How coconuts and irony helped Democrats take back the meme wars
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Becca Rothfeld
2024-07-31 09:00:00GMT
(Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post; The Washington Post; Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images; iStock)
In 2016, while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were duking it out on the campaign trail, a second and perhaps more consequential skirmish was unfolding on a different battlefield. This was a clash over aesthetics, and it took place online. The weapons deployed in this second war were not attack ads or pleas for donations but irreverent (and sometimes downright offensive) political memes.
Traditionally, transgression has been a leftist specialty. But Trump is not the familiar breed of stuffy, patrician Republican. He is a more flamboyant species, prone to outrageous antics, and the group of pathologically online reactionaries known as the alt-right sensed that he could help them reclaim the coveted mantle of edginess. First on obscure far-right message boards, then on more mainstream sites such as Reddit and Breitbart News, they launched what they called the Great Meme War in an effort to get him elected. Their ammunition consisted of funny pictures and pithy phrases designed to be replicated and circulated — the stuff of which digital culture is made.
Pepe, a cartoon frog with bulging eyes, was quickly enlisted as their mascot. Once an innocuous figure who appeared in comics on Myspace, Pepe had a disarmingly cutesy appearance that clashed conspicuously with his new ideology. Soon, he was a fixture of anonymous message boards such as 8chan and 4chan, where he wore Nazi regalia or proclaimed, “Kill all Jews.” He was succeeded by a cavalcade of equally dicey characters: Giga Chad, a muscular personality who typified the sort of hyper-masculinity that the internet’s resident sexists hoped to revive, would eventually show up in a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ video posted by the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign.
It’s probably not possible to measure the effect of the Great Meme War on the results of the 2016 presidential election (though it is certainly significant that some of Trump’s campaign staffers were avowed meme enthusiasts). Still, the meme warriors won an important victory, regardless of their impact on the polls. They helped to unify the motley crew of evangelicals, GOP stalwarts and MAGA die-hards that makes up Trump’s base by employing a potent political tool: irony.
The posts containing Chads and Pepes were sarcastic — or were they? For that matter, were the people who posted them serious or joking? No one knew for sure, and that was precisely the point. An ironic movement could accommodate all comers. Dyed-in-the-wool racists and sexists could interpret the nastiest memes literally and sign on to a campaign they saw as a front for white supremacy; Republicans who sought to maintain a veneer of respectability could insist that they were just kidding around; and contrarians without firm political convictions could be conscripted solely because they liked to make liberals angry.
In the hazy space between sincerity and satire was a dark glimmer of political possibility.
For the intervening eight years, the fragile liberal-left alliance failed to challenge the right’s monopoly on meming, both in the United States and abroad. As the novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens lamented in a recent essay on her Substack, “the loss of leftist ‘cool’” is in part responsible for the staggering triumph of the far right in the E.U. elections last month. In Europe, as in America, she writes, reactionary populists have “an anti-establishment online streak that is especially attractive to younger generations.” By way of illustration, she cites a sign erected by a progressive youth organization in Germany. The poster reads, roughly, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: If you don’t, things will turn brown.” There is a pun at work — the “brownshirts,” of course, were Nazi paramilitary officers — but the image is still uninvitingly nagging. To all but a few neurotics, dental hygiene is not very enthralling.
The Biden campaign was similarly deflating. He, too, relied on chiding moral appeals about the future of democracy. He, too, had no apparent sense of humor. His slogan, “Let’s finish the job,” was vaguely menacing, and somehow consistent with a dentist’s desperate calls to floss more vigorously. Not only did the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer seem determined to lose, but he also seemed determined to be mortifyingly earnest. There was no way to support his campaign without identifying with it entirely.
Enter, then, the coconut meme.
In a clip that has become ubiquitous, Vice President Harris asks, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” She pauses to laugh knowingly, then continues, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and all that came before you.”
