Trump, Trolling, and the Re-Wilding of the American Failed State

American trolls as home-grown barbarians

Trumpian Republicanism is infamous for trolling its opponents, but there’s some potential for confusion in observing as much, because there are two senses of “trolling” that both apply.

Angling for Attention

First, there’s the shady practice on internet chat rooms that’s comparable to “trolling” in the sense of angling for fish. The root meaning of “troll” in this case is from French and German words that mean “to run here and there, to ramble, or to walk or run in short steps.” In fishing the practice is to lure fish by jerking the line up and down, to animate the lure and fool the fish, sometimes just by trailing multiple lines from the back of a slow-moving boat.

Early users of the internet saw that as analogous to the abuse of anonymity in posting inflammatory, insincere comments to get a rise out of certain users who would take the bait and engage in lengthy, heated, ultimately pointless arguments.

The troll would automate her provocations by sending out lures in multiple forums, the point of the comparison being that just as fishing can be done automatically, by allowing the slow-moving boat to move multiple fishing lines and intrigue the fish, the medium of the internet can be used against certain users. Some people are so high-strung that they’re triggered by a random, bogus comment posted by a stranger.

This sense of trolling applies to the more well-intentioned conservatives who mean to expose the smugness and hypocrisy of their liberal opponents, testing the latters’ patience by pretending to be more authoritarian, uninformed, and savage than they really are. By caricaturing themselves, conservatives hope to expose the hollowness of the left-winger’s civic faith that all Americans share the same noble values. When the liberal or progressive takes the bait and argues as if the conservative weren’t merely being sarcastic or performing a role to amuse others who are in on the joke, the left-winger has been trolled.

Trolls from the Wilderness

But this sense of “trolling” is already confused with a second one, as is evident from the associated warning, “Don’t feed the troll,” meaning “Don’t take the bait.” Here it’s the noun rather than the verb that’s paramount, and the relevant sense of “troll” derives from Scandinavian folklore. The troll in folklore is a type of demon or more precisely a demonized non-Christian, who lives in dark places and is hostile or at least unhelpful to Christians. “Troll” in this sense is similar to “witch”: both are Christian labels for demonizing those who haven’t been Christianized.

Thus, the internet troll has an appetite for mischief and you only make matters worse by taking his provocations at face value and engaging him in conversation, because you’re only encouraging the troll to return. Ideally, those who operate in good faith would ignore the trolls until the trolls would take the hint, leave, and crawl back under their rocks, as it were.

Trollness in this case is about the fear of uncivilized foreigners. We presume the correctness of Christendom or of the neoliberal world order, so anyone who’s left out of that society must be defective.

Hillary Clinton’s remark in 2016 that Donald Trump’s followers are a “basket of deplorables” picks up on this second, negative sense of “troll.” The split in this case is obviously between Democrats and Republicans, but it’s also between urban and rural areas of the country. Big-city life is taken as the cutting edge of civilization, so that those stuck in small towns or who are living off the grid, perhaps in dying industries, have been left behind and consequently they regress to the point of becoming monstrous.

If you asked conservatives about their trolling behaviour, they’ll admit to the first kind but not exactly to the second one. They’ll say they mock Democrats, revealing that the latters’ sophistication and elite mores are mere pretenses, since these liberals are so easily “triggered.” The “salt of the earth” conservatives think of themselves as the “real Americans,” and they implicitly compare themselves to the rugged pioneers who fled the Old World decadence to practice their more authentic, Protestant Christianity in North America.

Still, if you taunted them with facts that make nonsense of their conspiracy theories or if you pointed to the obvious inhumanity of President Trump, their mascot, American conservatives may concede to being negative trolls in a limited respect. The meme in this case is that if you expect someone to be monstrous, she may oblige, so you should be careful what you wish for. In other words, if you insult someone by having such low expectations of her, she may return the insult by living down to that standard you’ve set.

The Re-Wilding of Failed States

The figure of President Trump combines both senses of trolling and he’s done so with such brazenness that we’ve reached a paradoxical kind of interaction between civilization and the wilderness.

What’s supposed to happen is that the former rides roughshod over the latter. With human ingenuity and hubris, we tame wild places. The Church sent its missionaries and its knights to win the world for Christ. Likewise, neoliberals in both parties spread the miracle of capitalism far and wide, producing a consumer monoculture that’s supposed to end poverty and lead to technological advances and economic growth.

In folklore, trolls symbolize untamed nature — again, with the presumption that Christianity was the mark of the opposite in being the catalyst for the arrival of God’s supernatural kingdom, whereas in the interim, nature is the province of demonic powers. Trolls live in dark places, emerging only at night and perhaps even turning to stone in sunlight. They ransack villages and eat people, like wild animals.

The existence of the analogue of trolls or of savages within the United States is, of course, an indictment of the civilization in question. We needn’t be so preoccupied with the culture war between big cities and rural areas that we lose sight of the bigger picture, which is that if the red states are populated largely by trolls in the negative, irredeemable sense, the United States isn’t so united and the highness of neoliberal civilization must itself be a ruse.

