Doppelganger

18 Jul 2024 - 31 Oct 2024

book by Naomi Klein about her relationship to "off-brand me", or "other Naomi", Naomi Wolf. But really about the overall weirdness of the world at this historical moment. It's not just her that is suffering from a doubling, a dark parody of itself – the entire alt-right fake-populist political movement is a kind of dark mirror of the left, taking its critical tropes and distorting them into their opposites. "The Mirror World" is the Trumpist one, managed by Steve Bannon. It haunts and interferes normal rational political discourse.

Was pleased that she referred early on to Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, which I had just been thinking about due to a discussion on Zionism I was sucked into a couple of days ago. That book too revolved around a doubling.

In trying to explain Wolf's transition into "the mirror world", dopamine addiction is the best hypothesis.

It is as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. (p121)

And now our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themselves. The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies tha somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise. (p124)