In the spirit of “know your enemy” I read this short-ish bio of Naomi Klein published last month in The New Yorker.  First, we should admire her for her ability to rile up the crowd and get young people reading, flowing into the streets, and speaking their (her?) mind.  Alas, if only the libertarian crowd was that successful.

Some of that rhetorical ability comes with a price to her coherence.  She preaches grass-roots, community-led movements that get the power back in the hands of the people, but wants that power and direct action to lead to “victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae.”  Huh?

Her husband says, “… she refuses to say, ‘Here’s the alternative, here’s what we all have to line up and fight for.’  Suspicion of people who know what the answer is — that’s very characteristic of our generation, and that’s one of the reason I’ve never gone into politics.  It’s very difficult for both of us when people look to us for the kind of certainty that earlier generations had.”  She claims to be critical of “left-wing, one-size-fits-all state solutions and of right-wing market ones.”  In No Logo, she wrote, “It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an overarching message, a master plan.  This is absolutely true, and we should be extraordinarily thankful.”  September 11th and Seattle evidently changed her mind on this.  “We were too ephemeral.”

But then Larissa MacFarquhar, the author of the New Yorker article, really gets to the heart of Klein.

But Klein doesn’t have much use for political parties. When she is asked about this, she explains that she has seen liberation movements betrayed by the politicians they fought to get elected, but her impatience appears to be rooted in something more than that: she seems to dislike parties and, indeed, governments, in a visceral way, almost the way that Milton Friedman does. In principle, she is a Keynesian, but she distrusts centralization, institutions, platforms, theories—anything except extremely small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives. Basically, she really, really doesn’t like being told what to do.

So there it is.  Naomi Klein is an anarchist.  Further, she “slides into the position that politics is always and everywhere about enrichment.”  Ahhh, so she is a Public Choice follower as well.  And check this out: “But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves.”  I couldn’t write it better myself.

Later in the article we find out she hates the earnestness associated with activists, “Going for a walk and chanting — I get nothing out of it.”  She only likes protests that are “theatrical enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the earnestness to a level she can tolerate.”  Yup, that’s pretty much my feeling too (putting aside my feelings on the actual goals (if any) of the protest).

So, shockingly, I have to ask myself, “What’s my problem with Naomi Klein?”  She dislikes government (although her stated love for programs like rent control call this commitment into question).  She’s all for the local and the devolution of political power.  She dislikes the directionless, pointless multiculturalism of the post-Seattle protest movement.  Lastly, she sees the inevitable post-Obama disappointment that’s coming.

But when I boil this article down, I come up against one big problem:  She’s against power …. unless it’s her kind of power …. which she refuses to define for you in any coherent way.  According to Klein, government is bad unless it’s doing what she wants.  Business is bad, because she can’t tell it what to do.  Protesters are bad, unless they are on her program.

Klein needs to ask herself: why is my program immune to the corrupting influence of power?  What am I doing that’s different from all previous experiments in governance?  If I dismantle the marketplace, isn’t the only feasible replacement power, which I despise?