Funnily enough, the initial context for this statement is now unimportant. As it happens, Harris was delivering a speech about economic and educational inequality at the White House in 2023 when she spoke these fateful lines, but the coconut has transcended its origins. Since Harris’s coronation as the likely Democratic nominee, the clip has been edited to remixes of popular songs, including Charli XCX’s “360” and Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon”; lawmakers have posted photos of themselves climbing coconut trees or emerging onto the steps of the Capitol sipping drinks out of a coconut; and videos of people toppling down the stairs have appeared with captions such as “kamala falling from the coconut tree and into the oval office.” The line has been quoted and re-quoted, shared and reshared, in a burst of collective giddiness.
Suddenly, I was getting invitations to coconut parties, and people were adding the coconut emoji to their bios on X. Did these coconut enthusiasts actually like Harris? Or were they mocking her? I couldn’t tell. I asked my husband, and he said he couldn’t tell, either, even though he has a coconut emoji in his own bio.
The coconut craze has even charmed leftists with plenty of reasons to hesitate before wholeheartedly warming to Harris. After all, “Copmala,” as she was nicknamed by skeptics during her previous presidential bid, is a former prosecutor with a history of pro-police stances — and although she has pointedly distanced herself from the president’s support for the Israel-Gaza war, she is still associated with an administration embroiled in a conflict that is wildly unpopular among younger and more progressive voters.
Matthew Sitman, co-host of the popular leftist podcast “Know Your Enemy,” told me that he added the coconut and tree emojis to his bio on X to “signal my newfound enthusiasm for Kamala Harris,” but added that this enthusiasm was “tinged with irony.” “It’s kind of complicated,” he said. “I haven’t actually been persuaded that Kamala Harris is amazing, but she’s an immense relief to me. My enthusiasm, ... it’s for Harris, yes, but it’s also for a human being who can string sentences together and could actually beat Donald Trump.”
Nathan Robinson, founder and editor of the leftist magazine Current Affairs, is largely in agreement with Sitman, although he has a more pessimistic spin. He marveled that, “seemingly overnight,” Harris’s “muddled word salads and platitudes have gone from making her a political liability to being grist for some kind of semi-facetious personality cult.” But he thinks the coconut phenomenon is “kind of a sad sign of how weak the left is, that the best thing we can do is convince ourselves that we can accept having Kamala Harris forced on us without any process if we embrace her with a certain level of irony.”
Perhaps the left-liberal détente will not last forever: Leftist Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu told me that, although “the language of the internet might be obscuring that divide a little bit, ... it will probably become clearer as the election progresses.”
Still, for now, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the left and the liberal center are more unified than I have ever seen them. If love means never having to say you’re sorry, then irony means never having to say you’re serious.
The painfully sincere Biden campaign failed to excite the Democratic base, and it scared off many of the leftists with reservations about his friendly relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his age or his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the euphoric meming around Harris has allowed a wide range of members of the Democratic-leaning electorate to coalesce around her without having to commit to everything she stands for. Irony is playful and capacious enough to permit simultaneous endorsement and ridicule.
In other words, it is the aesthetic required for the emergence of a coalition — a delicate and hard-earned achievement that most certainly does not just fall out of a coconut tree.
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Becca Rothfeld
2024-07-31 09:00:00GMT
(Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post; The Washington Post; Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images; iStock)
In 2016, while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were duking it out on the campaign trail, a second and perhaps more consequential skirmish was unfolding on a different battlefield. This was a clash over aesthetics, and it took place online. The weapons deployed in this second war were not attack ads or pleas for donations but irreverent (and sometimes downright offensive) political memes.
Traditionally, transgression has been a leftist specialty. But Trump is not the familiar breed of stuffy, patrician Republican. He is a more flamboyant species, prone to outrageous antics, and the group of pathologically online reactionaries known as the alt-right sensed that he could help them reclaim the coveted mantle of edginess. First on obscure far-right message boards, then on more mainstream sites such as Reddit and Breitbart News, they launched what they called the Great Meme War in an effort to get him elected. Their ammunition consisted of funny pictures and pithy phrases designed to be replicated and circulated — the stuff of which digital culture is made.
Pepe, a cartoon frog with bulging eyes, was quickly enlisted as their mascot. Once an innocuous figure who appeared in comics on Myspace, Pepe had a disarmingly cutesy appearance that clashed conspicuously with his new ideology. Soon, he was a fixture of anonymous message boards such as 8chan and 4chan, where he wore Nazi regalia or proclaimed, “Kill all Jews.” He was succeeded by a cavalcade of equally dicey characters: Giga Chad, a muscular personality who typified the sort of hyper-masculinity that the internet’s resident sexists hoped to revive, would eventually show up in a controversial anti-LGBTQ+ video posted by the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign.
