Naomi spent her adolescence in her room writing poetry or experimenting in the bathroom with makeup. Bonnie was appalled. She worried that Naomi was turning into a brat, thinking about clothes, spending time in front of the mirror. “I think we were overly concerned about the kind of typical teen-age stuff she was into,” Bonnie says. “She read Judy Blume! I was beside myself. I was a feminist—I wanted my daughter to be good at math.” “They had imagined themselves to be breeding a new kind of post-revolutionary child,” Naomi wrote in her twenties. “Hadn’t they diligently mushed their own baby food? Read Parent Effectiveness Training? Banned war toys and other ‘gendered’ play?” Bonnie says now, “I think she thought, ‘What’s wrong with having a good time?’ And there was something in us—although I don’t like to admit it—something of the overearnest, you know? We were always fighting something. There were always people who were the bad guy.” In fact, it was worse than that. Naomi suffered from a kind of spiritual claustrophobia: she had glumly concluded that any path she chose in life—conformist or rebellious, lawyer or itinerant poet—would be equally hackneyed and ridiculous. And so even her parents’ idea of a good time, which usually involved getting out into nature and attending to one’s bodily needs under artificially primitive conditions (“another ponchoed picnic”), was to her just more proof of their irredeemable cheesiness and the vast gulf between them and herself. “All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,” she wrote. “That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar. . . . ”

Soon after she graduated from high school, two catastrophic events erased her animus toward her parents and their politics. First, her mother had a severe stroke that initially left her quadriplegic. Naomi quit her job and spent most of the six months that Bonnie was in the hospital at her side. Then, during her first semester at the University of Toronto, a gunman killed fourteen women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, declaring, “I hate feminists.” She decided to call herself a feminist from then on.

Klein sat on a table, inside the MTV studios, in Manhattan. She swung her legs back and forth. She was wearing a long necklace and black high-heeled mini-boots. She may have made up with her parents, but in matters of style she stands firm against activism of the old school. She wears jeans, but she is groomed as flawlessly as an anchorwoman. She giggles, she makes jokes. She smiles a lot, especially onstage, though it is never clear whether she is smiling in amusement, politeness, irritation, or for some other reason. Her demeanor is friendly but guarded.

While they were waiting for the interview to start, the interviewer, a young man in a black T-shirt, asked her what she’d been doing lately. She told him that she’d been working on the movie version of “The Shock Doctrine,” which was being made by the director of “Road to Guantánamo.”

“Did you see ‘Road to Guantánamo’?” she asked.

“No. I heard about it, though.”

“It’s excellent—it’s intercut between interviews with the Tipton Three”—three young British men who were held in Guantánamo for two years—“and they’re just, like, blokes, you know? The best moment in the film was when one of them suggests going to Afghanistan because they’ve got massive naans there. That was the reason.”

The producer, a young man in jeans and an acid-lime polo shirt, appeared.

“We’ll be talking about China and the Olympics, about Darfur and intervention,” the interviewer said. “But also about you personally—how you became who you are—because it’s a young audience that looks up to each and every person on the program. The goal is to have them want to be like that person.”

“Are you going to ask me my favorite band?” she asked.

“We will, yes, I’m afraid.”

“I’m going to say M.I.A., just so you know.”

“That will definitely ingratiate you with the demographic,” the producer said.

“I’m sucking up, that’s why I’m here. D’you think I could get some tea?”

Klein has been a person whom young people look up to since she found herself in charge of emotional teach-ins right after the Montreal massacre. She spent most of her time in college on politics and journalism; she was the editor-in-chief of the university paper, the Varsity. Then, after her third year, the Globe and Mail offered her a job, and she dropped out of school to take it. At the age of twenty-three, she took over as the editor of This Magazine, the Canadian equivalent of The Nation. But after a little more than a year she started to get discouraged about the state of the left—she felt that it had run out of things to say, apart from being outraged by people it disagreed with—and she decided to go back to school.

