Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’ a scary take on political absurdity

formation into a heroine of COVID truthers.

That obsession, in turn, guided Klein into an examination of what she calls “the Mirror World,” the vertigo-inducing inversion of reality common to contemporary farright movements. Think of Russian President Vladimir Putin claiming that he’s liberating Ukraine from fascism, or former President Donald Trump howling that his multiple prosecutions are a racist plot to subvert a presidential election.

This idea of the doppelganger gave me a new way to think about the mix of malicious projection that dominates our public life. Sometime soon, the House is likely to impeach President Joe Biden on the pretext that he was involved in corruption in Ukraine — the same conspiracy theory Trump was trying to breathe life into when he got himself impeached for corruption in Ukraine.

Wolf ’s story is instructive. “The Beauty Myth,” her 1990 blockbuster about the toll taken on women by unreasonable beauty standards, made her famous. In retrospect, the seeds of her intellectual decline were already present in that book, which contained both major statistical errors and a conspiratorial subtext that painted the influence of patriarchy as a deliberate plot. Her work grew increasingly sloppy and absurd, until her reputation collapsed altogether in 2019 with the publication of “Outrages.”

Wolf faced the singular mortification of being confronted, live on the radio, with evidence that her book’s central contention — that several dozen men in Victorian England were executed for having same-sex relationships — was based on a misreading of historical records.

But in channeling the fears of people similarly unmoored by COVID,

Wolf seems to have found something like stability, gaining a new audience that accorded her the respect she’d lost. I looked up her most recent book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID19 and the War Against the Human,” on Amazon. A bestseller, it features glowing endorsements from Bannon and Tucker Carlson.

In “Doppelganger,” Klein offers a half-joking formula to explain onetime leftists or liberals who migrate to the authoritarian right: “Narcissism(grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown.” As Klein emphasizes, Wolf ’s journey into the Mirror World can’t be described as a fall. She and others like her, says Klein, “are getting everything they had and more, through a warped mirror.”

For Klein, the more important question is less about Wolf’s motivations than those of her followers.“when looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting,” Klein writes. “The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us.”