‘Steve Bannon is watching us closely’: Naomi Klein on populists, conspiracists and realworld activism

Naomi Klein is aware that her new book, Doppelganger, looks strange. A distorted picture of her face stares at you from the front cover. “Everyone who holds it looks like they’re holding my severed head, including me. It feels like Macbeth,” she says. Her laugh punctures the quiet communal space we’re sitting in on the first floor of a London hotel in late September.

But the weirdness is intentional. It’s supposed to capture what she’s writing about – a mirror world where her sense of self becomes distorted. Her starting point is her very own doppelganger, the writer Naomi Wolf. For more than a decade Klein has repeatedly been confused with Wolf. What at first irked her became more frustrating – destabilising, even – as it moved to social media and Wolf dived full on into conspiracy culture, allying with the far right in the process. The two are so frequently mixed up that social media algorithms began to autocomplete Klein’s name when people were writing about the latest thing Wolf had said or done.

Best known for her writing and activism on corporations, disaster capitalism and the climate crisis, Doppelganger

is inmany ways a departure for Klein. More conversational and personal, it is funny and honest. Speaking softly on the other end of a sofa, in a rather grand book-lined room, Klein tells me one of the reasons for this is that she wanted to write in her own voice, not lean into some idea she had in her head of what a serious intellectual should sound like.

Her concern, though, was that it might be too specific; that the response would be “OK, that’s interesting for you but what does it have to do with me?” I wondered, too, when I heard the premise. But it works. Partly because it’s refreshing to read someone so established write with such candour about their insecurities, but also because many of the big themes of Klein’s work are still there.

It’s tempting to focus on the Naomi Wolfness of it all, but she is just a case study. As well as being Klein’s doppelganger, she is also a doppelganger of herself. Once a prominent feminist and Democratic party adviser, Wolf is now aligned with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and has become part of what Klein calls the mirror world. This is where conspiracies are spread, where left critiques of corporate power are absorbed and twisted so “deregulated capitalism” is framed as “communism in disguise” and “where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing farright propagandists all in the name of saving and protecting ‘the children’”.

Klein analyses how the inhabitants of the mirror world have ended up there, including the allure of online clout and the payouts of the attention economy. But it’s also the anxiety created by the climate crisis. It isn’t only people who are becoming doppelgangers of their former selves, Klein says, the Earth is too – producing “vertigo on a planetary scale”. Where