![(\"La Charit\u00e9,\" 1878, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Source: Wikimedia, Creative Commons License).](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/635\/2017\/01\/Bouguereau_La_Charit%C3%A9_1878_5590358248.jpg\")
<\/a>Irony has been essential in the rise of Donald Trump. I\u2019ve written about it before<\/a>, but since my word lacks force, you need only ask The Washington Post<\/a> <\/em>and NPR<\/a><\/em> (we can even throw in Breitbart<\/a><\/em> for good measure). Irony is negative in function; it establishes distance from an object and allows one to then tear it apart. It\u2019s a way of exposing hypocrisy, simultaneously undoing the thing criticized and raising up the one doing the criticizing.<\/p>\n It does not have to work in exactly this way. The irony of watching Oedipus come to realize his fate is not the same as its function in the Age of Trump, but now trolling dominates the scene.<\/p>\n We live in time of heightened emphasis on subjectivity. We live in the tension between desiring to recognize good and evil in the world (how many people truly believe all values to be relative?) and having philosophically repudiated stable and objective meaning. Enter Donald Trump, a man with no shame and a willingness to troll<\/a> his opponents into oblivion:<\/p>\n Many have argued that Trump is the product of political correctness (PC). This is true only in part. Rather, both PC and Trump\u2019s response to it are fruits of the postmodernism that has long ascended to the heights of our culture: the nihilism in the common presumption that all truth is relative, morality is subjective, and therefore all of our individually preferred \u201cnarratives\u201d that give our lives meaning are equally true and worthy of validation. Tony [Montana, from Scarface<\/em>] tellingly lectures his audience, \u201cI always tell the truth, even when I lie.\u201d His character was a man ahead of his time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The case against postmodernism is overstated, but the point is worth sticking with. If, culturally, we swim in an overwhelming inundation of information and we hardly believe anything can be truly the case, exposing hypocrisy, or even just transgressing boundaries, becomes the most serious form of political statement. Critiques don\u2019t need to be serious. Everything can be \u201cjust trolling<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n In November, shortly after the host of \u201cThe Apprentice\u201d was elected President, the troubled starlet Tila Tequila\u2014herself a former reality-TV star, one whose life had become a sad train wreck\u2014blinked back onto the gossip radar. Now she was a neo-Nazi. On her Twitter account, she posted a selfie from the National Policy Institute conference, an \u201calt-right\u201d gathering, where she posed, beaming a sweet grin, her arm in a Hitler salute. The caption was a misspelled \u201csieg heil.\u201d Her bio read \u201cLiterally Hitler!\u201d<\/p>\n It was an image that felt impossible to decode, outside the sphere of ordinary politics. But Literal Hitler was an inside joke, destabilizing by design; as with any subcultural code, from camp to hip-hop, it was crafted to confuse outsiders. The phrase emerged on Tumblr to mock people who made hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler, often ones about Obama. Then it morphed, as jokes did so quickly last year, into a weapon that might be used to mock\u00a0any\u00a0comparisons to Hitler\u2014even when a guy with a serious Hitler vibe ran for President, even when the people using the phrase were cavorting with Nazis. Literal Hitler was one of a thousand such memes, flowing from anonymous Internet boards that were founded a decade ago, a free universe that was crude and funny and juvenile and anarchic by design, a teen-age-boy safe space. The original version of this model surfaced in Japan, on the \u201cimageboard\u201d 2chan. Then, in 2003, a teen-ager named Christopher Poole launched 4chan\u2014and when the crudest users got booted they migrated to 8chan, and eventually to Voat.co. For years, those places had mobbed and hacked their ideological enemies, often feminists, but they also competed for the filthiest, most outrageous bit, the champion being whatever might shock an unshockable audience. The only winning move was not to react.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One must be immovable, deflect criticism with criticism, hypocrisy with hypocrisy, truth with irony. Trump is the first political candidate to enact this on the national stage. If you can outmaneuver your opponents, you can win. Style, with a little nudge from substance, prevails<\/a>:<\/p>\n Indeed, a common point between academic and media analysis is the tendency to \u201cunmask\u201d an ideological opponent. To unmask is to reveal a delusion beneath a political or intellectual claim. To unmask is to presuppose that there is no principled basis for debate. There is nothing to understand besides the error of the other. The presence of difference of opinion attests only to the existence of false-consciousness, not to the existence of a question that admits more than one answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Trump did was turn this unmasking back on his opponents: \u201cI may be a misogynist, but at least I\u2019m not a hypocrite.\u201d David Ernst clarifies this point in his re-imagining of a famous scene from Scarface<\/em> to reflect Trump\u2019s campaign:<\/p>\n So I\u2019m a scoundrel because I don\u2019t pay income taxes? Maybe so, but it also makes me smart, just like all the other billionaires who are backing your campaign. So I\u2019m a sexist because you found a video of me bragging about how my superstar status enables me to grab women by the p\u2014y? Maybe it does, but allow me to publically introduce four of the women who have accused your husband of everything from indecent exposure to rape. So I\u2019m a greedy businessman who stiffs my contractors? Fine. You\u2019re a corrupt politician who sells out our national interest to line your own pockets.<\/p>\n Maybe everything they say about me is true, but at least I\u2019m authentic, at least I\u2019m real: you on the other hand, are a bloody, disgusting hypocrite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Great. But as a Christian I am left asking: where is the room for charity? Where is the space for disagreement without the assumption that the other is a monster? Or, perhaps better, how can I take for granted that as a fallen human being, my opponent is fractured, unstable, and, yes, even monstrous, and still love him or her?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To start, we have to consider the \u201chermeneutics of suspicion<\/a>,\u201d a term coined by literary theorist (and Christian) Paul Ric\u0153ur. In essence, it means not taking the superficial meaning of a text or person for granted. Something else must be at play. Trump\u2019s similarities with Putin must mean he\u2019s a puppet. Those small hands suggest a small something else, an inadequacy that can be overcome only by holding power. Hillary Clinton\u2019s exhaustion must <\/em>mean she\u2019s ill and unfit to lead.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a way of uncharitably reading the world, the culturally-salient version of \u201ctrust no one.\u201d Its converse is a \u201chermeneutics of faith,\u201d a certain willingness to believe, a gut reaction of, not disagreement, but hope. It\u2019s a way of charitably reading the world.<\/p>\n That may sound a bit na\u00efve. It\u2019s bound to in our society. It\u2019s the way simple folk think, those who don\u2019t recognize just how depraved the world is. I, however, disagree. Having endured chronic illness and the early death of a parent, I am well aware that the world is not fair, that most people are not being totally honest most of the time. And yet, suspicion does nothing but breed more suspicion. What of childlike innocence?<\/p>\n At that time the disciples approached Jesus and said, \u201cWho is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?\u201d He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said, \u201cAmen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me. (Matthew 18:1-5<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Will we be the unforgiving servant or the obedient child of Christ? When we see news will we immediately assume it validates our narrative or will we wait for the emergence of more facts? Will we hear what we want or will charity live in our ears and on our tongues?<\/p>\n