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

Author speaks candidly about a ‘mirror world’ that feeds our anxieties, distorts reality and fuels the polarisation of society

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 in many 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 far-right 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 there were once woodlands, teeming with life, there are now nature-depleted farmlands, we are facing the possibility of a new mass extinction and people all around the world are breathing toxic air. It might not be “one of the conscious factors of what is making you behave in certain ways” but it “is a universal experience”: the “interlocking ecological crises” are part of why people feel despair, says Klein.

The problem is that for some people, the mirror world speaks to these anxieties better than anything else. Not by seriously addressing the climate crisis but by playing on these feelings for its own ends – an authoritarian political project which is highly nationalist and has elements that are “explicitly fascist” (although not everyone is in the mirror world for this reason).

Take Bannon. “While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding.” And this focus on popular issues could be his ticket to the next wave of electoral victories, Klein warns.

People like Bannon co-opt truths – such as how elites take advantage of emergencies for their own ends, one of the arguments of Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – and mix them with dangerous lies, such as the “great reset” conspiracy. They hijack and obscure the left’s arguments – tapping into people’s worries, they turn themselves into the vanguard of resistance, without offering any real alternatives to the “corporate predation” they rail against.

Using conspiracy culture, they become the only source people trust, regardless of what they hear, read or even see themselves. One recent example, Klein says, is that a directed energy weapon caused the Maui wildfires. “Everything has to have an alternative story, it’s a great way to have an obedient base.”

The mirror world is not to be brushed off lightly. But what is important is to understand how we ended up here. It’s too easy to say people in the mirror world are the ones who “have no regard for material reality”, Klein says, and that “we are the people who are guided by truth and science when we all know we are in various stages of denial”. The “grotesque mockery and language and words that go on in the mirror world are only possible because of a generalised cheapening of words that is happening at the centre”. Politicians say they care about the climate crisis but continue subsidising fossil fuels and opening coalmines – she points to the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who joined the 2019 climate strikers that were protesting against the policies of his very government.

For Klein, the mirror world tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the people we’re looking at. This goes for the left, too, where she suggests too much time is spent building personal brands. “I still care, far too much, about the image I am projecting into that world,” she writes of her anxiety about being confused with Wolf – acknowledging the irony given Klein wrote No Logo, “a treatise against the rise of lifestyle branding”. She asks us all to reflect: “What aren’t we building when we are building our own brands?”

I can relate (though not to the doppelganger/internationally renowned writer part). Typing furiously online, sharing articles and videos, feels alluring and urgent but also self-indulgent and hollow. Klein says our online avatars make us less human, “less capable of changing and evolving, even in the face of pressing ecological and political crises”. This affects leftwing movements, which are in favour of inclusive and caring policies but do not always behave in those ways.

Klein says one of the reasons the book is more personal than her others is that she didn’t want to chastise people. “It’s not me being outside of it shaking my finger. I’m saying I have a branding crisis, that’s pretty ironic. I’m concerned about the way this is impacting movements that I have been part of.”

She recognises that in the capitalist economy, people can make money by creating these brands, and that some of us disappear into these personae because the world around us is overwhelmingly bleak. “We don’t know how to know. It’s too big; whether it’s our own complicity in labour abuses, or in extinctions or wars.”

This is not a lamentation of the way things used to be, a one-dimensional argument about political polarisation or an apolitical plea to be kind to each other. Klein is encouraging us to be attuned to what is going on in the mirror world and to combat it by going back to first principles.

“When you’re stuck in the realm of ‘this is their analysis, this is our analysis, they’re in the realm of conspiracy but we understand its capital’ … people don’t really know what to make of that, it’s all just talk … until you’re railing against the elites and you’re actually trying to materially take some money away from them and give it to workers.”

Pointing to automobile workers on strike and tenant organising in the US, she says the more real-world activism there is, the more counterfeit populism is denied at least one of its sources of power – some of the others being white supremacy, toxic nostalgia and patriarchy. “One of the wellsprings is that people are really mad at elites, and that’s one we can do something about – give people the real thing.”

Klein says Doppelganger is not an exercise in “I have figured out the left, come follow me” – it’s one contribution to the creative work that’s needed on climate and the other interconnected challenges of our time.

Still, all of this is dizzying. We are, after all, meeting as part of a promotional tour for her book, featuring her face on the front and with her ideas in it. Klein tells me how the front cover came into being, which involved a very last-minute search for something that captured the bizarreness of the book and bringing the cover designer of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything out of retirement (he’s now a fiction writer). “At a certain point you have to defer to good design,” she says, “but I admit that it’s full of contradictions.”

She doesn’t bristle when I ask about it. She did say earlier in our conversation that she was trying to hold herself a “little more lightly”. It’s important we all try to do this, she argues, because if we’re going to deal with the weight of “the vast, complex planetary crisis”, we can only do that together.

• Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian