The experience that alerted me to the idea of a deliberate organized assault on a liberal forum involved the publication on Huffington Post of my piece, The Spirit That Drove Us to Civil War Is Back. There, a comment that so blatantly misread my article that it should have been an embarrassment to any self-respecting right-winger garnered over 500 "Likes," and thereby came to dominate the whole 700-plus thread of comments.
My sense of these men has changed. I now see them less as ignorant people making foolish comments and more as smart people deploying crude but inflammatory comments as part of a strategy for winning a political war.
What does that suggest for us, against whom they are waging this war?
First, we must keep in the forefront of our minds that there is a battle ongoing to determine what set of values and forces will prevail and steer our nation into the future. And the stakes in this battle could not be higher.
Second, we should think as strategically about our discussions as they do. Are we trying to accomplish anything with our discussions--anything that will have an impact on the outcome of that battle?
If one side spends its energies in the quest for victory, and the other is not even thinking in terms of a battle, one can guess which side is likely to win.
Third, our discussions should reflect how urgently Liberal America needs to organize around good ideas and strategies for winning that battle.
Which brings us back to the trolls on their mission to disrupt communication, because such work of clarification and organization can't readily happen if the exchanges on liberal websites get side-tracked by the impulse to respond to the provocative nonsense that right-wingers catapult into the discussion.
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