The Gaping Holes In Naomi Klein's Grand Conspiracy Theory

Right-wing critics tend to go easy on Naomi Klein. But in the latest New Republic, senior editor Jonathan Chait - who is, if anything, to Klein's left - presents the most withering and convincing critique of Klein's Shock Doctrine, and of the leftish politics that Klein champions, that I've yet read:

"What makes Klein's thesis so odd, and so awful, is that in fact there is an unlimited supply of raw material, an abundant basis in reality, for the sorts of arguments that she wants to make. The last two decades certainly have seen the global spread of absolutist free-market ideology. Many of the newest adherents of this creed are dictators who have learned that they can harness the riches of capitalism without permitting the freedoms once thought to flow automatically from it. . . All these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and significant problems. It's just that they are not the same outrage or the same problem. And Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense."