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Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is an absolutely brilliant read on why you see this kind of consonance between the fringe left & right (although fringe may not be the right word anymore):

https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mi...

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Ha, poor Naomi Klein getting confused with the other Naomi... I guess it was inevitable she'd write a book about it.

Yep, that's what started the whole trip. She quotes a tweet in it from someone in the middle of the pandemic about it: https://x.com/localnotail/status/1395393630022553602

"If your Naomi be Klein You're doing just fine If your Naomi be Wolf Oh buddy, big oof."

It’s not implausible that someone might go through a transformation like that, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

That link led me to this fascinating reminiscence:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n11/elaine-mokhtefi/diar...

No! No!!

One of the things that cuts the Democrats off at the knees is that the far left is even hungrier for “change” and “shaking things up” than Trump supporters are and doesn’t get any emotional satisfaction out of supporting the party of “status quo at any cost” other than the behavioral sink of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.

A hundred percent, yes. The GOP learned they needed to activate their base during the Obama years - that led to the Trump takeover and a lot of the issues we're seeing right now, but the MAGA movement's fundamental allure is they're actually talking about problems in the country that are pretty apparent to people outside the professional class (there's an interesting civil war happening inside the GOP right now between the MAGA true believers and the people who thought they were riding the tiger, instead of just holding its tail).

The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.

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