The disunity is due to the individualism of America’s founders and to the country’s enthusiasm for capitalism. In more collectivist, Eastern societies, the Christian lesson that those who are well off show their civility and spirituality by not allowing huge numbers of their countrymen to fall behind is taken as a prerequisite for society as such.

According to the frontier mentality, though, you have to earn your way and there’s no one to aid or to stop you, because the country hasn’t yet been widely explored or “civilized” by European standards. American capitalism carries forward this pragmatic individualism, since the economic goal is to compete for profit and wherever possible to exploit loopholes in the law, defraud the masses, horde wealth, capture the government and build a monopoly or a shadow empire.

This predatory capitalism obviously conflicts not just with elementary Christianity, but with the essence of society, with the project of living peacefully together with other families, tribes, villages, or cities by adopting a shared outlook.

American individualism has been pushed to such extremes that “socialism” has become a dirty word. This is like the monstrous troll’s sneering at the notion of Christendom. To the extent that socialism is just a matter of the government’s pooling of resources to preserve the population’s shared mission and to prevent a collapse of parts of the country, socialism is synonymous with the compromise of collectivism (with the focus on the social good, not on the abstraction of what would be good for isolated individuals, as though they weren’t part of a larger body).

In libertarian circles where there’s no such compromise with the individualist’s principle of self-reliance, there’s likewise no society as such. Libertarian or strictly capitalistic society is a cynical charade in which the individualists pretend to tolerate each other even while plotting to out-compete everyone else, whereupon they’d decline to lend the losers a helping hand. With no ethos or sense of shared purpose, this social Darwinian Potemkin village exists in a state of cold war between ever-diminishing tribes.

Likewise, Christians faced the dreaded problem of evil: if their God created the universe, why is nature overrun with demons and trolls beyond the Christian borders? Perhaps God isn’t in charge after all or there’s no benevolent deity in the first place.

Trump’s Barbarism and the Hollowness of American Society

Again, what’s supposed to happen in the context of negative trolling is that civilization eclipses the wilderness, leaving no untamed, unassimilated, or “haunted” grounds within its borders. In the case of a failed or failing state, however, trolls no longer lurk just over the hills and far away, but may pop up next to you when you’re going about your business. When the civilization in question is only superficial or is somehow fraudulent or internally conflicted, the eclipse is partial at best and nature has the last laugh.

But returning to the figure of Trump, we now face an even more astonishing scenario. What happens when trolls learn to live in the sunlight, when they’re no longer content to eke out their savage living in caves or valleys, slums or de-industrialized zones? What happens when a reckless political party nurtures and co-opts these resentful savages, much as the CIA supported the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to jab a thorn into the side of the Soviet Union?

What happens when a troll, the embodiment of anti-civility, becomes president of the country?

The recent run-up to Trumpism is instructive. At first glance George W. Bush wasn’t a troll, since in 2001 he took his neoconservative ideology to be a civilizing force. In response to 9/11, he intended to tame the savage terrorists and bring democracy to the Middle East that had resisted modernization, by invading Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein couldn’t be trusted with his weapons of mass destruction.

But once again, in the end there was no such taming of that “wild” place, because the highness of American civilization under Bush was exposed as a sham. Although the American military destroyed Saddam’s regime, Bush’s WMD pretext for the invasion fell through and his neoconservatives were only academic devotees to certain prejudices, with no real-world knowledge of Middle Eastern cultures. As a result, the Iraq War didn’t go as planned: with the dictator removed, the insurgent tribes fought the Americans and themselves, producing ISIL and benefitting Iran.

In effect, Bush Jr.’s Texan swagger was a case of quasi-trolling, since he adopted those mannerisms to widen his base of political support and to conceal the fact that he wasn’t really a peasant or a barbarian, but was educated at Yale and relied on his father’s name as his dynastic heir.

The real American barbarians or “trolls” wanted a more genuine spokesman for their anarchic cause. Sarah Palin was their next offering, in 2008, but she and John McCain were defeated by Obama who symbolized cosmopolitan high culture, despite his skin colour which repelled the racist alt right.

In 2016, Donald Trump capitalized on that appetite for payback, not just as a nihilistic, “transactional” con artist but as a genuine outsider who never fit into New York’s high society, whose buildings were panned as tacky, whose business acumen was suspect because of his multiple bankruptcies, and who was ridiculed for pretending to be richer than he was. Trump was likely an outsider also because of his obvious antisocial personality disorder which prevented him from caring about others and thus from fitting into polite society.

President Trump pushed out his party’s moderates and turned the Republican Party into an alt right cult whose most vocal supporters are the white supremacist and Evangelical trolls that meant to use Trump as a weapon against the establishment, the neoliberal deep state, and the forces of globalization such as free trade and multiculturalism. Their arguments may have little intellectual merit, but that’s irrelevant since they’ve invalidated the neoliberal world order just by existing in the United States in their uncivilized form and by emerging from the shadows and managing to desecrate the White House with a full-blown troll or savage, that is, with a blundering enemy of civilization.

No further proof of American hypocrisy is needed. However incredulous Barack Obama appears in his speeches campaigning for Joe Biden, as he ridicules Trump’s inappropriate abnormality, the joke is on Obama and on America’s standing in the neoliberal world order.

When a troll becomes emperor, the empire has fallen.