“The left has not taken the measure of the civilizational project of the radical right”

In his latest work, “Le Double. Journey into the mirror world”, the Canadian essayist explores the American radical right. While in Paris, she analyzes the errors of the Democratic Party, which contributed to Trump’s victory.

LNaomi Klein’s latest work is a curious literary object. Her initial premise: for years, the essayist has been confused on social networks with an almost namesake, Naomi Wolf. Same age, or almost, same appearance. Feminist and advisor to Al Gore in the 90s, this doppelgänger gradually lost his media credit to become a conspiracy theorist rallied to the most radical Trumpism. Confusion does damage. But Wolf is not the real subject of the book. It’s a literary means, the white rabbit ofAlice in Wonderland, which Klein follows to observe “the mirror world”, that of the American radical right, of Steve Bannon and the fascist apprentices, “who observes us but whom we prefer not to look at”. While Donald Trump has just won the presidential election by carrying all the key states, The Double. Journey into the mirror world takes a critical and sincere look at the strategic errors of the Democratic camp.

What lessons can be learned from Donald Trump’s victory?
The figures surrounding the vote of young people, of the black and Latino working class, must raise a deep awareness among liberals. The left must understand why it speaks a language that is no longer in tune with workers and people in precarious situations. I think we are now among the elite, and that should be of great concern to us.

The investigation that you carry out in your work on your double is a pretext for an examination of conscience. To what extent is Trump the reflection we fail to see in the mirror?
In 2016, I wrote a book about Trump, No is Not Enough. In the conclusion, I argued that it should be viewed as a work of dystopian science fiction. It is a mirror held up to society, which asks us: do you like what you see? This is why his first election should have been interpreted as a warning. Instead, it became an excuse to further polarization, and liberals have spent the last eight years dumping on the right what they could no longer bear to see in their own camp: “They have all these horrible ideas, but we are pure, we believe in science and reason, we are compassionate. »

The left has taken refuge in a cocoon of flattering stories, but it has not taken the measure of the civilizational project of the radical right. You know, Trump is not only a figure of this movement, he is also and above all an extremely American figure, in the same way as McDonald’s apple pie, beauty pageants, wrestling matches, Hollywood and advertising. This gives it an astonishing capacity for attraction.

Including with his political opponents?
In some ways we are becoming more and more like him. Look at Kamala Harris’ campaign. On immigration, she spent her time repeating that she was tougher than him. She played according to her rules, adopted her speech, abandoned all principles of solidarity and universalism. It is a collective renunciation. Now that Trump is promising to pursue a policy that increasingly resembles fascism, we will see who we really are. I can’t watch my double, the other Naomi, hang out with Steve Bannon, vote for Trump, get a gun and endorse attacks on reproductive rights by reducing her to a distant otherness. In the coming months, I fear we will see a major rationalization operation in which some will accommodate Trump’s policies, in the name of respecting working-class voters.

Is one of the great defeats of the left to have lost this battle of language, this ability to name things?
So much should have been said in this campaign—about health care, wage increases, economic injustice, corporate domination—and remained silent. When Bernie Sanders ran [Naomi Klein l’a activement soutenu, ndlr]which he named as people’s suffering and proposed a plan to fix it, the Democratic Party has deployed crazy energy to smear and sabotage it. Today, everyone talks like him to analyze the results! So I don’t think our language is dead. We have a union leader in the United States, Sean Fain, of a type we haven’t seen in a long time. He leads the auto workers union and launched a simultaneous strike at the “Big Three”: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (Chrysler). He was speaking wearing a t-shirt that said “Eat the rich,” and Donald Trump didn’t know what to say, because it wasn’t just a slogan, he was organizing workers and their obtained better working conditions. In other words, he was really challenging the rich. And gave words their meaning again.

All the same, you criticize your camp a lot for only speaking to itself…
There is a form of cowardice in using language that is not really understood to say radical things. If no one understands you, you exclude the people you claim to defend, you signal your disdain. I really like this sentence from the late Mike Davis [historien et géographe, figure de l’activisme américain, décédé en 2022, ndlr] : “Speak like everyone else. The moral urgency of change acquires its highest nobility when it is expressed in common language. »

And in the “mirror world” that you describe, the radical right knows how to find the words.
They translate this abstruse and academic language, and say to the working classes: “These people despise you. » The right seizes on critical race theory or gender theory to lie about what these concepts mean, but also to highlight the hypocrisy of the left. Bolsonaro got himself elected president of Brazil using this strategy. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, governs this way. I think we have yet to appreciate the extent to which academic language is weaponized by the right.

In the collapse of the flow of words that you mention, there is one that we hear with more and more insistence: “fascism”. Is this justified?
We are undeniably witnessing a fascist turn in formerly democratic countries, in India, in Italy… However, it is not because Trump is a fascist that he will succeed in introducing fascism to the United States. But we should not be afraid to name him in these terms when he animalizes his adversaries and does not hesitate to threaten journalists or name enemies in shambles. We must oppose it. But how? Working on my double has been a great help to me in understanding how I want to navigate this world: constantly asking myself if my values ​​or ethics are coherent and readable. If we are afraid that fascism will take hold in our societies and that it will express itself through extreme forms of thought control, attacks on universities, massive layoffs and the tracking down of intellectuals, can we reasonably agree to “deplatform” at your discretion someone whose ideas you do not share [Donald Trump avait été banni des principaux réseaux sociaux après l’invasion du Capitole le 6 janvier 2021, ndlr] ? This is how Elon Musk managed to present himself as a supposed champion of freedom of expression: by exploiting our inconsistencies…

Is there an element of the grotesque in the world you describe?
In Operation Shylock, which features his evil double, the writer Philip Roth forges a word from the name he gives to this homonym: pipikism, or “this anti-tragic force which transforms everything into a farce, trivializes and superficializes everything”. There’s that in Trump. We constantly wonder whether we should laugh or cry. It is too serious to be ridiculed, and too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Because his sense of the grotesque takes nothing away from the danger, the monstrosity, the cruelty, the fascism. It is no coincidence that during his first mandate, the late shows humorists offered the best political commentary on his action.

How do you think this second term will be different?
Quand j’observe Trump, Musk ou Robert Kennedy Jr. [neveu de JFK et figure des antivax complotistes, que Trump vient de nommer à la Santé, ndlr]this triad of narcissistic womanizing men, I wonder what they are going to do. What will the total merger of state and algorithm look like? What will be the consequences of a culture of conspiracy at the highest levels of government? I think the difference will not be marginal, but radical. All our organizational strategies are deployed on platforms and devices that they control or can contaminate, it’s dizzying.

What are the reasons for hope?
We’re going to have to mobilize more offline, in the real world, and find ways to find each other without relying on recommendation algorithms. We will have to take up intellectual judo, take back the weapons they confiscated from us. This is yet another reason to have clear values ​​and a simple message, even if it may seem naive: to defend humans, living things, solidarity. We must oppose a machine that is turning the world into ruins and crushing life, whether it is Gaza or the climate.

r The Double. Journey into the mirror world, ed. Actes Sud, 496 p., 24.80 euros.