It’s too early for Democrats to worry about President Joe Biden’s polling numbers — until it isn’t. Like his predecessor Barack Obama, Biden exits the third summer of his presidency with his re-election prospects almost a coin flip. And like Obama, Biden’s most vexing issue is the economy, where voters continue to give him poor marks despite strong job creation, falling inflation and rising wages.
A book centered on an author’s digital double might not sound like the starting point to find a diagnosis for this disconnect. But Naomi Klein’s “Doppleganger,” released Tuesday, is about much more than social media’s confusion between her and author Naomi Wolf. The world has understandably hastened to put the global pandemic behind us, yet Klein’s fascinating and sprawling work reminds us that it was a profoundly destabilizing event, on top of decades of policies that had already made Americans’ lives more precarious. Fighting that instability can be Biden’s calling card for 2024.
“The system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed,” Klein writes.
At first, the confusion between Klein and the woman she calls “Other Naomi” was bizarre, but somewhat understandable. Both women rose to prominence in the 1990s writing “big idea” books. Klein wrote about “the ravages of expanding market logics and corporate power,” while Wolf was a “standard-bearer of 1990s feminism.” The misidentification became more vexing as Wolf’s focus wandered into politics more broadly; while Klein warned of the climate crisis, Wolf feared the Green New Deal was cover for “fascism.”
Klein might have maintained her long public silence, she writes, “if Covid hadn’t intervened.” Not only was she, like everyone, much more online, but during the pandemic Wolf slid into what Klein calls the “Mirror World.” The once-liberal feminist began making regular appearances with Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon to push anti-vaccine conspiracies. With newfound free time thanks to “that damn virus,” Klein dove in after her doppleganger, observing Wolf on Bannon’s podcast, Carlson’s show and other outlets of the authoritarian right, hoping to understand what had driven Wolf — and thousands of other former liberals and leftists — to descend into the mirror world.
As Klein notes, Wolf entered “the destabilizing period of the pandemic in an already highly destabilized state.” (Her most recent book had just been pulped by its U.S. publisher due to glaring factual errors.) This made her and those who lost their businesses or livelihoods to the pandemic vulnerable to people like Bannon, who told them lockdowns were just a ploy by the global elite to remake society.
“And because the system is rigged, and most people are indeed getting screwed,” Klein writes, “without a firm understanding of capitalism’s drive to find new profit sources to enclose and extract, many will imagine there is a cabal of uniquely nefarious individuals pulling the strings.” None of this excuses Wolf or other misinformation spreaders. But it explains the appeal of these messages — and why Bannon and others think this “MAGA Plus” will work in the future.
Klein’s book focuses largely on Wolf and her fellow travelers. But the instability that drove many into the mirror world affected all of us, and continues to ripple through society today. While it hasn’t driven everyone to fact-free fairylands, Americans have re-evaluated how confident they are even in what, on paper, is a strong economy. “I don’t think that people measure the health of the economy,” Klein told me in an interview last week, “based on the jobs numbers for any given month. I think they look at their grocery bills, whether the shops are boarded up, whether things sort of feel kind of busted.”
Get tickets for Chris Hayes’ “Why Is This Happening Now?” live tour, with guests Naomi Klein and Joy Reid, on Oct. 16 in Philadelphia.
To be clear, partisanship influences Americans’ views of the economy. As does media coverage: Recession fears pervaded stories about the economy for much of 2022, for example.
But that isn’t the whole story. It’s been 12 years since Obama, in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, acknowledged that “for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.” That remains true; add a global pandemic, with its death, disruption and subsequent inflation, and you can understand why most Americans think things are still “kind of busted.”
As economics writer Kyla Scanlon puts it, “The economy can be good, but that can be meaningless if people feel unsafe and uncertain and unsure.” Those feelings can dovetail with something that voters feel is missing from Biden 2024. In last week’s Wall Street Journal poll showing Biden and Trump running even at 46% apiece, 52% said Trump has a vision for the future, while just 44% said the same of Biden. “Re-stabilizing America” can be that vision.
This pivot would build on the repositioning of the last Democratic president. By the fall of 2011, the country had escaped the worst of the Great Recession, with 17 straight months of job growth. But Obama trailed Mitt Romney in polling averages; in an August 2011 Gallup poll, just 26% of Americans approved of Obama’s handling of the economy. Sound familiar?
That December, in that speech in Kansas, Obama unveiled a new rhetorical theme for his campaign: the fight against inequality. “Gaping inequality,” he declared, “gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try.” (It should be noted that this framing owes much to the Occupy Wall Street movement.) Austerity was out; income inequality and tax fairness were in. Obama rode that message to a comfortable victory the following year. And his focus on inequality cemented its centrality in American politics, paving the way for Bidenomics’ approach of government growing the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out.” Which brings us to what a second term of Bidenomics looks like. A full platform is beyond the scope of this column, but a few initial steps stand out. One easy starting point that builds on work already done in Biden’s first term would be to call out big business: not just Big Tech and Big Pharma, but all the companies that, whether through corporate consolidation, share buybacks or worker exploitation, have hurt Americans’ pocketbooks and made their lives more precarious. The president can also expand upon the environmental efforts of his first term — reflecting younger voters’ understandable fears of the climate crisis — and double down on his goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. As Klein told me, “You need policy solutions that tell people, ‘Actually, it’s called the social safety net for a reason.’” More broadly, as Klein told me, “You need policy solutions that tell people, ‘Actually, it’s called the social safety net for a reason.’” In addition to reinstating 2021’s expanded child care tax credit, which Biden already has called for, the president could propose a plan to fix America’s broken child care system, which ties up the time and money of millions of working families. Strengthening Social Security and Medicare also remains a political winner — and it’s a rare instance where Biden can tell Americans he’s fulfilling Trump’s broken promise. If “re-stabilizing America” sounds ambitious, that’s because it has to be. As president, Obama didn’t so much reverse inequality as he fought it to a standstill. The share of income going to the top 1%, which had risen steadily from Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the 2008 financial crisis, finally plateaued during Obama’s presidency, but remained higher than any decade since the 1930s. Yet the inequality fight gave Obama a new ambition for his second term, one that Americans liked. (And should Democrats hold Congress after the 2024 elections, they’ll quite likely no longer have to contend with Sens. Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.) During the 2020 campaign, Biden ran on a return to normalcy — an end to what he called the “aberrant” Trump presidency. On the one hand, unlike his predecessor, Biden follows the law. But Americans clearly still feel overwhelmed in the post-pandemic malaise. “People need very robust policy solutions to these crises,” Klein told me, “and if they’re not seeing them manifest, then they will be more attracted to a kind of a counterfeit anti-elitism, which is what the Bannons of the world are selling.” The president is right to tout his first-term economic achievements. But that resume must be paired with a vision for his second term. Otherwise, Democrats risk reprising the failed “America is already great” messaging of 2016. Fighting America’s epidemic of instability can avoid that trap, cement Biden’s legacy and defeat Trumpism again.
James Downie is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. 
