she insists, even though many states and countries did just that.)
This is Disaster Socialism in a nutshell: using the pandemic as a pretext for a vast project of socio-economic transformation on all fronts.
But the main lesson Klein draws from the harms done by COVID policy is that we should have done everything more, and harder, and more expansively. “There is no doubt that there have been points when schools and businesses needed to be shut down,” she writes, “but where were the debates about why shopping malls and casinos were allowed to stay open in many of those same periods?” We should have “hir[ed] many more nurses and giv[en] them pay raises,” made “far more robust commitments to install high-quality air filters in public spaces, including schools, while hiring more teachers and teacher’s aides so class sizes could be smaller.” We needed to think big, she argues:
“We cannot rely on pharmaceutical technology alone. We also have to use all of the social, economic, and political technologies at our disposal— just as much tools as vaccines and antivirals—like social distancing, masking, paid leave, eviction prevention, community harm reduction, upgraded ventilation, infrastructure investments, Medicare for All, debt cancellation, decarceration and so much more.”
This is Disaster Socialism in a nutshell: using the pandemic as a pretext to inflate COVID policy into a vast project of socio-economic transformation on all fronts. Of course, we did try most of these things during the pandemic, and didn’t do them more because they were annoying and expensive and disruptive, and caused surging inflation (and crime, in the United States). And none of them helped very much in controlling the virus, except for Big Pharma’s vaccines and antivirals. But for Klein the failure of Covid Disaster Socialism just means that it needed a grander global vision. Here, for example, is how the vaccine rollout should have gone:
“By far the most significant measure governments of wealthy nations could have taken to stop the spread of new variants would have been to make vaccines free and available to the entire global population at the same time as they were rolled out domestically; the suspension of pharmaceutical company patents would have been more than justified, since public money so heavily subsidized the development and rollout of the vaccines.”
In addition to being politically impossible—Klein suggests that people should have refused a second vaccine dose until everyone on earth had had their first—this scheme would have been a medical catastrophe. It would have taken many months, maybe years, before distribution systems in poor countries could have been established to make the shot available to everyone on the planet at the same time; meanwhile, millions of doses would have sat in storage while the pandemic raged. Nor would regulators have permitted a simultaneous global rollout. In the United State, the Pfizer vaccine wasn’t approved for children five years or older until October, 2021, and for children under five until June, 2022—long after the resistant Omicron variant appeared. Had people agreed to Klein’s idea of refusing second doses, the vaccines would have been less than half as effective at preventing infection as they were with a two-dose course, making it easier for the virus to infect vaccinated people and evolve resistance. There was simply no way to quickly get shots to the old people who needed them without skipping over large population reservoirs, with weak or no immunity, where resistant variants would evolve. And there was no way politically that governments could have prioritized giving their vaccines to foreigners over giving a full course to citizens.
It’s extraordinary that Klein thinks this program could have worked, or that people might have accepted it, or that it’s a response to anti-vaxxism rather than an accelerant. But it’s a classic move in socialist politics: when people object to the policies you’re imposing on them, just talk up a bigger, bolder, dreamier version of those same policies.
This comes out in an entertaining chapter about her partner Avi Lewis’s campaign for the Canadian parliament in British Columbia, where the couple live, running on the progressive New Democratic Party line. Out canvassing, Lewis encountered a likely NDP voter—a woman dressed like a yoga teacher with Buddha statues on her windowsill—who nonetheless proved an anti-vaxxer; “‘I think those people should die,’” she supposedly said when, responding to her attack on vaccine passports, Lewis cited the risk unvaccinated people pose to the immunocompromised. “This is fascist thought,” Klein mutters, but she gamely workshops a counter-message to deflect the vaxx-pass issue, one based on her theory that fascist yoga instructors are really just confused left-populists. “I’d first validate their fears about data,” she tells Lewis:
“Tell them that your top priority is safeguarding their privacy and keeping their personal information out of the hands of private tech companies. Pivot the conversation to the need to regulate those companies, break them up, treat them as public utilities, guarantee everyone’s right to be part of a digital town square. Show them that there is a way to stick it to Big Tech without putting their life and other people’s lives in danger.…Same with Big Pharma. Remember, people have good reason to loathe these companies. Pivot to common ground: why lifesaving treatments and medicines shouldn’t be run for profit in the first place. Shift to the need to expand public health care to include prescription drugs. Talk about how we can create good jobs in public health and preventive medicine.”
If all this validating and pivoting sounds patronizing and clueless, to Klein it’s best-practice socialist organizing. A voter, probably a small businesswoman who has had her yoga studio locked down, thinks the government is trying to inject poison into her veins and just wants the public-health regime off her back. So, naturally, you tell her you will smash the corporations, eradicate the profit motive, expand the public-health regime that’s on her back and give her more preventive medicine (like vaccines?) for free! It’s of a piece with Lewis’s campaign slogan, “The pandemic recovery must be a Green New Deal for all!” (“After the hairshirt medical crusade, the hairshirt environmental crusade!”) Lewis lost.
Right-wing protests against COVID restrictions were not “revolts against connectedness,” as Klein has it, they were pleas to restore social connectedness and communal life: to reopen shops and schools, go to church again, eat at restaurants, celebrate the holidays with family and visit parents in nursing homes—all things that were forbidden by public-health measures that Klein supports.
Opposition to the coercive nature of Disaster Socialism raises fundamental questions about freedom, and this subject stirs Klein’s most intense feeling. She believes that “freedom is collectively won,” and writes lyrically of the mystic collectivism she saw flowing from the pandemic emergency:
“This was a crisis that could only be met if we chose to truly see one another, even those laboring and living in the shadows, a crisis that could only be addressed with collective action and a willingness to make some individual sacrifices for the greater good. Who can forget those first tender weeks when everything froze. When so many of us were so alone, but at the same time alive with connections. Every intake of breath outside the home forced us to think: Who else exhaled into this air? Every time we touched anything—doorknob, elevator button, park bench, food carton, delivery box—we had to think about who else had touched it. Were they well? If they weren’t, did they have the right to call in sick? Did they have access to health care? The illusion of our separateness fell away. We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by one another.”
But when it comes to individuals Klein sours on freedom, “that empty, heavy word,” interpreting individual claims to freedom as an assertion of pure selfishness and irresponsibility. This was highlighted by the paradox of COVID protests, she writes:
“[A] subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see…. Protests usually are expressions of collective power, based on the core principle that we are stronger when united. But this was something different: a temporary conglomeration of atomized individuals who saw anything collective as the enemy, set against their individual bodies and their individual families. It was, in a way, a revolt against connectedness, a howl against the lessons the virus had taught us all so jarringly: that we share the same air with people we don’t know, the same hospitals, the same biome. That we are enmeshed with one another, like it or not. No, the demonstrators were saying, we are individual islands, shaped with our own hands alone; we answer to no one. We are ‘sovereign citizens’ they declared, and you cannot force us to be in community or society.”
Here again, Klein’s excavations of ideological deep structure get things backwards. Right-wing protests against COVID restrictions were not “revolts against connectedness,” they were pleas to restore social connectedness and communal life: to reopen shops and schools, go to church again, eat at restaurants, celebrate the holidays with family and visit parents in nursing homes—all things that were discouraged or, mostly, forbidden by public-health authorities. Elsewhere in the book Klein grudgingly acknowledges this, but only to disparage its unscientific “logic”:
“[T]he early anti-lockdown defiance came from….evangelical Christians, many of whom packed megachurches despite the lockdowns, and our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, who came into conflict with local authorities for continuing to congregate for large funerals and other services despite the health orders. That was to be expected: many ultra-religious people believe that their faith acts as a kind of force field against harm, or that sickness is a small price to pay for performing their religious obligations. Within that logic, failing to follow God’s directives for communal prayer posed a greater risk than braving the aerosol particulates of their fellow believers at church or synagogue.”
