Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Naomi Klein about left melancholy, coping with and working against years of disastrous pandemic response, and her new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)
Naomi Klein 0:01
And we are all gonna have to figure out how to live together on less land, even if we do all the right things. And we either become more monstrous, more eugenicist, more fascist, or we radically change our values, right?
Death Panel 0:32
[Intro music]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:43
Welcome to the Death Panel.
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So I'm joined today by my co-host, Jules Gill Peterson.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:19
Hi everyone.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20
And the two of us are here with author and journalist Naomi Klein. Naomi is the author of the books, No Logo, Fences and Windows, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No is Not Enough, The Battle for Paradise, and On Fire. And she's here today to talk about her latest book, which is out this week, called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Naomi, welcome to the Death Panel. It's really great to get a chance to talk to you for the show.
Naomi Klein 1:45
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to speak with you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:48
So I'm sure you get this all of the time, but your work was very formative for me in terms of really shifting my politics in my early teens. I actually stole your first book, No Logo, from my first job. I tossed it out the window into the dumpster behind the big soulless bookstore I worked at and then went around back during my break to scoop it up. I think it was maybe 2005, you know, as I started reading it at work. I really wanted it. I lived in Florida and I had this really long commute and gas was so expensive. And my whole paycheck went towards like this pool of gas money that we would all put together to get back and forth to school. So I figured, you know, you wouldn't mind, having read the introduction of No Logo, that I borrowed it, expropriated it... But that book, thank goodness, I stole that book, because No Logo really sort of set some important things moving for me when I was very young. And it's really great to get a chance to talk to you 20 years after I first encountered your work. And I'm sure you hear stories like this all the time, and I really hope you're not cringing right now. But apologies if you are.
Naomi Klein 2:54
[laughing] Well, I'm touched. Most of those stories don't involve dumpsters, so that's a twist. And I hope -- I hope that you're not too modest to say that you are quoted a couple of times in this new book, and your work has also been important to me. So it's mutual.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:11
Well, I appreciate that. It means a lot to hear that. And I -- it did really surprise me when I came across that in the text of the book. I wasn't expecting it or aware that you sort of knew of the work that we were doing. But I know that, and you talk about this in the beginning of Doppelganger, the way that No Logo was sort of received and the big deal that it became, you know, it kind of shifted how you were approaching some of your work. You talk about in Doppelganger, you know, your frustration with, and maybe, I don't know if I'm projecting here, but it feels like there's almost like a disgust you felt at the reaction that a lot of people [in the corporate sphere] had to No Logo. And that really pushed you to kind of not get locked into a kind of typecast author, someone who just writes about one subject. You are really and always have been looking to make a broader argument about the social and structural forces that subject us to organized abandonment, which demand constant growth, even if the cost is like a burning planet, you know, and you take your analysis beyond the arena of sort of the growing trend towards a corporate self. That's sort of your original work in No Logo. And it moves through a lot of different arenas, sort of using the same lens, always trying to get into the heart of sort of like what is -- in terms of like how power is constructed, a theory of power, a theory of politics.
And the most recent book, you're pivoting some of your analysis to COVID, and COVID is something that we cover quite frequently here on Death Panel. We've been documenting the pandemic, the sociological production of an end to the pandemic, which has been imposed, despite the fact that the pandemic, of course, rages on. And that was imposed not just by MAGA conservatives, but by Democrats and liberals, and even many on the left. And truth be told, as a left podcast, we are quite lonely in our focus on COVID. Many of the left have either failed to rise to the challenges or opportunities that COVID offers. So many of the left have, as the pandemic has gone on, really looked the other way. Some of them right away, some of them as it dragged out, and some when liberals told them it was time to be vaxed and relaxed.
And you know, I'm not saying left at large. I'm talking more about like the big names and voices on the left. I think a lot of folks doing organizing work, mutual aid work, they're all very focused on COVID, because it's continuing to disrupt movement work -- make it more dangerous, make it more difficult. But the tangible, material concern with COVID is missing from a lot of the analysis of folks doing like left knowledge production. And so it was such an interesting and great sense of relief to, in some ways, see that you, a very sort of hegemonic left figure such as you are, which I say in a tongue and cheek way, but like, let's be real, it's true. It was really nice to see you focus on COVID. And I was hoping you could start us off by talking about, you know, why you continue to focus on it, even as many shifted their focus away.
Naomi Klein 6:07
Well, listening to you, I guess, I think the book is about COVID. And it's also like COVID as a material reality, on actual bodies and social relationships. And it's also about the way a pandemic changed the culture. And you know, it's interesting because I think there is such a -- there's a weird kind of, I don't know, it's almost like a shame or something where people are almost embarrassed to look at the way they behaved in the early -- like I mean, there's all these different phases, as you know, because you've been tracking it so closely. But as a person of the left, [laughing] whether you want to call me hegemonic or not, you know, I'm always interested when people self organize and when people are interested in working class people who they have systematically averted their eyes from and you know, that those moments where there was -- where -- you know, disasters very often act as unveilings, right. I mean, this is -- I think this is true of like hurricanes. And it's a phrase that often comes up, you know, disasters as unveilings, where it's not that it creates the disaster.
Yes, there's some of that, but it also unveils pre-existing disasters. And I think that that was very, very much true around COVID. And that's why I think it's interesting that there's such a rush to not look at that, or almost like an embarrassment about that early phase, you know, the clapping for healthcare workers phase. So, yeah, so I think that -- that I want to look back at it, you know, I want to look at what was going on, I want to look at the backlash to it, I want to look at the momentum of "normal," but I don't think we have returned to "normal." I believe we are changed, right? And so I think that part of what I'm trying to do with the book is offer a few rough draft sketches of ways in which we've been changed by COVID, recognizing that we're still in it. And so you know, that image of -- I don't know how you feel about Arundhati Roy's image of “The pandemic is a portal”. But, you know, if you go back and read that piece, it's interesting, because some people remember it as more optimistic than it was, you know? Like I mean, Arundhati's a friend of mine, and she's not optimistic, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:39
Yeah, no.
