Lessons from Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger
and the buzzy book I won't be reading
My son, who will be 3 in June, is a pandemic baby. I spent the first pandemic winter in near complete isolation with my husband after we found out I was pregnant. I had a virtual baby shower. I received my first COVID-19 vaccine when I was 7 months pregnant. I spent most of his first year screening visitors for their vaccine status. My son got his first vaccine shot just days after the COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5 received emergency approval. Even from our relatively privileged position, the pandemic was all consuming.
And perhaps because my formative memories of motherhood are so intertwined with the unique context of becoming a parent during a global pandemic, I have often imagined talking to my son about the pandemic when he’s older. I picture him coming home from school one day and asking where we were when the stay at home orders were announced, what it was like when the world shut down.
In this imagined moment, I’d recount how eery and quiet those early days were. How confused everyone was. How hard hit my hometown city was. And depending on his age and how petty I was feeling, how a shocking number of people we knew refused to follow public health guidelines (despite any revisionist histories they might tell now).
There is now a version of this future conversation where I simply find Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger and insist that we read it together (obviously, in this version he’s a bit older). That’s because Naomi Klein’s book is the sharpest, most insightful analysis of pandemic-era politics that I’ve read. Doppelganger forced me to rethink so many of simply narratives I clung onto during the pandemic. The Us vs. Them narratives that cast Us as fundamentally reasonable and grounded in reality and science and Them as selfish (at best) or out of their fucking minds (at worst). It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the pandemic became the clusterfuck it ultimately became.
Klein’s book is dense and erudite, and I frequently found myself having to re-listen or re-read sections of it. Klein narrates the audiobook, which is excellent, but again dense! I bought a physical copy soon after starting the audiobook because it’s the type of book you are going to want to highlight and annotate.
There are two ideas, in particular, from Doppelganger that really stuck with me that I want to talk about today.
Idea #1: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but the feelings right.”
I know Klein is not the first person to make this argument, but her work brought the meaning of this insight to life for me. She does this by analyzing a dizzying array of conspiracy theories ranging from vaccines to digital surveillance. Klein argues:
Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right— the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being withheld. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with a c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy (pg. 242).
This point is critical to understanding why misinformation persists despite repeated efforts to debunk lies and conspiracies. Take for example, the explosion of misinformation about birth control on TikTok and other social media platforms. It is easy to be dismissive or feel frustrated with people who trust random, unverified, non-medical sources on social media apps. It is much harder to acknowledge that some of these conspiracy theories around birth control are borne out of the medical establishment’s very real dismissal of women’s pain and women’s adverse experiences with various types of birth control. And that the medical establishment routinely dismisses or downplays women’s pain and experiences creates an opening for misinformation that purports to center women’s wellbeing.
Klein also underscores how online culture making fun of absurd conspiracy theories can ultimately be counter productive. Klein talks at length about conspiracy theories promoted by Naomi Wolf claiming that vaccine passport apps track your every movement and listen in on every conversation (which I must stress, they absolutely cannot do). While this conspiracy theory is absurd, the feelings of mistrust towards Big Tech, the feelings of concern about digital surveillance are very real. It’s easy to dismiss these absurd ideas. It’s harder to acknowledge that only one side of the political spectrum is working to turn those feelings into action. As Klein astutely asks: What is the progressive vision for taking on digital surveillance?
This idea around taking people’s feelings more seriously or at least working to acknowledge them is one I’ve been really working to adopt in my own interpersonal interactions and writing. What is the feeling underlying the conspiracy theory? What is the feeling underlying support for bad policy ideas?
Of course, sometimes the feelings are good ol’ racism or sexism. And I do not read Klein as saying we need to hear these ideas out. But drilling down to figure out what the feeling is will always be clarifying. Take for example, Chris Rufo, the conservative activist hell bent on re-segregating America. For context, Chris Rufo is the conservative activist who led the plagiarism accusations against former Harvard President Claudine Gay that led to her stepping down. Chris Rufo is not concerned with academic integrity or merit. Rufo is concerned with de-ligitimizing Black scholars (particularly those who study racial inequality) in elite institutions. Why? Because he’s racist and believes any Black person in an elite institution cannot possibly have gotten there by their own merit. Understanding that is important less we waste any more valuable time engaging with bad faith actors.
