Episode 201: The Conservative, Faux-Erudite Rise of Nuance Trolling
\u201cHere's why creating single-payer health care in America is so hard,\u201d explained Harold Pollack in Vox in 2016. \u201cThe benefits of climate action\u2026are diffuse and hard to pin down,\u201d shrugged a Foreign Affairs article in 2020. \u201cA nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,\u201d presented Aliza Pilichowski in The Jerusalem Post in 2023.
Each of the above is an example of something that can be called "Nuance Trolling": The insistence that some major beneficial development like single-payer healthcare, ending wars and bombing campaigns, or the mitigation, even cessation, of climate change is impossible because the situation is too nuanced, the plan too lacking in detail, the goal too hard to achieve, the public isn\u2019t behind it or some other bad faith \u201cconcern\u201d that makes bold action an impossibility. Nuance Trolls present power-serving defeatism as savvy pragmatism, claiming over and over that no good, meaningful change can happen because no version of it will ever work.
Nuance and complexity, of course, are real, legitimate things. Political, social, environmental, and economic dynamics often are complicated. But Nuance Trolls abuse this self-evident truism, using it as a mode of analysis designed to weaken \xa0and water down movements for change that seek actual, material solutions to political problems, and instead promoting inaction to ensure the continuation of the already oppressive status quo.\xa0
On this episode, we examine the rise of the Nuance Troll and analyze the media\u2019s selective invocation of \u201cnuance\u201d in order to stifle urgent movements for social justice, reducing poverty, curbing climate chaos and ending occupation and war.\xa0
Our guest is Natasha Lennard.