The Politics of Trolling: A Few Reflections

It seems to me that the label "troll" is much misused. Certain lazy writers will apply it to any criticism. Straightforward political commentary, or satire, are routinely mislabeled this way.

A troll is not merely someone who disagrees with you, or who even happens to annoy or offend you in their disagreement. A troll is someone who makes it their business to annoy you or offend you with disagreement. They do not address themselves to the world at large, but make a point of going specifically where they are not wanted. They enter other peoples' civil conversations in uncivil fashion. "Stop your talking among yourselves and address me!" they demand, putting others on the spot, and often demanding they answer absurdities and irrelevancies, often absurdities and irrelevancies which the troll themselves recognizes as such, or otherwise endure their attacks (though in fairness, they also mean to go on attacking you regardless of what you say).

This is because they are uninterested in an exchange of ideas. They are not even interested in persuading others. Rather they are the self-appointed police of what is acceptable, meting out punishment to those they see as unacceptable, or even disrupting it. They cannot shut other people down by command, but they can waste their time, and still more, make them miserable. They can confuse and distract, disgust and offend, embarrass and wound. They can, in short, harass them, sabotage them, bully them.

That last word is critical. Bullying is something those with more power do to those with less; something those who feel less inhibited do to those who feel more inhibited. The exploitation of the asymmetry is critical. And the asymmetry itself points to a reality not often owned to which is that, in practice, bullying tends to go from right to left.

Writing those words, I could almost see the right-wingers foaming at the mouth with rage.

I remind them, however, of the way I have defined trolling here--not simply any critical or satirical statement, but a statement presented in this particular way, for this particular effect.

I remind them, too (or explain to those who have not read this blog before) that not everyone they think of as left really is of the left--with many a practitioner of "identity politics," for example, really a right-wing nationalist whose nationalism simply happens to attach to a traditionally marginalized group.

Finally I remind them that, as a rereading should suffice to confirm, my statement is not absolute. I do not say here that bullying can never go from left to right, just that it is less common (I suspect, much, much less common), because it so much less consistent with their values, and so much more dissonant with them; while their practical situation reinforces this.

The reason is that it is those on the left who value reason, freedom, openness, fairness. Many a self-identified conservative insists that they are all about these things, but conservatism is, at bottom, defined by a more guarded attitude toward them. Conservatism is founded on a skepticism about reason, especially in the realm of human affairs. Its respect for freedom is limited by its fear of what "too much" freedom might mean. It is, accordingly, more concerned with order--with enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules--and more accommodating of irrational bases for action, not least authority and prejudice (in the broad sense of the term), and the sacrifice of openness and fairness to them.

Moreover, those on the left are convinced that they have reason and fairness on their side. They want, need, to persuade others of their rightness. At the same time, those hostile to them can and do exploit their commitment to dialogue and fairness by sucking them into exactly the position where they wind up trying to defend themselves in a legitimate fashion against the unfair tactics of a troll.

One can go still further and consider certain attitudes, certain kinds of behavior--an admiration of self-assertion and aggression for their own sake, even when, or because, this goes along with callousness and meanness, with inegalitarian and even anti-egalitarian sentiments or presumptions. Being an "asshole" is hardly a deep or sophisticated basis for a political ideology, but there seems no shortage of those who treat it as if it were that, and it would be tough to argue that the "cult of the asshole" is not something more prevalent on the right, much of which, in the age of "greed is good," status politics and the rest, positively revels in such attitudes.

There is, too, the not insignificant reality of who actually has power. We live in a profoundly unequal society, with regard to wealth and status, and it is those who are on top, those who are comfortable with things as they are and ferociously hostile to those who would have them another way, who determine what is allowably respectable and mainstream in speech and expression. By and large, the further to the right one is, however much they may complain (and do they ever complain!), the safer and more secure they can feel; the further to the left one is, the greater the risk they take when they express themselves, the more easily are they put on the defensive and faced with the outrage of a mob. (Bill Maher may pal around on his show with Steve Bannon and the rest of the Breitbart crowd. Can you picture him similarly paling around with genuine Marxists? Of course not.)

There seems every reason to think that this does make a difference with regard to how often a person will act out in this way, whether they end up aggressor--or victim. And it seems pointless to deny this all in the name of that pseudo-fairness which assumes that both sides must be equally guilty or equally blameless in a given situation.