Idea #2: What are children for?
In the chapter “Autism and the Anti-Vax Prequel”, Klein writes:
So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World— the “anti-woke” laws, the “don’t say gay” bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks- come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and model and ultimately benefit from?
This question “What are children for?” is the question we have been debating indirecting since 2020. It is the question at the very core of so many of the conflicts that have embroiled school boards and school administrators since 2020.
As Klein notes in this excerpt, we see this question at the heart of the manufactured conflict over critical race theory (CRT) in schools. (Manufactured by the same Chris Rufo mentioned above. He sucks.) Social psychologist Neil Lewis, Jr. sums this dynamic up well in this piece from a few years ago in FiveThirtyEight:
One reason why so many white Americans, especially white Republicans, might be concerned about the effects of teaching children about racism — and are actively trying to ban such lessons from schools — is a fear about what this type of education might mean for their own power in society.
When one major party denies the existence of systemic racism and actively opposes efforts to remedy systemic racism, public schools and colleges teaching kids and young people about systemic racism becomes a threat. That’s because as Lewis points out in the piece linked above, research suggests that kids who are taught more honest and critical histories of the US and about systemic racism tend to become young people who care about those issues and who support politicians who want to address injustices that stem from past and present state actions.
Final thoughts on Doppelganger
There is a lot to love about this impressive book. Klein weaves together a remarkably impressive amount of analysis about a wide variety of topics and issues, and manages to pull off book length analogies into a sort of theory of everything (Doppelganger, Mirror World, Shadow Lands).
Klein’s chapter on Israel and Palestine and Israel’s Doppelganger politics is excellent. I’ve been slowly reading Except for Palestine by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick (which is good, but so dense.) Klein gave me the big meta narrative that was missing from Hill’s book and has helped anchor me through other readings about Palestine and the current crisis in Gaza. I also really appreciated this interview Klein did with the Jewish Currents podcast after the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza.
I do think the recommendations sections towards the end fell flat. And at times, Klein is straining with overly generous interpretations of Naomi Wolf’s behavior. (If Books Could Kill did a Patreon episode on the book and they raise this point, which I agree with.)
But even with those few qualms, I have no doubt that Doppelganger will be one of my top 10 books of 2024.
Currently Reading
I finished all 5 books in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, by Sarah J Maas this month. I have not had such a fun, immersive reading experience in a long time. I was not prepared for how much more I would love the second book in the series after enjoying but not loving the first book. I’m planning to write a longer review of ACOTAR, but suffice to say, I get it. I’m in. I cannot wait to see what else the Maasuniverse has in store for me.
I really appreciated this wide-ranging story of racism, homophobia and transphobia, the rights of transgender students, and the lingering effects of the pandemic and leadership vacuums on public school governance in The New Yorker. This piece does an excellent job of making clear that multiple things can be true at once and refusing to simplify an un-simple narrative.
Finally, I want to mention that I’ve decided to post my book reviews to Goodreads. (Let’s be friends!) One of my goals this year is to write a short review for every book I read and while I originally thought I’d share book reviews in this newsletter, I’ve decided that I want to focus on the how and why of reading for a bit.
What I’m Not Reading
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt. Why?
Research does not back up many of the central claims of his book. This book review in Nature provides an excellent overview of the ways Haidt’s arguments do not hold up to scrutiny.
Haidt is using those inaccurate conclusions to fear monger to an already overly anxious generation of parents.
Haidt is mainstreaming transphobic ideas of gender dysphoria as a social contagion (ideas that have been roundly debunked).
loved reading your thoughts Rachel!!!!