Oh gosh, I remember that Doctorow post about Doppelganger and how irritated I was with the "Klein was a leftist, Wolf was a liberal" setup; you're exactly right that it feels like the kind of thing you say to reassure yourself that your ideological cohort won't fall into the conspiracy thinking that Naomi Wolf did. I don't know how much that kind of thinking is present in the book, but it seems to be how a number of people read it.

And yes, definitely agreed that there's no political alignment that protects you from bigotry and assholism. I think there are policies and structures that do more to lead us away from those things on the macro level! But that never means someone expounding those policies is free to stop thinking about their own ideas and attitudes and behavior.