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Naomi Klein: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023)
Reagan Youth: Youth Anthems For The New Order 12” (1984)
This week I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger. You may have heard about it… there has been a large promotional campaign behind it, and I’ve read reviews of it in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications, heard Klein on podcasts like Marc Maron’s, etc. If you pay attention to new books, you probably know about it. If not, you might still recognize Klein’s name from her previous books like No Logo and The Shock Doctrine; she is a cogent critic of capitalism and its associated ills, and Doppelganger is a fabulous book (well, at least the 3/4 of it I’ve read so far)… well-researched, engrossing, enlightening… just a great book.
I won’t go too far into its complex premise, but Doppelgangerexplores what Klein calls the Mirror World. The Mirror World is the shadow media sphere that belongs to the right wing. Not so much Fox News (though they have one, if not both, feet planted in it), but the layer beneath that of right-wing podcasts, YouTube-style personalities, and social media influencers. For those of us who aren’t part of or interested in this mirror world, it’s easy to ignore because much it exists outside the mainstream social media landscape on platforms like Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social that are shadow versions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., populated by people banned—or, to use the current term, deplatformed—from the mainstream sites. I hear about these right-wing social media alternatives from time to time in the media I consume, and I assumed they were sad intellectual ghettos. Maybe they are, but Klein describes a rich and active world that, even if it doesn’t touch my life directly, exerts enormous influence in the world. I’m sure most of us have experienced, in the past several years, the phenomenon of one or more of our loved ones being “flipped,” turning into quacks, conspiracy nuts, ring-wingers, proud boys, or some combination thereof. That process of moving from the mainstream media to the mirror world is crucial in this flipping process, undermining (or perhaps simply realigning) what its audience previously held as values and truths.
One part of Doppleganger that was enlightening to me is what Klein refers to as “diagonalism,” or the forging of alliances across the traditional left/right political divide. While the left has been busy eating itself with infighting over identity politics, right-wingers like Steve Bannon have found common ground with groups that, previously, might have been on the other side of the political spectrum. One of the largest of these diagonalist alliances is between the right wing and the amorphous world of social media health influencers, supplement peddlers, alternative health quacks, and others whose supposed expertise is in health and fitness, but who share the right’s conspiratorial mindset and disdain for leftist values like equality. While this alliance had been percolating for some time, it seemed to coalesce during the COVID crisis when numerous social media influencers from this sphere were deplatformed for sharing misinformation about the virus. When these folks were booted off the mainstream social media platforms, they found a new audience in the mirror world who ate up their COVID-related conspiracy theories and bought their quack cures. While the yoga / life coach / holistic health / alternative medicine set has roots in the hippie movement and ties to the political left, vaccine paranoia (about both the COVID vaccine and the persistent belief that routine childhood vaccines cause autism) has pushed these people to the political right. Klein writes about how beliefs about bodily autonomy and the idea that one’s physical fitness reflects their worth dovetail with ring-wing ideas about economic freedom and white supremacy.
As I’ve been reading Doppleganger, I’ve also been listening a lot to Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order. I never owned this record before, but I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago. Even though I’ve never owned it, I’ve somehow soaked up all seven of its tracks through the punk ether, and I know them well. Of course, this is a brilliant record. Reagan Youth had a different vibe than their fellow early 80s New York punk bands, adept at crafting memorable choruses and imbuing their songs with hooks that remind me more of early 80s west coast punk than the more spare, grimier New York bands like Agnostic Front and the Abused. But, at the same time, Reagan Youth had that New York toughness (I’m sure you had to, living in that city at that time) and they were politically aware in a way that differed from their New York peers too, which is probably at least part of the reason Youth Anthems appeared on MDC’s label R Radical Records.
While Reagan Youth’s original singer Dave Insurgent died in 1993, the group reformed in 2006 and has continued to play live ever since. As with their fellow New Yorkers, the Cro-Mags, their reunion era has seemed chaotic, plagued by near-constant lineup shuffles and magical thinking about what the reformed version of the band might accomplish. I have not heard good things from anyone who has seen them play. As someone who didn’t even own their seminal record, this controversy happened off my radar, but in the past several years, Reagan Youth’s official Instagram account started popping up in my feed. Apparently maintained by guitarist Paul Bakija, Reagan Youth’s only constant member, the posts on the account always struck me as unhinged, evincing a level of paranoia that might be notable in its extremity, but not different in kind to what you see many other old punks (and old people in general, I guess) spouting on social media.
Thinking about Reagan Youth in light of Klein’s analysis of diagonalism in Doppleganger, though, makes me see it in a different light. I, like so many other punks, have wondered how so many of our heroes have flipped to the other side of the political spectrum. But the roots of this transition are right there in punk itself. The suspicion of power. The impulse toward nihilism. The DIY ethos that puts so much focus and responsibility on the individual. The distrust of mainstream media. As with the health influencers Klein writes about, you don’t have to flip all that many switches to get from 80s punk to contemporary conspiranoid.
Given that Reagan Youth was always a political band, it’s easy to view their embarrassing modern era as a single member hijacking a group’s legacy for their own ends. However, I wonder if the seeds of this diagonalism were there in Reagan Youth’s music all along. (Even their Wikipedia page calls them “an aggressively anarchist, socialist, and anti-racist band,” which hints at the muddiness of their politics.) The song “USA” has the lyric, “I want peace and anarchy,” but it also advocates for “total liberty.” There’s a large streak of “I do whatever the fuck I want” nihilism in Reagan Youth’s anarchism, which is the soil in which diagonalist thinking grows. I’ve also always been uncomfortable with the gleeful shouts of “sieg heil” in the song “Reagan Youth.” The song obviously indicts Reaganism, but there’s something about the way they lean into that chant that wigs me out. Klein writes about how believers in COVID and vaccine conspiracies compare themselves to Jews in Nazi Germany and black people under slavery and Jim Crow, claiming their beliefs make them an oppressed class akin to those groups. At the very least, that idea is overblown, but it’s best classified as insane and offensive. In “USA,” Reagan Youth compares living in America to “mental slavery,” and their name and signature song make an equivalency between 80s America and Nazi Germany. I mean, yeah, but also, no… know what I mean?
I’m not saying Reagan Youth was a right-wing band… that’s absurd. However, their thinking was complex, muddy, and slippery. As is everyone’s… yours, mine, your Fox News-watching parents, your red-pilled work acquaintance / cousin / former bandmate / etc. Like I said, I haven’t finished Klein’s book, but I suspect part of the takeaway might be that when people cross that line between acceptable and unacceptable views and we cut them out of their lives (and our feeds), we are complicit. There has to be a better strategy than ignoring and abandoning these people, letting them find each other and coalesce into an growing social tumor.