Whether or not you agree with the “logic,” this was not an anti-social movement; it comprised people who hold community sacred and subordinated their individual well-being to it. It was the Left, not the Right, that declared war on social connection during the pandemic, reducing it to Zoom calls and the occasional solitary, anomic, masked outing. The Left’s awareness of connectedness, of mingled exhalations and bodily traces, fueled a paranoid drive to avoid other humans and their aerosol particulates. As the illusion of our separateness fell away, the Left strove to make it real by championing a demented regime of extreme physical separation. As we became aware that we are made and unmade by others, the Left demanded that no one even slightly risk being unmade by another. As so often with the Left’s collectivist projects, COVID collectivism amounted to state coercion that eroded social solidarity rather than strengthening it.
That collectivist paradigm was not medically required in the pandemic; in fact, an individualist logic made sense in many respects. Masking was ineffective except maybe for people who wore tight-fitting N95s and followed fastidious protocols. The very few people who did that benefitted themselves, and had health officials stressed self-protection vulnerable people might have masked themselves better. Herd immunity was an illusion, but vaccines made it possible for individuals to choose their level of protection from the virus. Most did so quite rationally: old and sick people had very high vaccination rates, young and healthy people had lower rates commensurate with their lower risk of serious infection. Lockdowns in most places had little additional effect because individual choices to voluntarily isolate—to stay home when you felt sick, or if you had heightened risk during an outbreak—accomplished most of what mandatory lockdowns did.
Nor was COVID Disaster Socialism collectively sustainable. Collective fear wanes when we don’t feel ourselves or our families personally threatened, and our collective sense of emergency fizzles as we adjust our expectations to life’s new risk profile. That truth is what finally brought an end to restrictions. The COVID regime collapsed in February of 2022 not because COVID went away—it killed 268,000 Americans in 2022—but because the Canadian truckers scared politicians around the world into relenting. Beneath that climb-down was a collective understanding that COVID was here to stay, that people would continue to die from it, and that the risk of dying from the virus was not all that terrifying and did not warrant burdensome impositions on the healthy. Our collective sense of ethical proportion reasserted itself against the moral tunnel-vision of the COVID regime, rejecting the demand for endless sacrifice by the majority to imperfectly safeguard the tiny minority that is at serious risk from the virus.
Doppelganger is evasive, incoherent and hysterical, and gets most things wrong. Doppelgangers aren’t the subversive demiurges of history, they’re just dumb literary devices. Naomi Wolf isn’t anyone’s doppelganger, she’s just a straw woman Naomi Klein hacks apart to dodge hard questions about the COVID policies she supported. The important conspiracy theories aren’t the ones concocted by fringe media hucksters, but the ones that ruling elites—be they Donald Trump blaming 2020 on fraudulent vote counters or Hillary Clinton blaming 2016 on Russian hackers—use to explain why they failed and were rejected by the public. The idea that COVID contrarians are really fascists on the march is a conspiracy theory Klein embraces because she can’t face the real reasons why tons of people hate her ideology and didn’t vote for her husband. It’s a dangerous theory, too, because many people in power use it to justify censoring and silencing dissenters from a medical orthodoxy that often proves faulty.
Unfortunately, Doppelganger is also a revealing window into how the progressive Left thinks about big issues. Left discourse on climate change, in particular, is replete with Disaster Socialist memes: there’s an existential crisis that demands an emergency mobilization and unlimited sacrifice; decarbonization trumps all other interests and needs; only total reconstruction of the system can stave off doom—with the upside that it will usher in a utopia; the only moral choice is between collective planetary salvation and greedy selfishness; anyone who questions these dogmas is an oil-company conspirator or a dupe of same. As with COVID, climate Disaster Socialism will likely misfire because of bad planning and a lack of realism, public resistance to state coercion, and the overselling of a Green New Deal that, even if it’s necessary, will at best be a grinding economic drag instead of an economic boon. If it all goes off the rails, Naomi Klein will be on hand to unmask the fascists thwarting it.
