Taking Stock of Some Shifts

There was a period--back when I first started this blog--when I felt like I had a deep sense of what "the other side" was thinking. Doing research on conservative evangelicalism through the aughts and the early 2010s, I was able to listen carefully. I practiced Krister Stendahl's three rules for religious understanding:

1. Read/listen to the practitioners, not their critics
2. Don't compare your best with their worst
3. Find room for holy envy--aspects of their side that you wish your side had

I immersed myself in conservative evangelical books, podcasts, sermons, websites, blogs, interviews. I bled "conservative evangelicalism" from every orifice.

I published my book, enjoyed the mostly positive feedback--and then watched as, over the next few years the "other side" that I examined morphed into something I didn't recognize. I suppose the influence of early-to-mid-2010s-era trolling, the birth and growth of the "alt right," played a part. A kind of nihilistic irony, a sharpening of the South Park poke-fun-at-every-sincere-belief mentality, wormed its way into the American right's structure of feeling. Cheap, one-sided victories--owning the libs, getting the lulz--came to supplant and eventually replace gains for long-term visions about a shared future.

It's easy to rose-color-tint the early twenty-first-century right. Plenty of cynicism drove the Bush II era's militant patriotism. Yet one gathered that George W. Bush himself actually believed the faith he professed, and that faith--unappealing as I personally found it--gave him some kind of coherent core of sincere values. And yes, I think there were plenty of bad-faith pretenders and grifters willing to mouth churchy platitudes in order to win audience. 

But the first-wave trolls of early Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc., didn't even pretend to coherent ethical or religious conviction. Instead you had webs of anonymized bullying and chaos for chaos's sake--all for anonymized fame and anonymized approval. These networks granted users a sense of power (I can make people outraged=I have power) and community (likes, lulz). Naturally, such an ethos attracted and intensified parts of online culture who felt themselves in need of power and community (young white men, mainly). This group in turn found a useful (and easily provoked) antagonist in the burgeoning online social justice movement. 

The sometimes brittle sincerity of the online left proved an appealing target for the "just joking" trolls eager to push buttons. The reaction from the left (and everyone else) to such puerile bullying soon crystallized around framing lonely white cishet men as infantile bullies. That framing in turn spurred some trolls to affirm and strengthen their male cishet non-SJW whiteness as a core identity. Thus Gamergate and other flashpoints advanced the polarization of trollish masculinity versus social justice warriors (feminists, Black and brown people, queer folk, etc.). 

Enter Trump as candidate. He and his campaign leaned happily into the trollish joy of provocation for provocation's sake. Trump's own ethos seems grounded in a petty bullying mentality: you're winning if--and to the extent that--you insult the other side. Their being outraged just proves how weak they are. It's shocking and funny at once to his audience. He gets the lulz. No wonder he so often praised his "army of trolls."

Trump II's governance advances this ethos, only without the laughs. Shock and awe--He can't be serious, can he?--defines his style so far. Yes, he really does mean it. Yes, he really will do that thing. The fact you're offended proves he's winning.

All this (and I'm super-simplifying) seems clear enough. The missing player here in my overview so far is the right-wing media ecosphere, a masterful hegemonic accomplishment. Its messages are consistent: Everything Trump does is good; everyone critical of Trump is deranged; only he alone can save us from The Threat. And, quelle suprise, The Threat turns out to be the same antagonists of Gamergate-era trolls: women, Black folk and POC, queer people. It's anyone who would dare to say that their puerile bullying is, well, puerile and bullying. 

And the government. This, I sense, comes more from TEA Party (and then Pizzagate and then Q-Anon) streams than from disgruntled gamergaters. From this source comes the deep-seated distrust and resentment of institutions, especially schools and government agencies. The right-wing mediasphere has over the past few decades supecharged such distrust into a reflexive hatred of complexity of any sort. Elon Musk and his DOGE seem the perfect blend of anti-SJW troll (with a bad boy hacker genius spice) and anti-big-government savior. Their cuts don't need to be smart or well considered, just grandiose and outrageous to Trump's enemies. That those people are getting upset about DOGE must, in this mentality, mean that it's doing something right.

The big question I have, though, is where conservative Christianity fits in. The evangelical intellectuals whose thoughts and stances I got to know so well--what's happened to them? I'm hardly the first to marvel at evangelicals' fawning over an amoral narcissist like Trump. I recognize that this support has happened. I'm still wondering how and why, which tells me I need to do some listening.