The Troll Decade

From online trolls at Reddit to political trolls like Donald Trump, to ultimate trolls like ISIS, this decade had been marked by a rejection of societal norms by people – mainly men – who confuse liberty with license.

I have been dealing with online trolls for 30 years and when I confront one now I always ask the same question, whether they understand the difference between the ordered liberty of the Constitution and the mere license of “I want what I want,” the essential role of government in guaranteeing that liberty is extended to all.

Sure, the Declaration of Independence held the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be self-evident, but it went immediately to how those rights were to be established:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  

In no case do I get anything like an answer. Trolls aren’t interested in an honest debate about anything, least of all their trolling. They are only interested in what they call their “rights,” never mind its interference with the rights of others, never mind if it ignores responsibility.

It’s almost enough to make you swear off libertarianism.

Every online community I have ever been in has run afoul of trolls, who insist that their “First Amendment Rights” triumph over everything, including others’ First Amendment Rights. What happened at Reddit  has happened at dozens of other sites over the years. The trolls drive out intelligent discourse, destroy the community, and then move on like a plague of locusts.

I’m currently seeing some of that at Seeking Alpha, which I joined after being invited to leave TheStreet.com by a new executive editor last year. The site has brought in new tools to alert editors to trolling, and to discourage it when you’re writing something on their forums. The result is that I’m now one of their leading authors, but site traffic and my own income are both way down.

Online trolls see a growing field with active discussion, then swoop in with their anger and their misogyny, their racism and their unity of purpose in the face of civility. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is politics or finance, sports or gaming. You take them on and it’s “The Argument Clinic,” you protest and they’ll scream about “Free Speech,” you try to organize against them and it becomes personal. If you’re female this carries a real threat, and I think this is the whole point. Trolls are, in the end, nothing but bullies.

And so politics has delivered its own troll in the form of Donald Trump. Had he just put the money he inherited from his father, Fred Trump (left), into T-Bills, many years ago, he would be worth much, much more than he in fact is. He is the ultimate child of privilege, pretending to be the friend of “the little man,” one right out of the Coen Brothers’ “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”

He is, in fact, merely the latest incarnation of something that has driven many states down over the last six years. Whether you’re talking about Wisconsin, Maine, North Carolina, or Texas, the politics of trolling gives license to its friends and rains destruction on its foes. Women are subject to being driven into slavery by their rapists, labor unions are systematically destroyed, voting rights are trampled and the environment destroyed for short-term profit and the insane fun of it.

There is nothing special about Donald Trump save his willingness to “go there” – to express the trolling mindset succinctly, in plain language, without apology. This is what I’ve been writing about for a decade as being at the heart of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. The aim is always to win by only a little, and to dump whole groups of supporters after each victory, as a lesson to the others.

If Democrats are engaged in creeping socialism, as Republicans contend, there can no longer be doubt that what too many Republicans have engaged in over the last 6 years is creeping Hitlerism.

It’s clear where all this leads. It leads to Latin America. It leads to Africa. It leads to the death of civil society. When civil society is fighting for its very existence against a foe that is engaged in trolling, the choices of voters narrow, because civil society itself is necessarily diverse, unable to hold nations to any single course. Force the majority to choose and you get internecine squabbling, which makes the unity trolls offer seem attractive, especially to military and industrial trolls for whom top-down “leadership” makes for a comfortable lifestyle choice.

Finally there are the ultimate trolls, those who put their hateful rhetoric into hateful action. I’m looking at you, ISIS.

ISIS is the product of Wahhabism, itself an extreme reaction to the extreme environment of Arabia. Its strictures on diet, on dress, and on behavior were necessary 300 years ago, when to live “outside the tent” of society literally meant a quick death. Arabia’s acquisition of enormous wealth under the Saudi Kings, in the last century, created a dynamic tension which the Saudis answered through a policy of “freedom for me but not for thee, ” in other words trolling. Members of the Saudi elite need never work, they can travel and have their hearts’ desires satisfied, so long as they return and follow the old strictures to the letter, at least in the public square.

Hypocrisy! Base hypocrisy! So said, first, Osama Bin Laden, a son of one of the Kingdom’s biggest industrialists. So, too, said his followers, and death to America! Death to Israel! Isn’t that what Wahhabism demands, ultimately? Why yes, it does. When, in the wake of 9-11, Bin Laden and his leadership were hunted to their deaths, ISIS moved in to fill the vacuum. Its leaders had no connection to the money, even if they took their funding from it. They meant to be the spear that would impose Wahhabism – pure, eternal – upon the entire world. A crusade for the prophet! You know, like Oliver Cromwell and Cotton Mather.

This is appealing to those who have nothing, to those who feel oppressed, and to those whose leaders keep all wealth for themselves and their kinsmen, ignoring all the Prophet said about the debt we owe to strangers. So destroy the world, bring us back our Stone Age tools, and let us remake it again in the image of the Prophet’s visions, as we interpret them.

It is, in the end, madness. But it’s what happens when civil society is thwarted by the need for order, and it is what happens when trolling seeks absolute power in its own name. Is there really any difference, this troll asks, between destroying Palmyra and the U.S. in Vietnam destroying villages in order to save them? Or is that, merely a continuum, with what the Wahhabist demands being merely another, more moral choice?

It’s fun to watch America’s Social Conservatives try to deal with ISIS, because for guys like Mike Huckabee and Bill Donohue, Pat Robertson and the Duck Dynasty crowd, it’s like looking at themselves in a funhouse mirror. ISIS is their own wish fulfillment fantasy made real, even if their trolling is aimed at merely destroying “secular” values in exchange for “Christian” ones.

Here’s the thing. Secular values are the ultimate Christian values. They are the ultimate Muslim values as well. Secular values are tolerant, secularists are open to strangers of all kinds, and their gifts include progress, ordered liberty, scientific advance, and, potentially, prosperity for all.

For the troll, who believes ultimately only in their own “freedom,” their own license, their own “right” to control others and dictate how the world should be, ISIS is the ultimate expression of what they’re about. Many in America can’t see that because their own view of their “freedom,” and the “oppression of others” needed to obtain it, results in a different world than that of ISIS. But it’s the same world, a world destroyed, a medieval world subject only to God’s wrath. We have met the enemy and he is us.

God is the ultimate troll. Or she can be, when we ignore her will, which you will find by opening any science textbook, paying particular attention to the section on Climate Science.