For the last five years, I’ve intermittently argued with a kind of Trump supporter who is not accurately represented by polls or empirical research on politics (in communication and political science). Call this person Chester.
Chester completely supports the current GOP, and everything it does or says. But he thinks of himself who is critically and rationally supporting GOP policies. I’ve watched him abandon positions in favor of new ones when the politically correct position of supporting GOP changes. And, each time he flips, he denies that he’s flipped. Every time he loyally adopts the new politically correct GOP position he insists that his adoption of this position is an independent choice.
He likes to think of himself as an independent and objective thinker who has mental reservations about the GOP but supports them regardless of what they do or say or support. In fact, he’s just intellectually lazy af.
He likes to think of himself as a person—objective, independent, rational—yet he never does any of the things that an objective, independent, rational thinker would do. He never looks at sources that might trouble his beliefs, and all of his information is second (or third) hand. He repeats claims he never tests. He engages with what he thinks of as “liberals” in a lazy trolling way. He never reads any of the links they provide. He just relies on what his in-group sources tell him, all the time thinking that repeating those talking points makes him an independent thinker because he isn’t a “liberal.”
For Chester, “critical” or “independent” thinking isn’t about some kind of process (e.g., we consider the best sources from various positions, look at their data and methods). It’s just loyally repeating the talking points from the position we’ve decided is objective. And we haven’t decided it’s objective because we’ve looked at a lot of research from various points of view and concluded that this source is reliable and rational (for instance, it represents alternative points of view fairly—something we can only rationally determine if we’ve read those other points of view). Chester is engaged in identity politics in a really ugly (and demagogic) way: we can decide that what this person is saying is true because they are loyal to the in-group.
People like that might be capable of tremendously hard scholarly work. Being able to succeed in school and being intellectually lazy aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s a lot of scholarship showing that some people are drawn to closure and feel threatened by ambiguity.
What I’m saying is that there are people who adopt an identity of an “independent” who aren’t in their actions or thinking, but only in their sense of themselves.
Here’s what they are. First, they are fully willing to post in threads on the pages of people who have politics they abhor, and that action makes them feel that they are being tolerant, and open to new ideas. Their version of disagreement is to repeat the talking points they’ve gotten from elsewhere. They refuse to read sources that might complicate their viewpoint. [1]
Second, they can’t defend their positions in rational argumentation, and, when that’s pointed out (such as by pointing out that they’re repeating debunked, irrational, internally contradictory, and/or incoherent claims), at that point, they retreat to the claim that they like trolling the libs, and they don’t really care if what they’re saying is true or not.
Let’s pay attention to that second part, since it’s the only aspect of them that is consistent. They just don’t really care if what they’re saying is true, accurate, or logical, if their policies hurt others, or even those policies will hurt them in the long run. They wander around repeating talking points because they like the image of themselves as someone who is engaged in politics, but they aren’t engaged enough to think about what they’re saying or care about the long-term consequences of what they’re supporting. They’re moral nihilists and, as I said, intellectually lazy af.
They’re energetic about posting talking points, but not about thinking about what those talking points are.
As far as their justifying what they do as “trolling the libs,” if you throw out a line with bait, and their “taking the bait” means pointing out that your argument is wrong in ways you refuse to admit, and providing sources you refuse to consider, then you haven’t really trolled the libs. You’ve repped supporting Trump as irrational, incoherent, and stupid. You’re just the Black Knight claiming you aren’t dead yet. With a hook you’ve swallowed so hard it’s in your small intestines.
[1] Here is a point where English is weird. I used to say “they won’t engage with any…” and I was heard as I’m advocating that someone has to engage with every. Nope. Just the best.
I love reading what you write…
Back in the days when I used to argue with strangers on the internet (a bottomless and fruitless black hole of time to current me), I would note that trolls getting themselves banned from forums (in this instance, science forums discussing evolution) for the tactics you’re describing was always weirdly bittersweet for them. They’d be happy on one hand that they’d annoyed everyone so much that they got banned (because making liberals cry), but also so addicted to being disruptive assholes that they’d sock-puppet themselves back into the conversation before inevitably being banned again.
And, as you suggest, I think that they really thought that they were engaging with different points of view and that the forum hosts were being the cruel and intolerant ones by kicking them out. And I think that’s because no one ever taught them (or successfully taught them, anyway) the difference between debate and deliberation. They simply did not understand that the ground rules for productive discussion go beyond bringing a bunch of inflexible positions and demands to the table. You have to be willing to listen and learn something, skills at which demagogues do not excel almost by definition.
And that’s sad, ultimately, because the ability to empathize and compromise are, to me, the fundamental prerequisites to being an adult. Dealing with demagogues is ultimately dealing with people who have never been allowed to grow into the realization that the purpose of the world is not to validate their wants.
I read this immediately on the heels of Rebecca Solnit’s current piece in the Guardian about the laziness and danger of extolling centrism. The resonances between Chester the Right Winger and, let’s call him… Joe the Centrist are strong. The centrist doesn’t have strong policy arguments about why their ideas are better; they’re better because they’re not extreme, and they’re not extreme because they’re centrist. Centrism is a declaration of “independence” from “dogma” without any recognition that it’s become its own dogma. And so on.
Much like people who identify as “libertarian” (with a small ‘l’), most people I know who identify as centrists are conservatives who don’t want to identify that way, but heaven knows they don’t want to identify as liberals.
I’m not sure that’s true. Definitely, there are some people who always vote GOP who claim to be centrist, and aren’t. But there are centrists. I’m not one, but they do exist and have real positions.
Let us imagine, for a moment, a world in which the nature of our communications networks encourages not just “echo chamber” effects — users in a social network self-selecting to only associate with others with similar views, for example — but some form of competition for attention that incentivizes novelty. A “radicalization” incentive, if you will. If the coin of the realm is attention, expect it to be awarded to whoever can extrapolate from the agreed-upon premises to a (slightly) bolder, more extreme position, and expect the process to be a.) incremental and b.) iterative.
In such an environment, instead of the old-school “Overton Window” effect wherein cultural gatekeepers set the bounds of permissible discussion for all players, replacing it would be multiple silos of ideologically-aligned members, and each silo with its own Overton Window.
As these balkanized windows move ever-more-rapidly towards their own designated North Stars, they diverge at roughly double the rate at which they are internally radicalizing. And if at some point the Window of Silo A and the Window of Silo B (or C or D or Z) have zero overlap, a “No Common Ground” state has been reached. At this point Silo A and Silo B can’t settle their differences through any consensus-based system (i.e. democracy.) They can’t even agree on simple definitions of words or whether the sky is blue or magenta.
To become a Centrist on such shifting ground all one really need do is remain in place. One way to do this is to adhere to principles even in the face of political expediency — are you still opposed to the thing you opposed a year ago, now that your in-group has grabbed the reins of power and is doing that thing? OMG, you’re one of those dreaded Centrists, aren’t you?
Another, easier way to become a Centrist is to not pay very close attention to social media, and to thus drift out of the window of acceptable opinions within your designated silo. You check in after a year or two away and can’t understand what the hell all your friends are talking about. Instead of diving in, you slowly back away without making any sudden moves. Congratulations, you may be have become a Centrist! Or, worse yet (gasp!) a “moderate.”
I don’t really understand why anybody would make “the Center” their goal, any more than I understand why anyone would aspire to be “average.” But regardless of whether they are goals, for most of us they are destinations.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”