When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate, she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in 1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in 1996 weren’t interested in identity; what they talked about was economics. At the time, corporations were starting to make inroads into schools: soft-drink companies were negotiating exclusive deals; advertisements were appearing in bathrooms. There was a feeling in the air that corporations were getting too powerful—more powerful than governments, but not accountable to anyone except their shareholders. And, at the same time that big corporations were withdrawing physically from the United States and opening factories overseas, visually, even spiritually, they were everywhere, insinuating their logos into what had once been public space. Young activists found this especially objectionable, perhaps because one of the places into which corporations insinuated themselves most effectively was youth and activism, folding mutiny into advertising so deftly that resistance seemed futile.

Klein dropped out of college again and started writing a book about the insidious new branding culture. She thought about how much she had loved shiny, plastic brand-name stuff when she was a kid—everyone had—and she concluded that a movement was doomed to hippies-only irrelevance if it condemned the longing and the pleasure that brands could create. “Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of deities in our culture,” she wrote later. “They are creating our most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian monuments.” She discovered that an anti-corporatist movement was brewing all over the world, in response to sweatshops abroad and brand encroachment at home. By 1999, she had finished “No Logo,” a book about brands and the new movement they had inspired. Then, in an extraordinary stroke of publishing luck, while “No Logo” was at the printer’s, enormous crowds of protesters suddenly materialized outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere—or, at least, that was how it appeared to the bewildered old left—and there was “No Logo” and Klein herself to explain it.

Klein lives with her husband, Avi Lewis, in a small house in Toronto, on a quiet street. Lewis is a host of political talk shows and a maker of documentaries; this year he is covering the U.S. elections for Al Jazeera English. Their house is very tidy, free of any sort of clutter. It is furnished simply, as though on one quick trip to Crate & Barrel. It does not look lived in, and, indeed, most of the time it is not: both Lewis and Klein are on the road so much that they estimate they have spent no more than two months in Toronto since they moved in, a year ago. Nonetheless, the house is important to her. “I come from such a line of wanderers that I wanted to stop wandering,” Klein says. “In Montreal, the city I grew up in, there’s no trace of us.” (Klein’s parents moved to British Columbia after Bonnie’s stroke, because the weather made it easier to get around in a wheelchair; Bonnie has become a disability-rights activist. Seth also lives in British Columbia, working on poverty issues for a think tank.) “I don’t like to go to the city I grew up in and feel like a stranger,” Klein says. “This is Avi’s city, he goes back generations here, and that’s as close to roots as I’m going to get.”

Although Klein and Lewis spend a lot of time apart, they make a point of preserving their dependence upon each other. Avi tries not to work when Naomi needs him. “He feeds her and takes care of her while she’s writing,” Bonnie says. “He edits things first.” He accompanies her on her book tours whenever he can. In 2002, Klein and Lewis concluded that their only hope of spending a long stretch together was to do a joint project, and they decided to make a film. They were tired of being against things all the time, and they were always being asked what they would suggest as an alternative, so they started travelling, looking for something that they could feel good about. They settled on Argentina, and ended up making “The Take,” a moving documentary about a group of laid-off workers who broke into their shuttered factory and started it up again as a collective. At the time, Buenos Aires was in turmoil, and every now and again a protest they were documenting would turn violent and the police would start shooting, and there was an ongoing discussion about what to do. Lewis wanted to run; Klein wanted to stay. “I was trying to dissuade the cowboys in our crew from putting themselves in danger,” Lewis says. “I was, like, ‘Just be safe, guys, it’s not our country, we’re here at best in a capacity of solidarity, it’s not the time to die.’ But Naomi said, ‘Here’s the principle: if something is happening and we’re the only ones witnessing it, we have a responsibility to posterity.’ ”

Klein and Lewis agree on most political issues, but Klein seems more ready to break things; more cynical; angrier. “I think Avi is too quick to reject revolutionary movements,” she says. “I think that incremental change makes sense in the Canadian context, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the mountains of Chiapas. I don’t fetishize guerrilla violence, but I think there are situations where people are justified in taking up arms. We’ve had fights about that.” Unlike Klein, the descendant of embittered ex-Communists, Lewis comes from a distinguished political family that has always been Socialist rather than Communist, and so has kept its political faith. “My earliest memories are of conventions and election nights, seeing grownups crying or celebrating,” Lewis says. “We understood in my family that we were part of a cause, a movement, and the Party, capitalized, was a big part of that.”