Naomi Klein 8:40
She's got her eyes pretty wide open, you know, she's in India, which is like flipping fascist hard. And she said there was a choice point about what we bring with us. And one choice was a choice to change and a choice to kind of travel more lightly through the portal and leave some of the worst of ourselves behind, or we bring it with us and we go somewhere really, really monstrous. And I think -- I think we chose the latter, you know, and I think we have to look at that, because it's not just back to the old normal. It's -- it gets worse? And you know, there's something else that Arundhati has been saying about India, you know, that there's no -- you know, she's used this image that there's no going back to the old shore, like we are at sea and we have to find another shore. And that's another -- that's where I think we have to be honest, that that's -- that like before we're gonna find the other shore, we have to admit we're at sea. And so that's what I'm trying -- trying to get at with this. And it's a very, very hard thing to look at directly. I think it is a true hyperobject, to use Timothy Morton's phrase, and so, you know, one way to tame a hyperobject is to shrink it down to human size and that's where doppelgangers come in.
Jules Gill-Peterson 10:00
I mean, there -- I shared that sort of feeling that, you know, reading -- reading through the book, like one reason it felt so compelling is I think you channel, or sort of write in great detail and with great honesty and complexity just about the quality of feelings of the past few years. And perhaps one of the sort of experiential phenomenon of this era we're living in is this sort of doppelganger effect, this doubling, this production of strange mirror images, opposites, people feeling haunted by other versions of themselves, other people who reflect strange things back to them. And I think there's something so interesting kind of moving through that process and the way that you narrate it, and then coming through, you know, towards the end, kind of thinking about what you were just describing -- the need to kind of have a reckoning first, in order to kind of get some critical perspective on what's so hard about building this kind of shared political horizon that we might need to meet the challenges of the moment.
But I'm sort of curious if like, for you, does that -- does that have -- I mean, something that we, I know Bea and I have talked a lot about, is thinking about the sort of political depression that various -- that has registered in various different ways for different groups of people over different time spans, right? I feel like the concept of left nostalgia, you know, as someone who also is from Canada, and and grew up organizing in NDP circles, you know, I like experience left nostalgia in reference to this sort of fantasy version of the 60s and the 70s I wasn't personally there to witness, but that there is something -- I mean, I wonder if there's something that you're sort of getting into here that operates both kinda like a left nostalgia, the desire to get back to a kind of normal, a rational normal, some sort of imagined pre-pandemic or so often, it's like some sort of pre-MAGA moment, where supposedly --
Naomi Klein 12:04
Exactly. Yeah, it's not just pre -- it's pre-Trump. Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 12:07
Pre-Trump, right? Like, oh yes, when the public sphere was rational, and everything was democratic. And it's like, wait, hold on, what? When was that ever the case, right? And I'm just sort of, yeah, curious if part of what you're wrestling with, or if you could talk a little bit about is the sort of, I don't know what -- well, I'll just let you say it because you could say it better than I could, but something about sort of the stubbornness of the kind of like aesthetics or feelings or rhetoric of liberalism in the face of not just the unmitigated chaos of the climate catastrophe, or record wealth inequality, or the pandemic, but also liberalism's defensiveness about acknowledging its own long term symbiotic relationship to fascism, right, and wanting to see the rise of Trump or events that have taken place in the last few years as magically exceptionally disruptive and coming out of nowhere, so that there is a path to get back to, as opposed to part of a more difficult history that let's say North American or Anglo European cultures have been sort of trying to avoid taking a deep look at for a long time.
Naomi Klein 13:18
Mhm. Yeah, that's so well said. And you know, this book is hard to describe, right? So I don't know if you're going to try to describe it, [laughing] or whether we should -- I should try. Unlike all the previous books I've written, and as Beatrice listed, it was so easy to be like, this book is about X.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:37
Right.
Naomi Klein 13:38
This one is a lot trickier. It isn't sort of a thesis based project, where it's like I'm making an argument, and I'm marshalling all the facts, and we're gonna climb up this very steep mountain, and we're gonna get there together. It's much windier than that. I do hope that it's more enjoyable for it. Like, I wanted to have fun with the writing, in a way that I hadn't since my first book, you know?
Like No Logo, I wrote when I was in my 20s, and nobody knew who I was. And I was very free to have fun and kind of play with my own complicity in the culture, you know, in the culture that I was writing about. And wrote it as a -- like I think I called it a mall rat memoir. But also wanting it to be an anti-corporate manifesto, you know, but from the inside, not from the outside, not shaking my finger from the outside, you know? And I think what I found exciting, and you mentioned sort of left nostalgia, I don't -- I don't think I'm -- you know, I don't feel nostalgic. I mean, that's not entirely true. I have moments of nostalgia for high points of political activism. I've had to reassess my memories of the 90s a little bit, around Sinead O'Connor's death, where I'm like, it wasn't all bad, there were -- there were [laughing] -- but certainly the way Sinead was treated was horrific, but -- where am I going with this? I think it's more -- like the way I see this book is more in the tradition of left melancholy than nostalgia, right? Where there is a tradition of left writing in moments of political disappointments.
And Sara Marcus just wrote a great book called Political Disappointment on this. And, you know, if you think about, you know, I quote Stuart Hall writing in the Thatcher era, about sort of a ghostly left, and I came -- I came of age in a moment of left retreat, you know, left defeat. And I think there is this real reluctance in sort of this stage of capitalism, and where left politics itself is so at the speed of social media, to pick up that tradition and actually say, we're not where we want to be, and how did we end up here, and to write in a different kind of register that is not triumphant, not just rallying the troops, but is like, if we want to be somewhere better, we really have to be more reflective, right. And that I think requires, once again, writing from the inside, not the outside, which is why this book is quite self critical. But I wasn't -- you know, I was not -- I did not have it in me in 2021 and 2022 to write a rallying book, you know, I was too disappointed of seeing another political opening slip away, you know, after the racial justice uprising, and those sort of early, tender months of, oh, we see each other, we're going to care for each other, and then maybe not, you know, maybe we won't, you know?
