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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As we welcome our next guest, Naomi Klein, I wonder how many of you have her mixed up with the other Naomi, Naomi Wolf. Klein is the author of books like The Shock Doctrine about disaster capitalism. This changes everything about the climate emergency. She's been outspoken in her supportive policies like The Green New Deal. Naomi Wolf, as Klein describes, has become "One of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises."

Klein has so regularly been confused for Wolf, once known as a leading feminist author, now more known as a regular on Steve Bannon's podcast, that Klein used this experience of having a doppelganger as a premise for her new book out today that she hopes will form a guide into what she deems our doppelganger culture. A culture in which we have come to think of ourselves as personal brands forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, so important amid the social media echo chamber and the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theories, deep thinking, and self-reflection to boot in this new book called Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. Naomi Klein joins me now. Always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Naomi Klein: Thank you so much, Brian. It's great to speak with you again.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open for Naomi Klein fans or anybody else with a question on the ideas in the book. 212-433-WNYC. You open the book with the line, "In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book," so why'd you write it?

Naomi Klein: [laughs] It then goes on, "I did not have time, no one asked me to, and many people cautioned against it." This is certainly not the type of book I think that readers expect from me or at least on the surface it would seem not to be. It's a more creative project. It's a more experimental book, but it does wrestle with some familiar themes. Really what aren't we looking at when we are looking in this hall of mirrors of the self? I used the experience of having a doppelganger, of having somebody who I've been perennially confused and conflated with for about 15 years now as really a literary device. The book is certainly not about her in any conventional sense.

She's an interesting case study of a type of person who has changed quite dramatically, particularly during the COVID years. I think we all know people who have "Fallen down the rabbit hole." It does look at her as a case study, but more than that, she's like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland leading me down the rabbit hole. The book is really about that rabbit hole and who else I meet down there, including folks like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who I think are probably a lot more consequential in terms of redrawing political maps in the US and beyond.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned in brief just there a cultural reference and I think the listeners should know that there are so many creative cultural world references in here that makes it such a fitting book for you as a public intellectual a worthy book. A few pages in you borrow from Philip Roth who once said of one of his own novels, "It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous." You get into the speculative fiction that sometimes employs doppelgangers like with Jordan Peele's Us or the fiction of Ursula Le Guin. What do doppelgangers represent in our broader culture before we get into some of the politics and ideas of who we are as a culture right now?

Naomi Klein: Sure. Doppelgangers are ancient back to mythology and often it is the mirror. If we think about narcissists falling in love with his own reflection, the double is a way of wrestling with ego, is a way of wrestling with the partitioned self, but in more modern art and in the history of modern literature thinking of works like Dostoevsky's The Double, Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson, and the more modern works that you mentioned, doppelgangers are ominous. They're often a warning that something needs our attention. They're foreboding. They can often foretell one's own death. I chose to see the fact that I have a doppelganger as a message that there was something I needed to pay attention to.

I used it as a way to understand myself better, to understand this uncanny moment in history better. I really found it a useful tool to reckon with our extremely polarized political discourse where there is a mirroring on each side of the political divide and where once an issue starts to get traction on the conspiratorial rights, it then becomes untouchable in polite liberal discourse. We could think about something like the lab leak theory and how that was seen as a wild conspiracy or treated that way and didn't get serious journalistic attention for a long while just because it was associated with a certain side of the political spectrum. I think that there's a way that we have started to mirror and mimic each other across the political divide that can really shut down important discourse.

There's also a way that folks like Steve Bannon are really, really good at appropriating and warping issues that are traditional issues for the left like being opposed to big pharma and big tech and mixing and matching them with xenophobia and transphobia in really dangerous ways. The book is a map of what I call the doubled self, and that's the self that can't stop looking into its reflection. Then the mirror world, which is the us and them, yin and yang discourse where we're just reacting to each other, and then the shadowlands. These are the difficult truths that I think none of us are really reckoning with directly. We've just come off your reports on the climate crisis, and I would say neither left nor right is really reckoning with the weight of our moment. Conspiracy acts as a distraction machine.

Brian Lehrer: What do you mean by the brand itself in the book?

Naomi Klein: Just remembering Brian, deep cut for some of your older listeners, you and I first met almost a quarter century ago when you chaired a debate in New York City about my first book, No Logo. There was a writer for The Economist who had written a piece called Pro Logo. This is where I cut my teeth. My first book was about the rise of the super brand, the company that saw itself primarily as selling identity as opposed to products, Nike or Apple being prototypical ones, but also the first human superbrand. Michael Jordan's agent said that his client was the first human superbrand. No Logo came out really on the cusp of a new world.

It came out just at the turn of the millennium. We didn't yet have iPhones, we didn't yet have social media the way we do today so everyday people couldn't be brands. Only celebrities could be brands. As we have seen this radical transformation where high school students will talk about how they have a brand, I teach university students and many of them wrestle with this feeling that they need to partition themselves and perform a consumable version of themselves online. I had been looking for a way back into this material because it has changed so much since I first started writing about it. I realized when somebody pinged me on social media and told me that I should sue Naomi Wolf for trademark violation, which is silly. She's just doing her thing.

She's not violating. I don't have a trademark. None of it is intentional but I just thought it was funny because he was saying, "You have a branding crisis." I thought, "Well, that's true, I do." People are confusing me with somebody who I profoundly disagree with but on the other hand, I also have a problem with the very idea that humans should see themselves as brands. That just struck me as a really fruitful area to explore that tension. I was off to the races with this experimental, but I hope really fun book.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners again, we'll take phone calls in just a few minutes. I want to help Naomi Klein talk about some more of the material from the new book, and then we'll get you in here. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. To what you were saying in your previous answer about how we sometimes borrow from each other on left and right and become mirror images of each other. A line from the book that got quoted in The New York Times review of your book about how people on the left began to act like people on the right. It says, "We defined ourselves against each other, and yet we're somehow becoming more alike, willing to declare each other non-people."

I cite that line because some of our listeners may have read it because it was in The Times before your book came out, and some listeners' first reaction to that might be that it's a false equivalency. The right dehumanizes because its value system essentially demands it. LGBTQ people are deviants, migrants from Latin America are a threat, unlike their own immigrant ancestors teaching the history of racism as racist. All of that. False equivalency to say people on the left began to act like people on the right by defining ourselves against each other?

Naomi Klein: The book doesn't make a both sides argument about the Neofascist Right and the Left. It is not a horseshoe theory book saying on either end of the political spectrum, we connect. I really genuinely don't believe that. I believe in fact the opposite that every victory of the fascist right historically, has also been a story of Left sectarianism fragmentation and strategic refusal to make alliances that were needed to defeat the fascist right. I also believe that genuinely redistributive policies drain power from the fascist right. I believe we need a really robust Left that is meeting people's real needs so that they don't get pushed into the arms of counterfeit populist figures like Steve Bannon.

I do think that in this very reactive period, we did see examples of people. I think that Times review may have made it sound like it was the Left, as opposed to the Liberal Left that I was talking about, including New York Times readers. It all depends on how you define the Left. I think one of the things that many of us who supported the public health measures were most horrified by. We supported the masking policies and thought that people should get vaccinated not only for themselves but for more vulnerable people in their communities, was this kind of defiant refusal to accept that we actually are in a mesh of bodies with one another and we owe each other something by right of being human.

People said, "Well, my immune system is strong, so why should I have to get the jab?" That was a real fault line. Then you would hear a lot of jokes online, "Well, maybe this will be good because more stupid people will die of COVID because they didn't get vaccinated." Even at very high levels, Emmanuel Macron in France said things like, "Well, maybe unvaccinated people aren't full citizens." That really just fed this sense of grievance and exclusion and was really exploited by the likes of Steve Bannon, who unfortunately, I listened to hundreds of hours of his podcast. I did it so you don't have to.

