Neglected left-wing issues get usurped by right-wing political figures

Evidence

To return to an earlier theme, corporate branding offers some useful tools for understanding the dynamic. Under trademark law, a brand that is not actively being used can be deemed dormant and thus fair game for another party to usurp. I started to feel that what had been happening to me, with Other Naomi, has happened to the left much more broadly—with Bannon and Vance and Meloni and others. Issues that we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World. If the arrival of one’s doppelganger is a message that something needs attending to, it feels like this flashing message is something to which a great many of us need to attend. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 408

Categorization

• DEFINE: Klein formalizes the doppelganger mechanism: trademark dormancy law becomes her metaphor for how neglected political issues are fair game for the Mirror World’s usurpation.
• XREF: Directly extends the book’s earlier doubling device — connects to the intro chapters establishing Other Naomi as analytic instrument. — connects to: The New Right consolidated unnoticed while the left focused on itself — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 483