Trolling is the New Politics
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Your classic troll was an amoral sociopath or played
one on the internet. His only cause was his own
amusement. He advocated horrible and contradictory
causes because it amused him to infuriate people. If
he could get an entire group howling for his blood,
he won. If an outraged media reported on his antics,
he was a prince among trolls. Chaos and absurdity
were his only agendas.
But
eventually the trolls who did it for the "Lulz" gave
way to the "Moralfags" sincere trolls who
were sincerely terrible people. They had the same
style as trolls, but there was nothing to
deconstruct there. Trolling was just how they
advocated for their agenda. It was like the
difference between Andy Kaufman and David Letterman.
When you actually have an agenda and a program, your
surreal deconstruction isn't deconstructing
anything. It's just a stylistic choice, it's how you
present your agenda.
It's the difference between Dadaists dumping a
kitchen sink in a fashionable art gallery and a
fashionable retailer selling art prints of that
kitchen sink a hundred years later. Deconstruction
becomes fashion. The subversive becomes stylistic.
The troll turns sincere.
Today the sincere troll is everywhere. There was a
time when Anonymous was a name associated with
random acts of trolling, many of them nasty and
malicious. Then it became trolling for a cause. It
stopped being subversive or chaotic and just became
another tool of political intimidation.
The sincere trolls really took off on television
where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert made it big.
Stewart pretended to be subverting the news, when he
was just stylistically updating it. That was what
made mainstream news personalities love him, rather
than hate him. Stewart wasn't really at war with the
news media. He was teaching them how to make their
left-wing biases hip.
Stephen Colbert was the prototype of the sincere
troll. Underneath the dour, humorless fake
conservative with an agenda was a dour, humorless
real liberal with an agenda. His move to CBS made
that obvious and sent viewers fleeing to watch the
sincere trolls still pretending to be trolls.
Obama is the highest profile sincere troll, but the
only real joke in his routines is that the most
powerful man in the world is acting as if his
trolling is subversive, when it actually is one of
the ways that he maintains his power. Like Putin's
global political trolling, the latest being his move
to welcome Jews to move back to Russia, trolling is
just a more brazen form of propaganda.
But trolling with an agenda is not everywhere. The
old style chaotic trolls, like Joshua Goldberg, who
pretended to be everything from a social justice
warrior to an ISIS terrorist, are a dying breed. The
new troll is just an extra-obnoxious political
activist who wears Jon Stewart's clown nose while
attacking people for political reasons. It can be
amusing, but mainly to those who agree.
In substance, the new troll is really no different
than a belligerent talk show host. The style is
edgier and trendier. The aim is to disrupt
narratives and then construct new ones in their
place. And that's where the old trolls, who were
concerned with disruption as an end rather that a
means, differ from the new trolls who adopted
disruption as a means for spreading their message.
Trolling is arguably the new politics. And you don't
have to be young to play the game. Trump is great at
it. But when presidents and billionaires, the RNC
and the DNC, do something, it's not subversive
anymore. It's the new language of power. Trolling is
how we communicate now. And sincere trolling isn't
deconstructing or subverting, it's just a total
breakdown in civility.
A total breakdown in civility can be refreshing.
It's why watching Trump can be fun. But what it
really means is that discourse is now the YouTube
comments section even at the highest levels.
What happens when disruption becomes the norm? Then
it's no longer disruption. It's just a breakdown
into factions that spend all their time mocking each
other. Sincere trolling removes most of the
self-awareness of the classic troll, the new trolls
no longer understand that they're trolling because
trolling is just how they communicate now. Trolling
becomes the default humor and political commentary.
There are no standards and no true sincerity and
therefore no one to actually troll.
Sincere trolls are living out a joke that isn't
funny and has no actual punchline. They have
retained the old troll's sense of false superiority
by provoking other people, but when everyone is
trolling, then eventually there is no one left to
provoke. The sense of superiority is no longer at
actually provoking people, but at the expectation
that they would be provoked or that they should be
provoked.
The end results of that are hubs of insanity like
Salon where every headline reads like something a
deranged troll might come up with, but it's all
sincere, and it's all written to provoke people who
aren't reading it, but instead outrages liberals who
do read it, so that the site is effectively trolling
its own readers. And that's what sincere trolls
really end up doing. Instead of trolling their
enemies, they end up unintentionally trolling their
own side by making it crazier.