I can tell you that he's still talking about basket of deplorables. He loves nothing more than for liberals and Leftists to treat his side as if they're non-human because then it is easier to play the victim and less possible to make a clear demarcation. You are the people who create these hierarchies of humanity and then use it as rationales for violence and even our greatest fear of all, which is extermination and this is why it is so dangerous to create these categories of more or less human. I think that was real. We all saw the jokes, and I think we have to be more judicious in not giving into it.

Brian Lehrer: Mike in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Naomi Klein. Her new book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into The Mirror World. Hi, Mike, you're on the air.

Mike: Hi, Brian. Thanks. It's great to talk to you. Ms. Klein's No Logo was profound experience to read back in the early aughts. I would love to hear you maybe flesh out of it what you mean by the Left mirroring the Right in the sense of not getting a full grasp on, I think you termed it not really fully taking in what the climate crisis means. To my mind, at least on the Left, and as you know, a couple of many Lefts, one that thinks that new deal made the Green New Deal or state capitalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it, could actually stave off the climate crisis within capitalism. Then there's parts of the Left that think, "Well, no, and as long as we have value production commodities and all these contradictions that flow from capitalism, we're not getting out." Could you just talk a bit more about how there's a mirroring of the Right in that respect? Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Mike.

Naomi Klein: Thanks, Mike. [laughs] That's such a good question. It's a profound question and I think there are different levels and gradations of denial because we are living in a time when many of the systems that we all grew up inside that are the air we breathe, are crumbling around us. One of those systems is the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet. The idea that we can continue to lead these high-consumption lifestyles and not have to change. Now, on the denialist right, it's very easy to identify the denial because they're saying climate change isn't happening. It's all a conspiracy or maybe if it's happening, but it's plant food and it's all good. We've heard the theories. [laughs]

We can very clearly name that denialism. I think if we're honest, there's also a softer denialism in the idea that we don't really have to fundamentally change how we live. When I'm saying "we", I'm talking about we over consumers in wealthy countries like the US and Canada where I live. We can just switch to green energy and continue exactly as we are. We can get electric cars, we can have impossible burgers, and we can have solar panels and all will be well. The truth is, is that all of this comes at an ecological cost. The climate crisis isn't the only depletionary crisis that we face. We are going to have to reckon with enoughness with the idea of consuming what we need so that others can have enough to live.

Yes, Mike, I appreciate that question. I think it's at the heart of what I'm trying to get at, which is that it's really easy to point at the other and in my case a doppelganger who I might want to push away and say is nothing like me. What I have had to confront is that it isn't only the conspiracists and the fantasists who are not fully reckoning with the weight of our political moment. I think it's hard for all of us, and part of the reason why it's hard is because we try to do it alone and we try to address it through our individual consumption when in truth, this is collective work, this is work that we need to do in movements of other people through large scale policies, and it's really system work. Thank you for that.

Brian Lehrer: This has been your message or part of your message for a long time, right? You mentioned the event that I moderated that involved you when your book No Logo came out a long time ago. You may remember another event that I moderated with you on stage plus Bernie Sanders just before he announced that he was going to run as a Democrat for president. Back-

Naomi Klein: I do remember that.

Brian Lehrer: -in 2014, 2015. Chris Hedges was on that panel. As I recall, you were talking about a very similar thing with respect to how people who consider themselves liberals, and I remember you being very critical of both Clintons at that time need to take a deeper look at the things that, through their assumptions, they're really allowing to progress on the downsides of capitalism even though they're presenting themselves as to the left of the Republican. This is a kind of a perennial Naomi Klein message, right?

Naomi Klein: [laughs] Well, look, I think they are to the left of where the Republicans are now. The issue is just that it's simply, A, not good enough, especially when it comes to the climate crisis because we don't get A's for effort. We really do need to get it done. We need to actually lower our emissions in line with what climate scientists are telling us. You just reported on the fact that we are blowing the commitments made under the Paris Agreement. That agreement was not all that aggressive. I was there. There were huge fights about how we needed a more aggressive temperature target, 1.5 instead of 2 degrees, but it was always voluntary and that was always the problem.

