Are they a bunch of malarkey?
“The left can’t meme” is more than just a popular cheer amongst terminally online right-wing trolls.
It’s a unifying war cry. A secret handshake. “The left can’t meme is also a boast because, according to conservatives, the right can meme, and they meme prolifically. And social media is choked with evidence proving that point.
Their work is garishly star-spangled and obnoxious. Right-wing memes are desperate to be funny, but the humor employed is a bully’s humor, which is firmly rooted in aching insecurities that can only be soothed with public displays of casual cruelty.
It’s common to think of the internet as an interconnected series of webs or a complex highway system, but it is a slow-moving blob absorbing information and growing and digesting photos and songs and personal data and excreting mashups and remixes and variations on whatever it just fed on. The art produced by the internet is recycled and regurgitated; algorithms can’t tell the difference between new and unusual and stolen and repainted.
But memes are as close as original as it gets in this digital world. They are a kind of folk propaganda that mixes political cartoons with bumper stickers, and the right loves them. A meme is a simple, surprisingly effective, political message delivery system, a single image, usually sloppy or photoshopped, that says “fuck you” to precisely the person you want to insult or intimidate.
It’s a dream come true for politicians and their assorted lackeys. To them, memes are recruitment tools. They are ways to build armies of political pawns happy to work for free. Here you go, sir, harass your High School friends with this meme ridiculing COVID-19 vaccines. Upset your liberal friends and ‘Never Trump’ family members. Destabilize them. Push ’em around a little.
Memes are potent psychological weapons, and there’s a limitless supply.
In a cultural war, memes are grenades lobbed from safety into the newsfeeds and comment sections of the enemy. One does not need to argue to win an online debate — that would take some research and reason. Instead, one can just toss a ready-made meme down someone’s internet foxhole. They are pure emotion. Just pull the pin and throw. There is no need to understand the issues and articulate them assuredly and logically if you can just grab a meme that mocks the people you hate or have been instructed to hate.
Conservatives, traditionally, sit in the boardrooms and executive suites of media corporations, making decisions from 30,000 feet and counting their bonuses, but they are not members of the creative class who make culture, many of whom are both bleeding-hearts do-gooders and ambitious backstabbers, ferocious ladder-climbers who believe in group hugs and equality and feeding the hungry, blah blah blah. Or at least, that’s the stereotype.
The young (and not so young) trolls of the right are intoxicated by memes. It is an art form they seem to excel at. Their memes infuriate the opposition, which then emboldens the faithful. A successful meme caricatures a group of people or an idea, much like an editorial cartoon, but does so using the chaotic collage-like anti-aesthetic of the internet.
There are only a few corners in media and entertainment where conservatives flourish, like talk radio, cable news, and internet message boards. And from these fiefdoms, conservatives have screeched with rage for decades as if a high-pitched scream could shatter the space-time continuum like glass and return the Republic to a time when America was divided into wealthy white male landowners and everyone else.
And for the last half-century or more, the conservative movement has been an uneasy alliance of country club members and bible thumpers and the old Confederacy, and that union has been mostly successful, except when it comes to making entertainment that isn’t passionless or news that isn’t propaganda.
The right can’t make a blockbuster to save their lives, but they can sabotage the social safety net and knee-cap reproductive healthcare freedoms.
The late right-wing writer and provocateur Andrew Breitbart, whose name has been hijacked by an insipid clickbait mill, once observed that “politics is downstream from culture,” which is astute, for sure. He wanted his ideological allies to understand that creativity fuels democracy and not dismiss the power of a book, play, or TV show with strong liberal subtexts. Of course, his followers would transform his remark into a full-blown political strategy that is artless and hollow.
That conservatives traditionally produce more bankers, ranchers, and preachers than actors, poets, and comedians is a source of great insecurity, which is why they’re particularly vulnerable to politicians who hail from Hollywood. Even the most buttoned-up conservative scold goes weak-kneed when a washed-up rock star or reality TV star parrots their backward beliefs.
Turns out the left can meme. Or, to be more specific, the left can generate politically partisan internet content that goes viral for two reasons: it triggers a positive emotion in the sharer and their friends and negative emotion in a user who is not part of the sharer’s personal and ideological clique.
Right now, on Twitter, a virtual and wholly voluntary prison camp where journalists, politicians, and nobodies shiv fight 24/7, freshly hatched Joe Biden memes are being retweeted by newly energized Dems.
These images feature President Biden catchphrases like “No malarkey” and “Listen here, Jack” while visually nodding to “Diamond Joe,” Biden’s Obama-era persona popularized by the satire site The Onion. “Diamond Joe” was a working-class party animal who loved muscle cars and rock music.
These new memes directly refute attacks by Trump supporters who accused Biden of senility and spinelessness during the campaign their candidate decisively lost.
These memes are a vibe: derisive, mordant, but not entirely unironic. All of the new Biden memes are celebrations of the career politician. They are old-fashioned, totally sincere, “huzzahs!” It feels good to share memes that say what you want because you don’t know how to say it.
