citationsneededpodcast

Episode 201: The Conservative, Faux-Erudite Rise of Nuance Trolling

Added 2024-05-15 16:01:10 +0000 UTC

“Here's why creating single-payer health care in America is so hard,” explained Harold Pollack in Vox in 2016. “The benefits of climate action…are diffuse and hard to pin down,” shrugged a Foreign Affairs article in 2020. “A nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” 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’t behind it or some other bad faith “concern” 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 and 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.

On this episode, we examine the rise of the Nuance Troll and analyze the media’s selective invocation of “nuance” in order to stifle urgent movements for social justice, reducing poverty, curbing climate chaos and ending occupation and war.

Our guest is Natasha Lennard.

Guest

Natasha Lennard (@natashalennard) is columnist for The Intercept, whose work has also appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, Dissent, and The New York Times, among many other outlets. She is also Associate Director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism graduate program at the New School for Social Research, and the author of two books. Her most recent is "Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life," which was published by Verso Books in 2019.

Show Notes

Vietnam: Solutions

Mary McCarthy | November 9, 1967 | New York Review of Books

On Withdrawing from Vietnam: An Exchange

Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy | January 18, 1968 | New York Review of Books

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | April 4, 1967

The Paths to Net Zero: How Technology Can Save the Planet

Inês Azevedo, Michael R. Davidson, Jesse D. Jenkins, Valerie J. Karplus, and David G. Victor | April 13, 2020 | Foreign Affairs

Here's why creating single-payer health care in America is so hard

Harold Pollack | January 16, 2016 | Vox

Bernie Sanders’s Bill Gets America Zero Percent Closer to Single Payer

Jonathan Chait | September 13, 2017 | New York Magazine

Op-Ed: There are 3 types of single-payer ‘concern trolls’ — and they all want to undermine universal healthcare

Adam Johnson | September 21, 2017 | The Los Angeles Times

On Cue, Saudi and Weapons-Contractor-Funded Pundits Attack Bernie Sanders' Yemen War Powers Resolution

Adam Johnson | December 16, 2022 | The Column

Why we split the world into good and evil – and make decisions we regret

Amanda Ripley | January 4, 2024 | The Washington Post

‘I Feel a Human Deterioration’

Lulu Garcia-Navarro (interview with Etgar Keret) | October 27, 2023 | The New York Times

***

Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can find transcripts of past episodes, interviews and News Briefs here.

****

Citations Merch

Remember that the Citations Needed merch store is open! Please consider further supporting the show by picking up a t-shirt, tank top, sweatshirt, tote or coffee mug for yourself or your favorite Citations fan (or everyone you know!).

*****