It was always within this framework of we're going to leave it to the market. We'll set up some incentives, but we're not actually going to regulate this. Yes, this has been the work of my life is looking at the clash between an ideology that wants to leave everything to the market, that has sought to privatize and deregulate and have a very austere social sphere. That is not compatible with the kinds of crises we face. I think that's true of the climate crisis. We've also had a really vivid example of it with COVID where radically underfunded hospitals were unable to deal with a shock on this scale and people died as a result.

Brian Lehrer: I think Brian in the Bronx is going to continue on this thread. Brian, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Speaker 1: Oh, hello. Can you hear me okay?

Brian Lehrer: Uh-huh.

Speaker 1: I'm a big fan, Ms. Klein, very exciting to talk to you. I guess, on this thread that I think the problem is that both Republican and Democratic parties are committed to neoliberalism, which you were just talking about or around a little bit. I wonder if you could take us into that a little bit. On the left, we think that Democrats and Republicans are too much the same. Then there's some people who, Brian might be one of them, that drive crazy because they think there's such a vast difference between the Republican and Democratic party. When I focus on the economics, I see the patterns that you're talking about, deregulation, austerity, market, market, market. Could you talk about that? Is that clear?

Brian Lehrer: Thanks very much. I wonder if you could put your views of Joe Biden into that answer.

Naomi Klein: Sure. I suppose I get a little bit nervous with a total equivalence between the two parties. I definitely see commonalities around economic policy. I've come up in movements that have been all about opposing the policies that are genuinely bipartisan, like the neoliberal "consensus" around privatization and deregulation and cuts to social spending. What I would say is that, that said, I think we are in a excruciatingly dangerous political moment, not just in the US.

I think if you look around the world at people like Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Italy's first female prime minister is the leader of a party called Fratelli d'Italia which is a party with deep fascist roots going back to Mussolini. If you look at how close Marine Le Pen is getting to power in France, if you look at the forces behind Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, if you look at Marcos's son's return in the Philippines, it's important not to just see this as a US phenomenon. There is authoritarianism and neo-fascism surging around the world, and I don't think that it is in any way accurate to say that they are the same as these centrist neoliberal parties.

I think what is accurate is to say that centrist neoliberalism has created the context in which neo-fascism and authoritarianism is able to pedal its very, very dangerous pseudo-responses. I do believe that we must stop this surge, and I believe it is possible to do. If you look at Brazil and you look at Lula's victory and the fact that there are indigenous ecofeminists in cabinet and that there's important progress being made in the Amazon, I think there's a difference. I think it does matter that we stand up to these forces. I think Trump represents those forces as does Bannon, as do other parts of the Republican party, and the Republican party, frankly, as a whole at this point, which is a Trumpist party.

What do we do with that because Biden is the candidate? What I would say is that if we don't like these policies, and if you are on the left, which clearly you are, Brian, we have our work cut out for us in terms of building real left power outside of electoral politics right now because that's what we have on offer. I was part of Bernie's campaign in 2020. I went to five states with him. We fought like hell. I was devastated when Bernie lost, but I also told people to vote for Biden because I think Trump is a real threat. I realize this is going to be dismissed by some as just the same old, same old but I think that is a misreading of our political moment.

I think what we can see with Biden to answer the other Brian's question, [unintelligible 00:25:54] two Brian's, is the Biden that we have seen in office is not actually the Biden that I expected based on who he was throughout much of his career, who was a quite staunchly neoliberal politician. I think that what we've seen is that he is receptive to pressure from an organized left. The left was more organized and more powerful when he entered office than he is right now because there's been a period of demoralization since the high points of the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020 and pushing for a Green New deal in the early days of the Biden administration.