It's one reason why Colbert had to leave, because he
was increasingly being targeted by social justice
warriors who didn't get the joke, didn't like jokes
and just wanted to skip straight to the lynchings.
And so the sincere trolling comes full circle to a
point where trolling has become so sincere that it's
just hate. The ironic posture is discarded, the
distancing goes away, and there's just anger.
The classic troll filtered his anger through humor
and detachment. The sincere troll loses the
detachment and eventually the humor leaving behind
only the contempt and then the anger.
Trolling was always about contempt. Sincere trolling
becomes a collective contempt agenda. In other
words, propaganda. But even contempt contains a
measure of detachment. Eventually even that measure
of detachment erodes and all the filters between
agenda and rage vanish. The sincere troll tells
himself this is idealism. And yet what makes the
sincere troll seem so hip is the distancing
self-awareness, the dashes of self-mockery mixed in
with the collective contempt agenda. But this is
only a pose and politics eventually kills all poses.
Political power kills poses even faster.
Contempt is based on either cynicism or idealism. In
politics, it's fashionable to base contempt for the
other side on idealism. When contempt becomes based
purely on cynicism, then the rot has really set in.
And yet trolling is contempt based on cynicism. The
very need to mask that self-righteous anger which
makes political activists look like Howard Dean
yelling or a bearded Al Gore preaching, is itself a
cynical act. Sincere trolling is cynicism in the
service of idealism. But it ends as neither.
Cynicism is at least pragmatic. Idealism isn't.
Cynicism in the service of idealism is too
self-deluded to be properly cynical. Instead it's
just idealism gone rotten. It stinks of the limited
pragmatism of power in which the vile means become
the self-righteous ends into which the left, like
all totalitarian ideologies, eventually falls.
Obama doesn't believe anything he says. You can
understand what he believes only based on what he
does. Everything he says is only a cover for what he
really wants to do. This is cynicism in the service
of idealism. Obama offered the country a false
idealism in the service of his true idealism. Given
enough doses of this dichotomy and you end up with
Putin, a man who believes in nothing, because he is
the product of a wholly cynical idealistic system
where the only smart people were those who believed
in absolutely nothing, while appearing to be
completely sincere.
At the final stage of the sincere troll is a KGB or
Gestapo thug working people over for the greater
good. And when that's done, he no longer believes in
anything at all except the exercise of power.
The left found a new method of discourse with
sincere trolling. Its renewed sincerity was based on
the distancing effect of its new style. It did not
have any new beliefs. It only had a new style. But
the style's self-conscious cynicism lapsed into a
worldview that was unthinkingly cynical. Constant
trolling for idealistic reasons created a cynical
idealism, a limited idealism contained within a
larger cynical worldview maintained as a defense
mechanism against outside ideas and internal
dissent.
Another name for this mindset is fanaticism. The
fanatic hoards his idealism by shielding it with an
unacknowledged cynicism. This is how cults program a
constant contempt for the rest of the world.
Underneath the ironic stylings of the new discourse
was a narrow-minded fanaticism, around the core of
sincerity was a thick shell of dishonesty, the
idealism was strategically dependent on cynicism.
Instead of true self-awareness, there was only a
pose of self-awareness, a carefully calculated
contempt dispensed for idealistic reasons whose
idealism derived from a cynicism that had to be
concealed from the sincere troll's awareness. This
mental house of cards was fragile. It doled out lies
based on truth based on lies. It was so rotten with
its own distortions that it could only destroy.
This is now the mindset of our media, especially its
younger apparatchiks. It is increasingly the tenor
of our politics. As everything becomes politicized,
it takes on the sincerely insincere taint of
politics in which evil must constantly be done for
the greater good. Total politicization means total
insincerity which requires new forms of discourse
that maintain the illusion of sincerity by
acknowledging the insincerity. And so the sincere
troll becomes the political model with just enough
acknowledgement of his own insincerity to appear
sincere, just enough cynicism to appear idealistic,
just enough lies to appear to be a truthteller.