And so, yeah, like, I mean, it wasn't like I had -- was making a choice between writing a more kind of rallying traditional political text and writing this stranger text. It was like writing this or not writing at all, you know, and just like hiding under the covers. And I kind of wrote my way back into a place where I feel -- of some, that feels like a little bit of stability. But I was certainly feeling very unstable. And it struck me that the figure of the doppelganger was really rich to explore, right? Because it is all about vertigo, and instability, and not knowing exactly what's real and who can be trusted, or if even the self is real.
And the thing about doppelganger books, you know, coming back to what you said, Jules, about liberalism is, you know, I do see this -- don't tell anyone, but like a bit of a Trojan horse book for liberals [laughing], where it starts off being like, oh, yes, we're gonna make fun of Steve Bannon and Naomi Wolf, and all the "thems," the bad people, and then like -- and then it kind of flips, doesn't it, you know [laughing]? And we end up in Palestine. And it's not where they thought, you know, it's not -- it's not where -- I hope -- I don't think it's where a lot of liberal readers think it's going to end up. It ends up as all doppelganger books do, which is with a mirror, you know? And I think the mirror -- I see my own doppelganger as a mirror that's shown me some things I don't like about myself. And I think this book might show some liberals some things they don't like about themselves, the ones who keep reading into the Israel chapter, at least.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:05
Well, and I mean, part of what the book's pointing to, I was saying to people that in a way, it's actually kind of disorienting, right? Because you start, and you're like, okay, the book's about this. And then as you proceed, like every chapter, you sort of revise your expectation for like where the end point of the book is, and you keep revising it as you go. And, you know, I think the sort of Trojan horse aspect, like the attempt to kind of destroy your brand to question the self, but also question the value of sort of sitting around and wondering why "bad people do bad things," which has been a huge part of the narrative of COVID that we've been pushing back on, is kind of the idea that like, but for better personalities and better politics and the positions of power, like we would be experiencing a completely different pandemic. And, you know --
Naomi Klein 18:58
Right. We, the good people, waited at least another four months before we did the same thing [laughing].
Jules Gill-Peterson 19:02
[Laughing] Right, right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:03
Yes, yeah. Oh, painful, right. You know, it sort of reminded me a little bit of the kind of lesser known Brecht poem that people tend to quote. The one that's like, "We know what makes us ill," which is like the sort of letter to the doctors and nurses, but it really made me think of this other poem in that series, which is The sick Communist's answer to the comrades. And in that one, he says -- well, I could just read it.
Comrades, by hunger, poor housing and inadequate clothing
I was made sick and removed from your ranks.
I immediately took up the struggle for my recovery.I declare to everyone who sees me
The cause of my sickness
I explicitly name the guilty ones.At the same time I wage the struggle against the sickness funds
Who seek to cheat me at every little turn.
I wage the struggle from my sickbed.I have informed myself about the liabilities of the hospital
The daily abuses committed against sick members of the oppressed classes.
I apply every resource which will help me
Recover my good health.And so, although stricken and wounded
I have not left your ranks. I will stick with you
Until my last breath. I have no thought of yielding.
I beg you
Continue to depend on me.
And I feel like part of the reason this really stuck in my head is obviously this book is like a lot more personal, a lot more vulnerable, sort of starts from this place of looking at the phenomenon of you being confused with Naomi Wolf, who's sort of one of the more well-known liberals who completely went sort of full eugenics in COVID, you know, the traces were there in her work, as you talk about. And sort of from there, obviously, you move very far away from that, towards a kind of reckoning also with not just like sort of what is COVID producing in the world, but how does COVID kind of show us the lack of a shared consensus reality, of like a shared political horizon, or, you know, cultural imaginary.
And I feel like one thing that I've really come into throughout the course of COVID, is to really feel that in a way that I kind of knew was possible, you know, but I think that in the decades prior, it was easier to sort of trick yourself into thinking that everybody was on the same page. And sort of as you go through this, a lot of the book you're talking about some of the kind of painful research that we do, you know, listening to people like Bannon, and Wolf, and all the sort of like, folks on that spectrum, talk about COVID, leverage COVID, but also like, you talk about your fascination with how they're sort of honing their messaging, what they're taking advantage of, and how they're actually painting this picture of a kind of shared political horizon. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you feel like some of that lack of -- you know, even when we say the left, right, like, it's a terrible catch-all term, because what the -- what the fuck does that mean, right? It's just like a meaningless umbrella term. So, you know, I wonder if you could just speak about sort of how that kind of lack of a shared consensus, of a shared political horizon, you feel like has factored into some of the ways that we've seen COVID play out?
Naomi Klein 22:20
Yeah. I'm just -- I'm pausing over whether they do have a shared political horizon, beyond power, you know? Like, I think Bannon, everything he does is about, as he says, taking back power for 100 years. And I think he does have some things he believes in and they're terrifying. But then he also just appropriates issues that have some juice, that he thinks are going to help him get back into power, or help Trump get back into power, and hopefully he will have ingratiated himself enough that he'll be able to get back in as well. And that's his skill as a strategist, right? He did that in 2016, with workers who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party, and he is now doing it with women who he understands are a big problem, particularly white women, who got all worked up over vaccines and masks during COVID and have been pivoting to so-called Critical Race Theory and trans rights and, you know, kind of trying to do a Bolsonaro -- electoral Bolsonaro on that.