The politics of the Lewis family have changed very little in the past hundred years. Avi Lewis’s great-grandfather Maishe Losz was the leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Socialist party, in his small town just east of Bialystok. The Bund was anti-Bolshevik; it believed that revolution should be achieved through democratic processes, even if that meant compromise. Thus, the Bundist maxim: “It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.” In 1921, fearing that he would be killed by the Red Army, Losz fled to Canada. Losz’s son David Lewis became the national leader of the Canadian democratic socialist party, the New Democratic Party. The N.D.P. never formed a national government, but it came to power in the provinces: in Canada, socialism was mainstream. David Lewis persuaded the Party to delete the eradication of capitalism from its manifesto, and he crushed movement dogmatism and indiscipline. (“When in heaven’s name are we going to learn that working-class politics and the struggle for power are not a Sunday-school class?” he asked.) David’s son Stephen, Avi’s father, also followed in the family tradition, and was elected the leader of the N.D.P. in Ontario at the age of thirty-two. (Avi’s mother, Michele Landsberg, is a journalist, who is well known in Canada for her feminism and her pugnacious left-wing politics—in her columns, conservatives are always “jack-booted” or “henchmen.”) When, in the late sixties, a faction called “the Waffle” threatened to splinter the Party, Stephen Lewis crushed it, just as his father had crushed factions before. For Stephen and for David, loyalty to the Party was paramount. They would not permit the left to destroy itself.

Stephen Lewis left office thirty years ago, and David Lewis died in 1981, but the Lewises are still well known and beloved in Canada. “I live in that fantasy world in which you should say what you believe in and shouldn’t retreat because the electorate may not be receptive,” Stephen Lewis says. “That may explain why my own leadership was one of remarkable futility, almost legendary futility.” Recently, Lewis spent five years as the United Nations special envoy for H.I.V. /AIDS in Africa, but his respite from campaigning has not made him quieter. “I’m more fundamentalist now,” he says. “I have no patience for capitalism at all. I see now that there is almost nothing that is positive in this ugly international system, and that’s why I embrace Naomi’s view of the way the world works. I’m actually tired of my rhetorical outbursts—I’d like to engage in physical aggression.”

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“I think there is, for my parents’ generation, a sense of defeat,” Avi Lewis says. “They grew up in a postwar period when it seemed like the world was changeable—a welfare state had been built and had to be protected and extended. But their adult lives have encompassed a long deterioration of the standard of living for the majority of people on this continent, and as they’ve seen the gains of the sixties and seventies largely erased, they’ve started to feel more and more hopeless. Whereas Naomi and I grew up in a time when the backlash was already well under way, so we may be just as pessimistic, but we don’t feel defeated, because we never had the luxury of hope.”

These days, Avi Lewis looks very much like the product of his family, but this was not always so. “I rebelled furiously, but without rebelling in the most hurtful way, which would have been to rebel politically,” he says. “I was a host on MuchMusic, which is our MTV. I knew that I wasn’t doing politics the way I was brought up to, and I was conflicted about that. My parents would ask me, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? I know you love music, and it’s cool for you to hang out with Bowie, and you sometimes get to do a one-hour special on music and politics in South Africa, which is sort of political, but are you sure you’re doing the most you can?’ I was alienated from my own political inheritance. I had a tradition to fit into. I had a platform from the time I was four or five years old.” It was at this point that Lewis met Klein. They were both covering the Canadian elections in 1993—he for MuchMusic, she for CBC. When Lewis met Klein, he felt that she was freer of her family than he was of his, and this somehow relieved him of the urge to run away. “I always got the feeling that Naomi was the author of her own politics,” Lewis says. “And when I got close to her I started seizing the reins of my own political development.”