Opposing political camps define themselves by inversion rather than principle

Evidence

As I shadowed my double further into her world—a place where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists all in the name of saving and protecting “the children”—I found myself confronting yet more forms of doubling and doppelganging, these ones distinctly more consequential. Like the way that all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other—whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 33

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the mirror-world framing: politics as mutual negation rather than belief formation.
• XREF: connects to: The paleoliberal and neoliberal labels once marked opposing camps within the liberal revival — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 350