So I don't know whether he has -- whether there's a shared political horizon there exactly. I think that there are shared interests in the sense that, you know, he offers a platform, he offers a sense of community, belonging. I don't know how much time they spend mapping out the world they're going to build, maybe because a lot of it is unspeakable. But where -- what I would say is that, you know, I mentioned having grown up in a -- you know, come of age in a bleaker political period in lots of ways, right, where the left was smaller and more marginal, in the 90s and 80s. And I would say that the effect of anti-communism, McCarthyism, the Reagan/Thatcher, kind of there is no alternative, being the air that we were breathing at that time, was that it was -- to the extent that there was a left, it was basically saying, stop it, stop hurting us, you know? It was a left of no, like, no, stop the cuts.
That was the rallying cry of the 90s, you know? And very nostalgic in terms of what Jules was talking about, of like sort of a bygone welfare state. And I do -- so I would just say, you know, putting my cheerleader hat on, just like very lightly [laughing], I would say that there has been some progress on shared horizon, like from my perspective, in terms of how bad things used to be. Because it was -- it was nearly impossible to say what you were for in the 90s. Nobody wanted to be a socialist, nobody would write a book, you know, with the word “communism” in the title, Beatrice [laughing]. Like, you know, I used to have to fight --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:19
People are still scandalized [laughing].
Naomi Klein 25:20
[laughing] I mean, that just makes me laugh at how hard I had to fight to get "capitalism" in any of my subtitles, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:28
I bet. I can imagine.
Naomi Klein 25:32
And then, you know, I've been a part of a shift in movements towards a yes, you know? Whether that -- you know, in Canada, we had a coalition come together around something that we called the Leap Manifesto, which was about the climate crisis, but it was also about indigenous rights. It was also about racial justice. It was a coalition. It was an attempt at a coalition of the yes, that brought -- that brought together a cross section. And then, you know, the Green New Deal, and then the Black, Red and Green New Deal. And then those sort of early attempts in the first few months of COVID, to think about what a people's response to the pandemic might be, that would really embody and absorb that convergence of pandemic, climate crisis, racial justice reckoning, like, what is the yes that comes out of that. And there were some attempts. And this is, I think, the heartbreak of 2021. Like, the reason why I did not know what to say, is that those coalition's fell apart. Like let's be honest, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:37
Yeah.
Naomi Klein 26:37
It's not that we didn't try, right? And so, so what happened with that, right? And that, I think, is partly what motivated me to want to come back to these themes around personal branding and like the way capitalism has infiltrated our movements, and the way funding affects the ability to work in coalition, and the way identity politics impacts it, you know? And I'm not anti identity politics, but I think there are different versions of it, right? And as Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò says, like there are some that are a bridge, and there are some that are a wall, right? And so, yeah, I think the picture's a little more complicated than that we don't have a horizon. It's that we -- I would say it's trickier. It's that we've learned to talk a good game around what we want, but we don't know how to embody those values, right? Like you can -- you know, The Leap Manifesto that was -- you know, the subtitle was, A Canada Based on Caring for the Planet and Each Other, but do we know how to act like we care for each other, right? And that's the theme of what you talk about all the time, right? So I think it's less ideological than it is -- you know, I have, I think, a line in the book where it's not that we don't know, it's that we don't know how to know. And we don't know how to act based on these things that we say we believe in, because that's how deep capitalism is in all of us, right? I mean, is that fair?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:57
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there is also a kind of -- you know, the Brecht poem kept coming to mind, because sort of throughout the book, there's like the theme of sort of -- like, as the kind of COVID despair continues to layer, as the abandonment layers, there's the kind of feeling of like, okay, part of what we're actually sort of seeing is that maybe sick people aren't a part of this shared horizon that we've all been talking about, right? And that maybe, you know, kind of part of what's going on is like, you know, it's not just like a failure of our movements, but it's like insidious, the values and sort of myths that we live with every day that are sort of more powerful shared totems, or, you know, touch points than some of these horizons.
You know, as we've seen, these aren't new things. These are ideas about independence and autonomy and self worth, through proving yourself through bodily improvement. All these kinds of like figures that you touch on in the book, whether it's like random yoga moms in Canada being like, we want them to die, when pointed out that vaccination protects not just you, but vulnerable people, you know, but this kind of idea of like, that we've seen pop throughout the pandemic that like, suddenly now, the left doesn't care about sick people.
But if you look back at the Brecht poem that I was reading, you know, he's like, please, continue to depend on me. Like, I haven't gone anywhere. I'm here, I might be working from my bed, like, I'm here and I'm for it until the last breath, but like, you have to -- you know, I'm begging you to continue to incorporate me existing sort of in our shared political reality. And I think part of what you seem to be sort of attempting to grapple with in the book is like, well, you know, how do we sort of move forward knowing that we're reckoning with these types of layered abandonment and that the pandemic is sort of accelerating that, but you know, that this also plays into a kind of larger, broader narrative that has way more to do with a kind of broader fascist turn than it does with any sort of one particular political movement.
Naomi Klein 30:20
Yeah. And it's why I end the book with Sunaura Taylor's Age of Disability, because the message is so powerful, and it's being extended into a book, which I think you might really enjoy. Do you know the essay, Sunaura Taylor's essay?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:39
Yeah, yeah.
Naomi Klein 30:41
I mean, for those -- for listeners who aren't familiar with it, Sunaura Taylor -- have you had Sunaura Taylor on the show?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:48
No, we haven't. We've had Astra. But we -- it's never worked out scheduling wise, with Sunaura.
Naomi Klein 30:55
I want to bring the Taylor sisters in to the university where I work. They're a pretty amazing team. But Sunaura is a disability theorist and writes about ecology, and writes about the parallels between disabled bodies and a disabled planet, and looks at the ecological crisis as planetary impairment, and makes a forceful argument that the Disability Justice movement doesn't just need to be included, but has a huge amount to teach about what it means to live on an impaired planet. And it is a -- it's a different kind of horizon. And I think you're right, to push, that it isn't -- it isn't just that the horizon is already there and everybody understands this. I don't -- I think you're right. I think this is -- this is work that needs to happen. And exciting work, I think.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:50
Mhm. Hmm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 31:51
Yeah, no. I agree, it should be exciting, right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:54
It should.
