55 pages • 1 hour read
Naomi KleinDoppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian activist and author. She was born in 1970 in Montreal, Québec, and grew up in a Jewish family with Communist roots. Her parents and her grandparents were engaged in left-wing activism, including anti-war activism. As a teenager, Klein rebelled against her mother’s outspoken feminist perspective, but later cited the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre as a turning point in her political development. Before Klein attended university, her mother had two strokes that left her physically disabled. Klein became her caregiver during her recovery. The following year, Klein began university at the University of Toronto but dropped out twice and never completed her undergraduate degree. At the age of 20, she met Naomi Wolf and was inspired by her successful writing career.
Interested in making her own mark on the world, Klein pursued a career in journalism. In 1999, at the age of 29, Klein published her first book, No Logo, which critiqued consumerist culture and the exploitation of workers by large global companies. Since then, she has published several notable books, including The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. Doppelganger is her ninth book, and it is among her most personal works. In addition to her work as a writer, Klein is a professor at the University of British Columbia. She teaches courses on corporate branding and climate justice. Klein is married to NDP politician and filmmaker Avi Lewis. The couple has a son who is on the autism spectrum. The experience of becoming a parent and speaking to other parents of children with autism pushed Klein to reckon with the legacy of eugenics and the harms caused by anti-vaccine activists.
Throughout her career, Klein has been outspoken on a number of issues including environmentalism and the threat of climate change. She has also criticized the Iraq War and American interventionism, and has been vocal about her anti-Zionist views. In Doppelganger, Klein is quick to point out her own shortcomings and the limitations of her previous books. She returns again and again to actionable solutions to the world’s problems, resisting getting caught up in empty words. All of Klein’s critiques are based on her leftist politics (See: Background): She points to capitalism and nationalism as interconnected forces that are responsible for many of the world’s problems.
To explore these complex ideas, Klein turns to the figure of the doppelganger. Some doppelgangers are political: Naomi Wolf discusses similar subjects to Naomi Klein, but she arrives at markedly different conclusions that bolster right-wing conspiracy theories. Wolf’s dramatic flip from liberal feminist to far-right conspiracy theorist fascinates Klein, forcing her to confront her own ideas, actions, and beliefs. Doppelgangers can also be structural: Klein explores the doppelganger relationships between fascism and democracy; members of the Global North and denizens of the Shadow Lands; and Israel and Palestine. She argues that the function of the doppelganger is to reveal difficult truths about the modern world.
Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf is an American author and journalist who now participates in far-right conspiracy theories. Like Klein, she is Jewish. She was born in 1962 in San Francisco to Leonard and Deborah Wolf. Leonard Wolf was a literary scholar who greatly influenced Wolf in her ideas and beliefs. Wolf graduated from Yale University with a degree in English literature and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she completed a doctorate of philosophy. In the early days of her career, Wolf wrote primarily about feminism and sexuality, publishing her first book, The Beauty Myth, in 1991 at the age of 28.
The Beauty Myth received critical acclaim, with feminist Germaine Greer calling it “the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch” (27), Greer’s own book. Many other feminists, including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, praised the book. Klein points out that even at the height of her feminism, Wolf had a very individualist political approach. For instance, she did not discuss the compounding impacts of racism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and other factors that make strict beauty standards even more harmful for many women. She focused instead on straight, white, relatively affluent women like herself. Her lack of structural analysis and solidarity in her political work may have made it easier for her to make the shift toward the far right, though there were other factors that pushed her to change.
When Wolf’s 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love was revealed (live on air) to have been based on a major factual misunderstanding, Wolf’s career as a respected liberal writer was over. With her academic reputation tarnished, Wolf turned to the world of far-right conspiracy theories and made friends with people like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Though she had often engaged in conspiracy theories in the past, this marked a new era for Wolf, where she shared increasingly alarmist pseudoscience and fear-mongering about the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, and the intent of public health policies. Throughout Doppelganger, Klein explores Wolf’s new political allies and outlines how Wolf came to surround herself with people whose views, in her feminist days, would have been antithetical to her stated beliefs. Klein examines Wolf’s new beliefs and asks what her shift indicates about the state of the world at large. She compares Wolf to many other people (largely but not exclusively white women) who shifted to far-right beliefs during the pandemic.
Steve Bannon
Steve Bannon is an American political strategist and media executive. He was born in 1953 in Norfolk, Virginia. Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, a media company founded in 2007 that platforms far-right ideology and conspiracy theories. Breitbart has been widely criticized for publishing material that is intentionally misleading. In 2016, Bannon described Breitbart as the “platform for the alt-right,” with the alt-right being the American white nationalist movement that supported Donald Trump’s presidency. Bannon was hired as chief strategist and senior counselor to Trump in 2016, despite outside concerns about Bannon’s ties to the alt-right, as well as his antisemitic and racist beliefs.
At the time, Bannon denied allegations that he was a white supremacist and described himself instead as an “economic nationalist.” Bannon used his position at the White House to push nationalist legislation, including Executive Order 13769, which restricted the immigration of people from seven Middle Eastern countries to America and suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days. Many of his actions were criticized for attempting to suppress minority voting rights, inhibiting civil rights and freedoms. He was also accused of misleading the Department of Justice in their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election.
Starting in 2020, Bannon began hosting a podcast called War Room, where he spread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and advised Trump supporters to fight against Trump’s impeachment. Naomi Wolf appeared on this podcast many times throughout the pandemic, where she spread many of her own reactionary conspiracy theories. In 2020, a federal grand jury charged Bannon with money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Trump federally pardoned Bannon for these crimes in the final days of his presidency. Bannon was later indicted by New York state, which was still able to pursue the charges of money laundering and wire fraud at a state level. The case is expected to go to trial in 2024.
In 2021, Bannon was subpoenaed by the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Capitol attack to testify in relation to his alleged involvement in the attack on the US capitol by Trump’s alt-right supporters. When he failed to appear in court, he was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress. He was sentenced to serve four months in prison and to pay a fine of $6,500, though he later appealed his sentence.
Philip Roth
Phillip Roth was a Jewish American author. He was born in 1933 in New Jersey and earned an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago. Roth’s novels and short stories are largely autobiographical, drawing from his own experiences grappling with his identity as a secular, middle-class Jewish American man.
His works have been divisive and controversial, and have drawn criticisms for his portrayals of Jewish Americans and women. Roth’s most notable works include Operation Shylock, which Klein’s Doppelganger references extensively, as well as American Pastoral, Sabbath’s Theater, and Everyman. Roth married twice in his life, once to Margaret Martinson Williams in 1959 (they divorced two years later) and then to Claire Bloom in 1990. Bloom divorced Roth in 1995 and wrote a memoir entitled Leaving a Doll’s House, where she depicted Roth as a controlling misogynist.
Roth died in 2018 at the age of 85. Roth left behind a complicated legacy; he is known as one of America’s most accomplished authors, but he was controversial. Klein explores the divisiveness of Roth’s writing in Doppelganger, acknowledging that while she hated his writing as a young woman, she is now able to recognize the importance of his words and insights. She uses Operation Shylock to understand her own experience of having a doppelganger.
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