It is a popular meme that ‘The Left can’t meme’. This Babylon Bee video contains some good examples of poor Leftist memes. One thing I noticed immediately about them was the bad English, replete with poor spelling and grammar. It’s not really a good look, is it? These people want to re-engineer human civilisation, but they can’t even form a sentence properly; it doesn’t really inspire much confidence, does it?
Why can’t the Left meme? The problem is actually much older. The meme is the political cartoon of the internet age. Today, the Left can’t meme, and in decades gone by, they never could joke either. It’s nothing new.
Lack of Clear Thinking
One of the problems is highlighted in the video linked above – they never seem to know when to stop. Look at this feminist joke I remember from the 1980s:
· Why is a man like a toilet?
· Because he is vacant, engaged and full of shit.
I’ve got no objection to hearing jokes about any subject as long as they are funny. This one is just so poorly designed. It doesn’t make any logical sense. I can be quite pedantic about this kind of thing.
First of all, a toilet cannot be both vacant and engaged at the same time. It is one or the other. Secondly, when you say that a man is engaged, what do you mean? Engaged to be married? How is that relevant to anything? It seems a bit random. Most men are not engaged at any given time, and spend a very small proportion of their lives engaged. It’s just confusing.
Let’s repair it for them. Let’s discard the useless ‘engaged’ part altogether, and make it a simple dichotomy.
· Why is a man like a toilet?
· Because he is either vacant or he’s full of shit.
Now, that’s a joke that actually makes sense. How difficult was that? It seems to be beyond the wit of most people on the Left to exercise that much analytical thinking, which doesn’t bode well for how they will run the economy.
No doubt clear thinking is an artefact of the Patriarchal-Fascist hegemony, created with the sole intention of silencing the voices of women and people of colour.
What the Left is very good at is using big, fancy, clever-sounding words to provide itself with a thin camouflage of intellectual and academic credibility, but which rarely amounts to anything more than recycled Marxism.
It’s also notable that the concept of ‘hate-speech’ doesn’t seem to apply to Leftists. If you made that joke about any group other than men, even back in the 1980s, it would likely have attracted the disapproval of the chattering classes.
Men seem to be unique in society in that they are not entitled to appeal to authorities for help, nor to defend themselves using their own resources, nor even to have a political identity as men at all. They are expected to sit still and just absorb any abuse thrown at them without complaint. It must be some of that male privilege I’ve heard about.
Everything is Propaganda
The Left tends to see everything through the single lens of politics, and so has difficulty distinguishing between political rhetoric and comedy. I’m old enough to remember Ben Elton in the 1980s walking out onto the stage and shouting “Thatch!” in reference to the then Prime Minister, and being rewarded with a roaring crowd. He was a successful comedian, but what he had said cannot be described as a joke in any sense.
All popular culture, all channels of mass communication are seen by the Left as just another opportunity to proselytise their message. They focus more effort on their political message than on the entertainment value. Look at the catastrophe they have made of entertainment brands like Star Wars. Ask them to write a joke, and they’ll give you a rambling political diatribe, because that’s just what they do.
Comedy is a Weapon
“Humour is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.” Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.
Satire and ridicule were significant weapons in the cultural revolution which swept the Western world in the 1960s. Shows such as “That was the week that was” lampooned the Conservative establishment, contributing to the collapse of its credibility. That is why the contemporary Leftist establishment has tried to censor comedy. They know that Woke culture is particularly vulnerable to ridicule, and so they use censorship to try to forestall it. They fear satire because they know perfectly well what it is capable of.
Humourlessness and extremism go hand in hand
Ideological movements naturally tend towards extremism. Members compete with each other for status, and this is based on demonstrations of piety; “I’m holier than thou”. The most extreme voice will win, before someone else, in turn, will try to outdo them. Thus, there is a constant drift towards extremism.
Comedy can be an antidote to extremism. Humour can pop the ideological balloon before it gets out of hand.
Extremism insists on ideological conformity. For those who derive personal power and influence from an ideological movement, that power depends on everyone taking the movement seriously. If people are laughing at it, its credibility is undermined, its influence will decline, and this is a direct threat to their personal power. Banning or restricting the use of humour is a common response. Humourlessness and extremism go hand in hand.
Why can’t the Left meme?
One of the best statements I have heard on this comes from Greg Gutfeld (starting at 9:50): “Memes can actually change the way you think by exposing unspeakable truths...The Left takes an obvious truth and abstracts it out to the point where it becomes an academic exercise in relativism”.
The Left seeks to ‘deconstruct’ culture, which means to disassemble it using negative criticism dressed up as intellectual analysis, until it becomes meaningless. By techniques such as deconstructionism, they hope to show that everything about Western culture is empty, arbitrary and fictitious. It is part of a wider effort to demoralise and ultimately overthrow Western civilisation, and replace it with totalitarian socialism. You can use this method to attack anything, but Western Leftist academics will only ever attack the West.
Leftist academics use the word ‘problematize’ to describe a practise or technique of creating - they might say ‘uncovering’ - problems where there previously weren’t any. To problematize something is to take an uncontroversial subject and make it controversial; it is to take something innocent and to poison it; the intention is to obscure its original meaning, to discredit and delegitimise, to overcomplicate, to undermine; to manufacture conflict where there previously wasn’t any. To ‘problematize’ something is to engage in cultural and psychological vandalism and to call yourself an intellectual while you’re doing it.
The meme is a powerful antidote to all of this. The Left takes a simple fact and applies an enormous edifice of pseudo-intellectual Leftist dogma on to it, in order to destroy it. A meme, in contrast, takes an enormous edifice of pseudo-intellectual Leftist dogma, and destroys it by pointing out a simple fact.
“The Left can’t Meme because the Meme is the antithesis of how the Left communicates”.
As anti-authoritarians, one of the most powerful weapons we have is humour. Woke culture is just crying out to be lampooned, and the meme is an ideal artform for doing so. The more humorous memes we can circulate, the better.
Yes. Absolutely
The Right to Keep and Bear Memes!