Jules Gill-Peterson 31:55
And just something about like the process of collaborating to rediscover what feels good about pushing our thinking and pushing our -- pushing our collective capacities, that really kind of comes through. And I think some of the -- I'm a historian, so I can't help but think in long term scales, for better or for worse, but, you know, I appreciate both how you pay attention to the really deep roots of certain logics and historical processes that, in fact, aren't novel, you know, to the last 10 years, or even say to the era of neoliberal capitalism, right? You go deep on the history of eugenics, the history of settler colonialism and colonial expropriation, and help us see some of those deep roots.
And then it's almost like, you know, if there's some sort of sedimentary rock metaphor that works here or not, that the topsoil is some of these formal changes in the way we live, and particularly the way that social media and sort of production of a digital economy and digital selves, and the political sphere's realignment around those dynamics, creates a number of effects, but maybe one of them is a difficulty with sort of looking at what sits beneath and this feeling of fundamental rupture, but also this kind of feeling of, yeah, loss of imagination, but there's, I think, a really poignant and for me really moving section of the book, where you talk about and develop sort of the feeling of speechlessness that -- that I think has, you know, in various forms often feels very individualizing and isolating, and maybe hit a kind of intense peak in -- yeah, for me, it would be 2021 as well.
But, you know, this sort of -- the way that the kind of diagonalism, as you put it, this sort of post-partisan rhetoric that, you know, not coincidentally tends to collect around people who espouse fairly far right views, but present themselves as renegades, and as always subject to being canceled and as victims and as, you know, really the only ones who see things truly, that there is a way that that sort of diagonalism, and its sort of reduction of everything to mockery, turning everything into bombastic, just completely unbelievable conspiracies, you know, there's a way that that has a tactical function, which is it just devalues everything and everyone around those forms of speech. And so, you know, if you find yourself on the other side of that or facing that down, it becomes hard to say anything in response because you yourself are devalued, and your own sort of relationship to meaning and to language, you know, is sort of degraded along with it. But I think what's sort of interesting is, you're really wrestling with and I think sort of, you know, laying out this challenge that then our task is not to regain a kind of haughty, holier than thou, "Well, you know, thank goodness I'm not that illogical and ridiculous. And I really am reasonable, and I really do see things," you know, but actually to think through what it would take to break out of that vertigo or isolation. And maybe what that is, is, of course, to come together with other people. But kind of also maybe moving from, yeah, an individual, to more collective imagination.
And I just -- I don't know, I mean, maybe for me, this really resonates because in my day job, I'm a professor, and I write a lot of single authored things and have also felt just sort of humiliated by my own relationship to language in the last few years, particularly as a trans woman of color, who does work in the public sphere, where I'm like, I don't want to talk. But I also, you know, feel that sense of like cheapening, but that has been really the thing that has helped countermand and transform that experience of humiliation, for me, has been something like Death Panel, coming together with other people and experiencing that relief of enmeshment and also of scaling beyond myself, so that I can't fantasize anymore that my brain is going to develop any solutions to anything by itself. And like, even if it did, what on earth am I going to do about that all by myself? Anyways, that was a -- I don't think I'm really arriving at a question here, but you know, I'm sort of --
Naomi Klein 36:32
Well, one thing it makes me think about is -- I don't know what your -- both of your relationship to the Bernie campaign was, but I do feel that for people who were very involved in that campaign and had some hopes heavily invested in it, there is a particular experience after the pandemic and the political disappointments. That there were a few high points, right, and so when we talk about feeling speechless and we talk about not knowing what to do, I mean part of it is that we were doing some things, right? I mean, talking for myself, like you know, I was on the road with Bernie, I was kind of his -- like one of his climate surrogates. And that's what I was doing right when everything shut down. And so the experience of those early days, it was really days of -- I mean, the last thing I did was go on Democracy Now! and try to spin Super Tuesday as not a defeat for Bernie [laughing], which it obviously was, so [everyone laughing].
But like, I think there was something about the kind of high of the Bernie campaign, you know, that feeling of us-ness, that feeling of being free of me, you know? Of like oh wow, like I get to not have to just be me, I get to be part of this just like surging humanity of us-ness, right, which one did feel in those huge stadiums. And then just being dropped into home screen Biden [laughing], like that was a very -- and then suddenly, so many folks from the campaign suddenly just attacking each other and just like everybody just proving they existed by posting a ton and it was whiplash, like that was a lot. And I don't think -- you know, just coming back to what I was saying earlier, like we don't look back very well these days, and it is worth doing, to sort of understand how we could have gotten to such a bleak moment. Spring of 2020 was the largest protests in US history we think, right? Like that's pretty far to fall, right? Like that's a lot. Anyway, that's what it reminded me of, Jules, just that feeling of loneliness and sort of like suddenly you're just one person posting, after that, you know? That's a -- like we tasted something else.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:12
Yeah, I mean, that was a very -- that was a very strange -- it's a very -- it's weird to think back to those early months of the pandemic, it can be really stomach turning to look back at our work from 2020. Especially, you know, talking about stuff like, okay, yeah, we've got these pandemic programs, and they all have these arbitrary sundown dates. So how is this gonna work if the pandemic continues, if it's just like, this program ends on this day in two years, right? We were talking about this, we were tracking this. But, you know, there was a moment where we were writing a pandemic policy proposal. We were talking about ideas for ways that you could completely change Medicaid, you could just shift all the FMAP funding to federal funding. We'd been doing all this work around Medicare for All. Talking about like, you know, the ways that actually Sanders was kind of putting together an interesting disability platform, with the recognition of the Olmstead Act, and that was like an unwelcomed take in the disability sort of online community that existed back then. I was a bit of a pariah.
Naomi Klein 40:19
I remember, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:20
Yeah, people really not open to Medicare for All, at all. But it is difficult to sort of wrestle back with how many sort of offhand comments came true, and how many sort of predictions were not worse than we were hoping, that were actually exactly on point. I'm thinking back to the episode we did with Adia Benton, you know, who's a great anthropologist based out of Chicago. And she actually does a lot of stuff sort of looking at media and sports, actually. And she and I were talking, we were talking about this interview she did in 2020, when she said -- I think it was to Medpage Today, she was like, we'll get our sports back when we earn it. And she was like, boy, was I fucking wrong. You know, like, we just went right in, and we put all of it -- you know, so many athletes have been put at incredible risk.
There's all these sorts of ways that looking away is sort of accelerating a lot of the dynamics that we've always been organizing against, and working on building like a political education program around here on the show, but, you know, it's been tremendous just to see sort of how a lot of those folks who checked out in 2020, they have come back, ultimately. And there is a kind of like, okay, we're living with this, okay, I've got to start working on this stuff again, you know, I've sort of taken two years to recover from the political depression of what happened with the campaign, and we really tried not to miss a beat. But it was a moment of feeling like, you know, I think the floor fell out of a lot of things. And a lot of people just sort of pivoted to like, oh, I'm just gonna talk about movies on our podcast now, or like, I think like Chapo Trap House read a list of like the top 20 cutest animals or something like that on an episode in the middle of the early throes of COVID, and the protests that were going on. And you know, the --
Naomi Klein 42:08
I remember [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:09
[laughing] You know, it was like a moment where we were like, wait, really? Like how -- why -- this is like what we've all been talking about already for months, and it felt so strange to sort of be --
Naomi Klein 42:20
Talk about not being capable of introspection [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:22
I mean, [sighs] yeah, it's -- and it's something that I know that, you know, sometimes folks are frustrated, like, why is Death Panel the only one? And we're like, believe us, we don't want to be, right? But I do think there is a kind of tendency to put a lot of hope in small things, in things that can be seen as these big transformative moments. And I think a lot of people really thought about the fight for Medicare for All in terms of what they were going to get, even though part of the message was not me and us, I think a lot of it was there was this real intense desire to be freed from the extraction and pain of fucking health insurance, that really was powerful. And I think that when that was taken away, a lot of people just sort of felt like, well, okay, fuck it.
And I think like Medicare for All actually being a big part of those two election cycles, you know, this incredible defeat as we go into COVID. I think that the sort of taking that off the table, and having to deal with that as a kind of painful thing for a lot of people kind of actually pushed the COVID denial and accelerated it a bit on the left, because it became a kind of like, well, you know, there's this nihilistic way of thinking about about bodily autonomy, where it's every man for themselves, and it's all about kind of, you know, taking care of yourself first, and doing things that are really oriented around like a individualist view of politics. And I think that's been sort of like a huge stumbling point that ultimately is something that we're still all working through.
Naomi Klein 44:03
I think so. And I think this, you know, that -- that this is -- you know, I think there's some shame and disgust around, you know, when you go really hard after the "them," you know, they are the people who don't care about the immunocompromised, they are the people who only care about themselves. And, you know, it's a little bit similar to what has happened with immigration. Like when Trump was in power, everybody cared about the kids at the border, you know, and now that it's Biden, it's like -- it's not that you don't care, you can't even look at it because it's too embarrassing. Like the hypocrisy of it is too embarrassing. And I think that there's something similar around COVID and disability, where it becomes shameful, and you almost lose ground. I hope that -- I hope that's not true.
Like, I hope it's possible to get back some of that -- I mean, I'm always going to -- you know, I still think there is something -- this is why, you know, coming back to what I was saying earlier around, I'm worried that people want to forget about some of the good stuff that happened in the early months. I want us to remember it, you know, because there is -- there's a body memory of other kinds of values governing a society. It was not perfect, but it was better than what we've got now. And it was better than what was before. And a whole lot of people who were systematically invisibilized were visible for a little while, not long enough, you know?
And I worry about it just kind of being memory-holed, you know, so. Yeah, you know, and I think some of what I write about, about the backlash, right, like the trucker convoy, and this -- you know, I really think part of it was just like, this shock of like, you can't ask me to care about other people when you've told me my whole life that my job is to just care about myself and my family and play by these rules. And if I get myself a little business, and succeed, you know, how dare you tell me I have to compromise that or suddenly have changed the rules, right? And, you know, so one way of looking at that is, oh, those terrible people, you know? But they weren't everyone, you know, they weren't even the majority. For a while, they were a minority. And so there's something interesting, and you can tell me if you think I'm trying to be too rosy, like Bernie after Super Tuesday, because I can do that. But you know, there's something in the fact that that despite growing up in this hyper capitalist, hyper individualistic culture, a critical mass of people welcomed interconnection, welcomed being part of a web of humanity and other than human world, and wanted something else. And we don't have a political project that builds on that, but there's -- that still was something and I don't like just saying it was nothing, it was a flash in the pan, it didn't represent anything, you know?
And like this, this once again, is what's interesting to me about the figure of the doppelganger, right, like it stands in for the multiplicity of the self, right? Like, we are not one thing. We're a mess. We're all -- like humans are capable of incredible selfishness and cruelty and compassion and beauty. And, you know, different systems light up different parts of ourselves, right, and different moments light up different parts of ourselves. And that's like, as a Canadian, you know, who -- my parents are American, we moved to Canada because my father was a -- you know, he's a deserter from the US military, because he didn't want to go to Vietnam. But I always say, you know, we left because of the war, but we stayed because of the universal public health care. And, you know, the way the right derides public health care, diminished as it is in Canada, is always by like presenting it as this, you know, bureaucracy, big government, blah, blah, blah, but actually, it's a manifestation of values, right? And it's an expression of a belief system, about the value of every single person. And the belief that you shouldn't have to -- on top of the pain of being sick, you should also not have to go bankrupt.