I think that we've been a little bit licking our wounds and regrouping more recently, but there's also evidence of a resurgent labor movement across the country. There's been incredible organizing around student debt and medical debt. These are the building blocks of the kind of pressure that I think is going to be needed to get more from a next Biden administration and to keep the fascists out.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in here before we run out of time. Just as you finish addressing the caller Brian in the Bronx, we're going to go to Brian in Harlem. I promise I don't only take calls-- [crosstalk]

Naomi Klein: That's a conspiracy of Brian's.

Brian Lehrer: I know, there have been John Smith conventions in the United States. We might have to have a Brian calling the Brian Lehrer show convention. Brian in Harlem, you're at WNYC with Naomi Klein. Hi.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Brian. In any case, I understand completely the point about saying we actually really do have to downsize because we cannot go on using the planet as we have, at least not with our current technology. The idea that we are going to develop something new, but where it's too late, that's a real long shot. However, that's how right-wing parties win. When you set up that target that says, "All you working lugs, you got to downsize." This is what killed Jimmy Carter even when you go back to that far. It's the same strategy that's going on. The other part of that is that the last 40 years, the US and many Western countries have really gone back on income redistribution programs.

We have much fewer of them. In fact, we usually hike taxes on working people as opposed to the investor class. The one thing that's been the one shining spot on that is that consumer prices on things like clothes and food and electronics have gone down. Now we're saying, "Well, we have to do something about that as well." The problem is, it's a catch-22. If you actually articulate this view, you create a problem for winning elections. I love Bernie, but I was happy that Biden was the candidate the last time and Hillary before that because I thought they had a better chance of winning. If that is not going to be a winning electoral solution, it's not a solution.

Brian Lehrer: Brian, I'm going to leave it there because we're almost out of time. Naomi, last answer. Address Brian's question and anything else you want to say on your way out the door.

Naomi Klein: Well, I would just say that I think part of it is a sequencing around these policies where I think we need big investments in what the Europeans call public luxury. This sort of green infrastructure that improves people's lives, that gives a sense of abundance. Before I think very, very economically insecure people are going to be able to reckon with the idea of cutting back. I think it can be sequenced in a way that is more electorally palatable. I guess my final words to all the Brian's--

Brian Lehrer: The conspiracy of Brian's.

Naomi Klein: The conspiracy of Brian's.

Brian Lehrer: Like a flock of seagulls or murder of crows. Anyway, go ahead.

Naomi Klein: I wrote this book because I think we really are somewhere new. Arundhati Roy, in the first months of the pandemic, wrote an essay that many of us shared called The Pandemic is a Portal. What she was saying is this is such a cataclysmic event that it is going to take us somewhere new. It is going to take us somewhere else. We aren't going back to where we were before. What I'm trying to do with this new book is map the world through the portal where there are all kinds of uncanny realities. People are behaving in uncanny ways. There's a confusion between left and right.

A lot of people who we have traditionally associated with the Democratic Party or the Left are flipping over to the Trumpian Right. My doppelganger is one of them. We also have uncanny weather. There's a way in which we need to, first of all, map where we are, understand how the world has changed and is changing, but the bigger question is really who we want to be in this new world.

We're going into another election cycle, and this way of behaving where all we're doing is just trying to carve out our individual personas and our little performance of virtue, whatever it is, I don't think it's going to get the job done. It's not really meeting the weight of this moment, which is very, very heavy, which is why we have to carry it together.

Brian Lehrer: Naomi Klein's new book is called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Listeners, if you want to see and hear more of her, Naomi Klein will be appearing at seven o'clock tonight at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library's Dweck Center, where she'll be in conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Listeners can register for the event at the Brooklyn Public Library's website, bklynlibrary, B-K-L-Y-Nlibrary.org. That's for Naomi Klein, not Naomi Wolf. Seven o'clock tonight at the Brooklyn Library Dweck Center, Central Branch. Naomi, always good to have you on the show. Thank you very much.

Naomi Klein: Thank you, Brian. Take care.

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