How 'Nuance Trolling' Derails Important Conversations
It's not true that it's too 'complex' to improve life for the average person
I recently learned a new term: "nuance trolling."
This phenomenon occurs when, in a public debate, someone suggests that there is actually a solution to, say, a lack of affordable health care in the US. The rejoinder will be that it's "too complex" to institute a single-payer healthcare system or even to stop forcing Americans into massive debt for healthcare.
The same goes for making higher education and housing affordable, reducing income inequality, or creating standards to protect employees from overwork. Basically, anything that could improve the average person's life is just impossibly complex and unachievable, and anyone who can't see this is simply dumb, naive, or both.
While it's true that nuance trolls are annoying, that isn't the primary problem with them. The real issue is that they make it nearly impossible to have a good-faith discussion about critical issues. Nuance trolls are omnipresent in the media and DC think tanks and are treated as though they are the only reasonable people, while anyone who wants systemic change is some wild-eyed fabulist or uninformed doofus.
Nuance trolls will find it irrelevant to their claims of insurmountable levels of complexity, that as recently as my childhood, the US was vastly more livable. Michelle Teheux wrote recently about how owning a home was feasible for her as a working-class person (she's Gen X), whereas today, even solidly middle-class Millennials or Gen Zers will find this nearly impossible unless they have help from their parents. The nuance police will ignore the existence of other countries or make uninformed assertions about them when you point out that many US peer countries provide robust social safety nets and aggressive consumer protection.
Nuance trolls claim to care deeply about the issue you raise but know for a fact that it's simply impossible to do anything about it. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are fierce defenders of the status quo, no matter how many people are suffering.
It's just too complicated, is their perpetual cry.
But since when do we not do things because they are complex or challenging to achieve? I'm sure someone told President Kennedy that landing on the moon would be very "complicated." That didn't stop him. Should the government stop funding the National Institutes for Health? Finding a cure for cancer sounds very complicated.
Of course, these government programs benefit private industry enormously, so nuance trolls don't seem put off by the seeming impossibility of the endeavor. But talk about reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals—which some people need to stay alive—and get ready to hear why this simply is not possible even though people all over the world pay less than Americans to fill their prescriptions of American-made drugs.
When I wrote "The Way We Live In America is Not Normal," and highlighted how badly the US compares to peer countries when it comes to supporting its citizens, I encountered a lot of nuance trolling. I heard a few of the same arguments that have been seemingly programmed into Americans: "It's not possible to do that with 300 million people," "The US is too diverse to do that," or "Those countries can only do that because they don't maintain a huge military."
The US is the most powerful and prosperous country in the world and is known for incredible innovation. Yet somehow, we can't provide an approximation of the social safety net that a tiny, not rich European country like Italy offers to its citizens.
There’s also the fact that the US had a vast, diverse population and a large military when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and health care was affordable, home ownership was a million times more accessible, public colleges were practically free for in-state residents and affordable for many people from out-of-state. “Hustle and grind” culture didn’t exist. (If you feel the need to nuance troll at this point, please read the footnote.1)
It's also critical to note that the changes in how we live were not caused by anything being complicated. The changes are a direct result of a neoliberal agenda that drove government policies that ushered in an era of hyper-capitalism. The result is a world that benefits corporations and the very wealthy and screws over everybody else. The neoliberal agenda was initiated by Republicans, but Democrats unfortunately capitulated to it.
Of course, it goes without saying that nuance is important. We don't want to view issues in a simplistic or overly binary way. Introducing nuance into a debate should bring clarity and understanding. But trolling is different. Trolling by nature isn’t helpful or elucidating.
It’s ironic that nuance trolls often provide “context” that isn’t nuanced at all. Instead, they treat a situation as all or nothing. So if I say that Italy does x, y, and z better than the US, then they will point to something unrelated that they don't do well—or that the US does better—and imply some sort of correlation that doesn’t exist. The implication is that you have to do everything like Italy or nothing.
But there is no connection between providing affordable college and the fact that Giorgia Meloni is prime minister of Italy, for example. That Italy has a terrible prime minister does not change the fact that college there is and has been for a long time accessible and much of it nearly free. Health care is entirely free, and nobody, not even an extreme far-right leader like Giorgia Meloni, is trying to change that.2
That there are good things about America and even things that are better in the US than Italy is irrelevant to the topic at hand. The US is much better than Italy regarding LGBTQ+ rights, for example. But you don't have to deny people a social safety net in order to prioritize equal rights. If you doubt this, please look up "Denmark." Also, the fact that there are great things about the US doesn't mean we shouldn't see it as a crisis that a third of Americans are living with medical debt, something that is unheard of in Italy or any of the US's peer countries. Even some non-peer countries provide free health care.
But even if this wasn't true, it wouldn't matter.
We are capable of tackling complicated problems and coming up with solutions that have never been tried.
If you go back to any important societal change from the past, you will find defenders of the status quo laying out the "too complicated" case. I learned the term "nuance trolling" from the podcast "Citations Needed," and they pointed to an article in The Economist published amidst the abolition debate explaining why ending slavery in the US was just too complicated. (It had already been abolished in the UK.)
The “Citations Needed” podcast title—The Conservative, Faux-Erudite Rise of Nuance Trolling—is a little misleading. The hosts offer criticism of the website Vox, along with other non-conservative media outlets, as prime perpetrators of nuance trolling. I can't speak for the hosts, but it seems that in talking about nuance trolling, they aren't referring to a political ideology but about a conservative tendency to want to keep things the same—that person could be a Democrat, Republican, or something in between—versus a progressive impulse for change aka "progress."
If we are being honest, we all probably engage in nuance trolling from time to time, especially when we haven't thought deeply about an issue. I know I did way too much of it earlier in my career. My experience is that it comes at me from all sides of the political spectrum, and typically involves conventional wisdom that hasn’t been interrogated.
We need to be aware that nuance trolling exists and do our best to avoid it because it often has the impact of derailing important conversations and accepting the lie that it's too complicated to create a society that is more livable, more equal and more humane.
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The US was not perfect during this period, and it was far from it. While middle class and many working class people had access to what I'm discussing, very poor people faced different barriers. Plenty has gotten better in the US since then, particularly as pertains to gender, sexuality and race though there is still a far way to go on those issues. I am speaking specifically about the issues mentioned in this sentence.
Italy is not perfect. Italy's social safety net is not perfect. There are lots of things that need to change in Italy. I am speaking specifically about Italy's social safety net as compared to the US.
Giorgia Meloni is very, very bad. The fact that she isn't trying to change these things is not because she is a good leader; it's because it would be political suicide and also she can't touch health care because it's a protected right in the Italian constitution.
Reminds me of MLK’s letter from a Birmingham jail - in a way he was up against the same arguments.
We also have the same issue in Australia where both major parties have embraced hyper-capitalism. It’s a major barrier to change. It means both sides think things are “too complex” to undertake, or will “impact the economy” for example stopping new coal mines. I used to work for the Labor Party, but they have embraced hyper-capitalism even though it does so much harm to workers, let alone the environment.
Whether by actual conspiracy or just circumstance, too many seem to benefit from the nuance trolling. *I* believe there are concerted interests in keeping us from having nice things similar to our Western allies. After all, nice things cost money. The high profile nuance trolls influence nuance trolling in the electorate and, low and behold, we get lackluster progress. Every once in a while it seems the stars align and we punch through the stagnation, such as Obama’s ACA or (unplanned) marriage equality position.