In fact, you shouldn't have to pay anything, you know, and I've experienced that in my own family. I wrote in the book about my mom having two catastrophic strokes when I was a teenager, or one -- you know, one lesser stroke, and a second catastrophic stroke. It turned out to have been because she had a vascular malformation in her brainstem that she didn't know she'd had her whole life, that bled. She was hospitalized for probably a year and a half, you know, counting rehab, maybe more. I think we got a bill for $20 for crutches. She was medivac-ed, she had multiple -- she had, you know, day long surgery. It really does make a difference, and it really is an expression of value. So, just being like this kind of -- I literally have dual citizenship, and I've lived in both countries and I have this strange kind of cross border reality, because my whole extended family's the States, but my immediate family is here. And, you know, my father works in health care, and we've had a lot of experiences with the healthcare system, which doesn't make us exceptional. But it's a big difference, you know, and the difference is not just like experiential, it's a value.
It's fundamental, you know, to say, you're not going to have to worry about this, you know, if catastrophic illness strikes. It's an expression of care, right. And it's being -- it's under attack completely in Canada. I've also experienced a lot of uncare in this system as the parent of a child with a disability and, you know, lost all my Canadian smugness, because actually the Canadian public school system is worse than the American school system in a lot of cases when it comes to kids with disabilities. But yeah, I think these are systems that express values and it's important to -- anyway, that's the way I see it.
Jules Gill-Peterson 50:28
Yeah. Well, and I wonder if part of the riddle -- I mean, I just feel like you work really, really effectively with contradiction in this book. And I wonder if, just in listening to our conversation, one thing it has me thinking is about proximity, missed chances, these feel kind of doppelganger-esque sort of motifs, but you know, the strange proximity of, okay, some of perhaps the largest single protest movement in US history, in the summer of 2020, you know, a very large political movement mobilized in part for Medicare for All, and then the deep fallout or the deepening of a kind of ultra-individualist, kind of revanchist diagonalism that can join up very far right white supremacists, with people who are -- you know, might own a small gym and are into wellness culture and things like that. But I wonder if, you know, part of that kind of -- you know, the riddle here, right, is just sort of figuring out, okay, well, you know, the right has come up with a kind of all encompassing narrative, whether it's sincerely held or not, to explain these things.
But as you say, you know, it shouldn't really surprise us that four decades after Thatcher saying, "There is no society," that like a global pandemic would engender this kind of intense austerity politics, this sort of intense focus on the individual's responsibility to protect their immune system and their family. And you know, the ways that this is all converging with the climate crisis to imagine, well, we will preserve our family or our homestead or whatever it may be. These are logics that have been incubating, not just since the advent of neoliberalism, but in the case of eugenic logics, you know, for centuries, and yet, in spite of that, as you're just saying, there still remains widespread support for a more collective kind of reimagination of the world that would ameliorate those things. But it seems that that collective imagination is not -- maybe it's been outflanked in local senses, in the kind of corporate owned social media, dark money politics world we live in, but it seems like the bigger riddle, you know, part of what I'm hearing this conversation being about is sort of the riddle of the "all," you know, the all in Medicare for All, right? Like, who is this collective? Because that's a really difficult question to face down.
And in a weird way, you know, the sort of right wing conspiracy theory has some answers, right? The "all" is actually just a series of individuals who are under attack from strange, impersonal forces, and you have to securitize them and save them because, you know, your cause is righteous, or you're just scared or whatever. But the kind of broader question for the left, right, well, who is this all, right, and there are divisions and there are disagreements, but to build a collaborative, complex, intramurally different sense of all? Yeah, that's gonna take some real taking stock of where we've traveled, not just in the last couple of years, but definitely, yes, it's the 60s and the 70s, even since way earlier than that, right? And I'm just sort of curious, like to maybe steer us a little in that direction.
I mean, does that -- does that feel like part of what the task ahead is, or this task of coming through this painful looking at where we have been, what we have not wanted to admit, or the shame or the pain of what has happened in the past few years. You know, to you, does that kind of moving through that lead towards this question of the collective and the all? And is that really the place where shared political imagination is probably going to emerge? Or perhaps, is emerging is in many different places right now, but has yet to be given a sort of -- yeah, just a bigger container or bigger infrastructure to kind of hook up all of its various components?
Naomi Klein 54:36
I hope it's the latter. I mean, I definitely think there are some signs.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:40
Appreciate the honesty.
Naomi Klein 54:41
And I think there are some spaces where we can -- we can point to examples of people building a sense of all-ness, finding one another and learning to trust each other across some differences. You know, in some tenant rights organizing, obviously in some exciting non-traditional labor organizing, you know, in the debt collective, speaking of Astra, you know, in the work that you're doing, absolutely. And I think, what's -- I don't know how to say this without sounding so corny, but, you know, the thrill of organizing is we sometimes find out that we actually like each other, you know? [everyone laughing]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:27
I love that.
Naomi Klein 55:27
And have fun.
Jules Gill-Peterson 55:30
Right.
Naomi Klein 55:31
But I think that that's a big part of how you build in all-ness, is that you actually kind of have to -- you have to like each other to want to fight for each other, right, on some level. You don't have to like everybody all the time, you know, but there has to be a kind of a wellspring of affection. And I think that that's really just in practical terms been one of the hardest things to maintain because, you know, a lot of our social relations are devoid of the kind of interstitial ease of not task oriented, you know? This is a Zoom meeting, we have an agenda, right, you know? Like when we build trust is in the in-between spaces often, right? It doesn't have to be in person but I think it does need to have a little of unstructured-ness And this is one of the parts of my research where I've been most chilled, where I have been hanging out in what I call the mirror world, right, and following my doppelganger to places where, you know, I think some really nefarious political coalitions are being built, you know, what chills me most is, one, when I hear them appropriating arguments that I know are powerful, that I believe the left has abandoned. And the other is when I see them being nicer to each other than we are [laughing].
Jules Gill-Peterson 56:58
Aw, damn.
