Naomi Klein's Plan to Save the Left

Larissa MacFarquhar has a smart profile of New Left poster child Naomi Klein in this week's New Yorker. Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine has embarked on a lifelong project to rehabilitate the Left. In part, this means drawing neat parallels between capitalism and communism in order to counter the equivalency between communism and Stalin. When Pinochet, Yeltsin, and Suharto did terrible things, they each took the blame, she points out; but when Stalin did terrible things, Marxism itself took the hit. Klein says the key for American leftists is to move the center leftward. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”