In Austin, March comes in like a lion but goes out like a marketer, thanks to the annual South By Southwest conference, where tech startups and content companies all try to implant brand awareness directly into your brain. This year, one of SXSW's more memorable stunts came courtesy of Hulu, which promoted their upcoming adaption of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale by hiring costumed actresses to congregate at various locations around town.
But the streaming platform also gave the city's progressive community an idea. Heather Busby, executive director of reproductive rights nonprofit NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, wondered if those symbols of patriarchal dystopia could be put to other use. "People on Facebook were saying it would be great if the Handmaids walked down to the Capitol to protest abortion restrictions," Busby says. "So we rented red cloaks from a local costume shop."
The 12 Handmaids who marched into the Texas Senate gallery in March were only the beginning. Handmaids have since cropped up at left-wing protests from California to Washington, DC, to Poland. And there's a simple reason for the symbol's success: "We're using the striking image of that red cloak and that bonnet to put out the call on social media," Busby says. The internet created Handmaid protesters, in other words, because the internet thought it would enjoy them. But that very motivation speaks to a fundamental difference between the two poles of the ideological continuum—and not the one you're thinking of.
Despite their seemingly uncrossable divide, the digital factions of the active left and right actually agree on one thing: the left can’t meme. For the meme-obsessed alt-right, this is not only hilarious but also proof in its proponents' minds that their movement is the future. For the progressive resistance, which has traditionally opted for hashtags over heavy-lidded frogs, it raises the disturbing possibility that their interests might get left behind.
Somehow, that "meme gap" has added a new wrinkle to the online conversation around politics: Memes are now seen as a core metric of a movement’s success. That’s led to progressives pumping out a series of made-to-go-viral stunts, like the pink “pussy hats” associated with the Women’s March or dressing up as a character from Handmaid’s Tale. But while seeing Twitter photos of Handmaids sticking it to the man might bolster morale for a limited subset of progressives, these images only have a fraction of Pepe the Frog’s sharing power. And besides, the left’s lack of rallying-cry memes isn’t the disease; it’s the symptom. Memes can help spread a cohesive, unifying message, but they can’t make one.
It’s not as if internet-era progressive movements have always struggled with memes. Black Lives Matter has produced many, from “I Can’t Breathe” to the movement’s name itself. Occupy Wall Street gave the internet pepper spray cop. And when it comes to day-to-day political satire on social media, the left gives at least as good as they get.
What the left doesn't have, though, is a mascot—a single, resonant image that distills everything into a replicable, relatable form. The alt-right has two: Pepe the Frog and President Trump.
Nor do progressives have memes that articulate their policy positions. The alt-right, on the other hand?
Even slogans like #Resist and #LoveTrumpsHate, while viral, are either vague or reactive. If that sounds familiar, it's because Hillary Clinton's candidacy faced similar problems in its own messaging—but it also reflects some resignation on the left's part. "Whether or not shitposting actually helped elect Donald Trump, that’s the narrative," says Whitney Phillips, author of The Ambivalent Internet, using the term for the indiscriminate meme-making that allowed the alt-right to flood and dilute online conversations. "So on the left, there's a sense of PR and marketing defeat."
In fact, the media was instrumental in helping create that narrative. Propaganda bots helped push out far-right content, and for better or worse, bigoted memes will always be more newsworthy than peppy slogans. Meme panic was part of that billions of dollars' worth of free advertising the media provided the Trump campaign in the form of ceaseless, often merely parroted amplification. And it didn't end when Trump took office.
All of which has left Twitter-loving progressives feeling meme-conflicted: they're reductive, but they're effective. And that in turn has led to attempts to force a meme into being—an intrinsically self-defeating practice that's a meme in itself (it's sometimes called "horsemanning" for complicated, BuzzFeed-involved reasons). That's how you ended up with the Women's March pink hat, Handmaids, and even other weird protest-costume crazes like dressing as a zombie.
But while the media covers them as emerging progressive memes, the experts aren't too sure. "They’re absolutely memetic: they spread, they’re social," Philips says. "But there’s a huge difference between those images and the kinds of things you would see with Pepe the Frog, and that is specificity." In other words, they aren't as infinitely remixable, and therefore not as shareable.
Part of that specificity is that—for whatever reason—the #resist movement has fixated on designing memeable costumes, which are by nature a limited-range weapon: they have the biggest impact on the immediate surroundings. "You kind of take on that persona," says Busby. "You can’t see very well, people can’t see what’s under the red cloak, and it changes the tone of when you come into the room."
The pussy hat and the Handmaid costumes do make an impression, which is why they've become global symbols of a certain kind of protest. But they aren't a rallying cry. "These memes on the left aren't taking off because they’re only resonating with one particular group: left-leaning white women," says Kate Miltner, an internet researcher at the University of Southern California. "A lot of the memes coming out of the right are trading on base fears." To be affected by someone dressing as a Handmaid, you have to be familiar with either the Hulu show or Margaret Atwood's book enough to know that Handmaids are the result of a conservative, patriarchal theocracy. Pussy hats are gendered, and targeted at people who know how to knit. Plus, they're an ironic spin on a comment made by President Trump over a decade ago. "They're not as universal as 'someone going to take my job,'" Miltner says. (And yes, the alt-right has memes for that too.)
The niche-ness of these progressive memes and viral symbols shouldn't have to be a failing, because memes aren't supposed to be what unites a political movement. "Memes are highly ideological," says Miltner. "The problem with the left isn't that they aren't good at the meme format. It's that there isn’t a coherent, uniform message that’s being circulated." A problem Democratic leadership knows about, and most recently tried to fix with their new "Better Deal" sloganeering.
But while it's probably unrealistic to expect internet culture to feed off of policy more than lulz, that's still where discourse needs be happen—especially in a culture so divided. "Memes are not going to be how we break down barriers," Philips says. "Having a conversation with memes is like having a conversation by throwing rotten fruit at each other from across the street." And instead of finding common ground, everyone just winds up smelling bad.