Naomi Klein 56:58
[laughing] And even if it's just a performed kind of -- you know, performative, like we are the inclusion people, you know, we are the people who aren't -- who don't cancel each other, that Bannon does. There's still enough truth there, right, that it -- that I think we have -- like, we need space -- you know, I teach university students, I think, you know, Jules, you do too, you know, like, it's important to have spaces where people feel like they can make mistakes, you know, that they're not going to be attacked, as they're learning, right. And I think that's something, like to build an all-ness, there has to be -- there has to be some just spaces where we get to where it feels possible to like each other. Yeah, I don't know if -- and I know that there -- like coming back to those places where people are building that, I think, you know, that that's what organizing does, as opposed to just saying what you believe, or just reacting when there's a clear goal, and you know who you're up against, and what you're up against, and why you're doing what you're doing. And that can happen during a political campaign, but it can also happen during a unionizing drive. And it can also happen in a campaign to cancel student debt. There is a grace that is granted to one another, and I think we really need that. We need more places of grace.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:29
Yeah, I mean, I appreciated the way you talked about sort of the embarrassment as a dynamic, right, and the distancing there, rather than it being like about more personal things. It's like someone's own deal iIf they've kind of separated themselves, or looked away, you know. It reminds me, you know, some of the ways that I think a lot of people often have talked about like the rise of a kind of more open, obvious, fascist political discourse has been, you know, like, liberals like to use the metaphor of boiling a frog, right? Like, you're in a pot of water, the temperature is rising, and so you don't notice that you're being cooked to death, right. But I appreciated sort of how, you know, you didn't go there at all, you went a very different direction. And I feel like one thing, you know, in terms of the embarrassment frame and the distancing, and all of these sorts of ways of like how, for example, the sort of liberal take on COVID has been excruciating. The ways that liberals have sort of turned themselves into -- like individual liberals will like self-deputize themselves to be truth cops, right. And it's like about, you know, fighting misinformation and disinformation in terms of imposing, in a very condescending way, you know, this is the way to think about it.
And one of the things you talk about is sort of like, you know, I think that we were too quick to kind of like jump to things like pandemic of the unvaccinated, things like Macron, saying, you know, people who are unvaccinated are not full citizens of France. The kinds of ways that the kind of abandonment was accelerated by a really sort of crass way of thinking about politics as a zero sum game of like, how many of that side you can cross off the board, right, and vote counting and all that kind of bullshit. And you know, as our colleague Phil Rocco likes to say, like you hold greater political value in agenda setting than you do in counting and collecting votes, right? You know, the kind of restriction of what's speech, of what's fighting back against misinformation. It's embarrassing, right? The kind of like Glenn Kessler popping out of the woodwork to say, like, no, that child did not get an abortion, because technically, blah, blah, blah, or like, you know, yes, everybody wants Medicare for All, but the CBO said it's going to be way too expensive. They get really sort of -- liberals get worked up about fighting misinformation and warning people, don't be fooled.
And while social reproduction obviously will lead to a lot of things that like from a strict standpoint, you could be like, yeah, that's not true. That's bullshit. But it's bullshit that people really believe, like the people who complain about COVID precautions, you know, they truly believe that it's over and that the pandemic is not a problem anymore. And I think you kind of get at the more important question, which is sort of like, within that environment, how do we find grounding, right?
I think there's this idea that the artist and writer Hito Steyerl writes about, you know, where she talks about in her essay called In Free Fall, she talks about the idea that when you're falling, you can't necessarily tell that you're falling. And part of that is because you can't see the horizon, you can't see the ground. The kind of inertia of falling can appear like perfect stasis. And she says even if history and time have ended, and you can't remember that time ever moved forward, you know, when whole societies around you might be falling, just as you are, it can be kind of hard to see.
And I think part of what you really tried to do here, and I appreciated like all the -- all of the sort of honesty about how COVID kind of broke you a little bit, because to sort of pretend that it didn't, as you're saying, wouldn't really be a kind of honest reckoning and looking back. And I really do feel like throughout this book, you're kind of trying to find that grounding, and not just answer for the reader in a kind of didactic way, like what what do we do from here, but like be honest with folks that you're asking the question of yourself, and you're seeking answers, and you sort of want that, and you don't know, because you're not in a position of being like an all-knowing figure, right, because none of us are.
Naomi Klein 1:03:00
Mhm, mhm. Yeah. Well, I would love to talk with you again, specifically maybe we could talk about the dance of liberalism and fascism, because Jules mentioned that earlier. And I think it's really key to the moment that we're in. And, you know, during US election years, presidential election years, gets harder and harder to tell these truths. And I think it's so important that you are continuing to do that. But yeah, thank you, Beatrice, for what you said. And, you know, it's -- I think, in the end, even though this is like maybe seemingly one of my least classically political works, I think in lots of ways, it's more demanding than anything I've written before, in terms of what I think this moment of intersecting and overlapping crises demands of all of us.
I mean, I think that the scale of change that is required is unprecedented. And I say that knowing chapters in history when things have changed very quickly. But, I mean, this has been a very terrifying summer. And it's only going to get scarier. And we are all going to have to figure out how to live together on less land, even if we do all the right things. And we either become more monstrous, more eugenicist more fascist, or we radically change our values, right? And that is -- that's like an underlined we, at least when it comes to me, you know? And so I can't write something like that or say something like that, and ask that of others, if I'm not willing to ask that of myself and actually fess up to my many hypocrisies and contradictions.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:54
That we all have, yeah.
Naomi Klein 1:04:57
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:58
Well, I think that's the perfect place to leave it. I know you have to run, you have a hard out, so we don't want to keep you anymore. We kept you up just past one minute past when you were supposed to go, but we will definitely take you up on coming back. And I wish we had known that we could have been talking to you about COVID back in 2021. But, you know, we'll make up for lost time.
Naomi Klein 1:05:17
I was too speechless.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:18
Fair, fair. And again, Naomi's book is called Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
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Death Panel 1:06:06
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)