The so-called ‘Dark Brandon’ meme works because it infuriates the right and thrills the left, which is the point. The vocabulary of these memes are directly ripped off from wannabe edgy right-wing memes: laserbeam eyeballs, bursts of electricity shooting from fingers, sinister smirks. Even the “Dark Brandon” name is stolen: ‘Let’s go Brandon’ is childish right-wing code for “F__k you Biden.”
The saying was all the rage last year and was born when a reporter misheard a NASCAR crowd cursing Biden instead of celebrating driver Brandon Brown’s win.
There is a rumor that one of the original Dark Brandon memes — a cartoon of Biden sitting on the Iron Thrones from ‘Game of Thrones’ — was of Chinese origin, and if it’s true, that wouldn’t mean much. The whole point of “Dark Brandon’ is cultural judo — using your adversary’s strength against them.
One thing both memes have in common is the portrayal of feeble, elderly men as physically powerful smart-asses, two masculine personality traits that are popular with drunks at the bar. I’m not surprised that conservatives are desperate to portray portly Trump as fit and fearsome, Republicans respect the appearance of strength. I know that party bristles when accused of flirting with fascism, but they are the party of gun worship.
I am mildly shocked, though, that ‘Dark Brandon’ resonates with Democrats, who are usually gentle and compassionate unless they’re bombing the wedding of a suspected terrorist’s family member somewhere far away. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to point out that both Biden and Trump are… well, old. Trump is 76, Biden 79. But ‘Dark Brandon’ seems to soothe some insecurities over Biden’s age by warping reality and re-casting him as a man a couple of decades younger. A youthful 60, maybe.
I’m not suggesting that liberals aren’t aware that Biden is a veteran senior citizen, but many don’t seem to care anymore. Those ‘Dark Brandon’ memes are defiant middle-fingers to conservatives on Fox News who joke about Biden being infirmed as if Trump isn’t a shuffling country club buffet zombie.
The reason the Trump memes enraged Democrats is that they were so blithe. Trump was a winner, and if you supported him, you were a winner, too. Trump understood a political fact that big-money leftwing consultants didn’t. It feels good to win and then to rub it in the faces of the losers. Is it sporting? No. It’s what dickbags do, but dickbags also have a lot of fun. The best Trump memes are funny and weird and, most of all, victorious. They brag.
The ‘Dark Brandon’ memes are successful for that same reason. After a few weeks of good news, Biden’s poll numbers are inching up slowly. He managed to pass the first gun control legislation in decades, a tortured bipartisan infrastructure bill, and took out one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks. Biden killed a terrorist, and the Republicans shrugged.
But the point is: Biden has some wind in his political sails. The midterm elections are going to be a street fight for Republicans instead of the easy victory they were expecting. The ‘Dark Brandon’ memes are made by centrist Democratic operatives who feel like they’re winning, which has nothing to do with whether they are or not. Politics is a head game, and it’s easy to get psyched out. For most of Trump’s presidency, Democrats were despondent and humorless. But something snapped after the Supreme Court nuked Roe v Wade. Democrats are suddenly, and joyfully, heckling conservatives and calling them names, and it is hilarious to watch conservatives cry about it.
It doesn’t matter if the right doesn’t think the left can meme, all that matters is whether the left thinks the left can meme.
The Democrats had their confidence rattled in 2016. At the same time, conservatives became hopelessly conceited. They were besotted with Donald Trump and emboldened by his magnificent, incandescent selfishness. The GOP became a one-issue party, and that issue was “owning the libs.”
If I had to translate “owning the libs” from political slang into English, I’d call it a policy of permanent callousness. On social media, on TV, and at raucous rallies. It is far easier to taunt, jeer, and threaten that it is to believe in anything.
The GOP eventually became addicted to tormenting Americans who resisted their “Make America Great Again” movement, and in their fog, the world changed.
Biden did not defeat Trump at the ballot box because he’s a charismatic leader. Trump is the charismatic one. He won because the entire Republican party thought a once-in-a-century pandemic was a PR problem and not the historic catastrophe it was, and they tried to bullshit their way out of it.
The country was drowning, and the GOP threw cute quips, dangerous lies, and wokka-wokka memes instead of life preservers. That’s the story. Trump lost.
And it’s only taken the Democrats two years to get their mojo back. For the time being, at least. That party won the presidency and the Senate and the House, and yet they still sniveled. But it’s a new day. They’re entitled to a bit of fun and a little revenge. Their memes aren’t fresh, but at least they‘re angry, finally.
I can spend hours scrolling through memes on my phone, chuckling to myself in bed at night, or while bored on the couch. The cute ones, the obscene ones, and the political ones that flatter me and curse my enemies. Ooh, those feel so nice. My honest review of the ‘Dark Brandon’ reviews is simple. They do what they’re supposed to do, so, therefore, *shoots laser beams out of eyes*.