It’s probably not possible to measure the effect of the Great Meme War on the results of the 2016 presidential election (though it is certainly significant that some of Trump’s campaign staffers were avowed meme enthusiasts). Still, the meme warriors won an important victory, regardless of their impact on the polls. They helped to unify the motley crew of evangelicals, GOP stalwarts and MAGA die-hards that makes up Trump’s base by employing a potent political tool: irony.
The posts containing Chads and Pepes were sarcastic — or were they? For that matter, were the people who posted them serious or joking? No one knew for sure, and that was precisely the point. An ironic movement could accommodate all comers. Dyed-in-the-wool racists and sexists could interpret the nastiest memes literally and sign on to a campaign they saw as a front for white supremacy; Republicans who sought to maintain a veneer of respectability could insist that they were just kidding around; and contrarians without firm political convictions could be conscripted solely because they liked to make liberals angry.
In the hazy space between sincerity and satire was a dark glimmer of political possibility.
For the intervening eight years, the fragile liberal-left alliance failed to challenge the right’s monopoly on meming, both in the United States and abroad. As the novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens lamented in a recent essay on her Substack, “the loss of leftist ‘cool’” is in part responsible for the staggering triumph of the far right in the E.U. elections last month. In Europe, as in America, she writes, reactionary populists have “an anti-establishment online streak that is especially attractive to younger generations.” By way of illustration, she cites a sign erected by a progressive youth organization in Germany. The poster reads, roughly, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: If you don’t, things will turn brown.” There is a pun at work — the “brownshirts,” of course, were Nazi paramilitary officers — but the image is still uninvitingly nagging. To all but a few neurotics, dental hygiene is not very enthralling.
The Biden campaign was similarly deflating. He, too, relied on chiding moral appeals about the future of democracy. He, too, had no apparent sense of humor. His slogan, “Let’s finish the job,” was vaguely menacing, and somehow consistent with a dentist’s desperate calls to floss more vigorously. Not only did the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer seem determined to lose, but he also seemed determined to be mortifyingly earnest. There was no way to support his campaign without identifying with it entirely.
Enter, then, the coconut meme.
In a clip that has become ubiquitous, Vice President Harris asks, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” She pauses to laugh knowingly, then continues, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and all that came before you.”
Funnily enough, the initial context for this statement is now unimportant. As it happens, Harris was delivering a speech about economic and educational inequality at the White House in 2023 when she spoke these fateful lines, but the coconut has transcended its origins. Since Harris’s coronation as the likely Democratic nominee, the clip has been edited to remixes of popular songs, including Charli XCX’s “360” and Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon”; lawmakers have posted photos of themselves climbing coconut trees or emerging onto the steps of the Capitol sipping drinks out of a coconut; and videos of people toppling down the stairs have appeared with captions such as “kamala falling from the coconut tree and into the oval office.” The line has been quoted and re-quoted, shared and reshared, in a burst of collective giddiness.
Suddenly, I was getting invitations to coconut parties, and people were adding the coconut emoji to their bios on X. Did these coconut enthusiasts actually like Harris? Or were they mocking her? I couldn’t tell. I asked my husband, and he said he couldn’t tell, either, even though he has a coconut emoji in his own bio.
The coconut craze has even charmed leftists with plenty of reasons to hesitate before wholeheartedly warming to Harris. After all, “Copmala,” as she was nicknamed by skeptics during her previous presidential bid, is a former prosecutor with a history of pro-police stances — and although she has pointedly distanced herself from the president’s support for the Israel-Gaza war, she is still associated with an administration embroiled in a conflict that is wildly unpopular among younger and more progressive voters.
Matthew Sitman, co-host of the popular leftist podcast “Know Your Enemy,” told me that he added the coconut and tree emojis to his bio on X to “signal my newfound enthusiasm for Kamala Harris,” but added that this enthusiasm was “tinged with irony.” “It’s kind of complicated,” he said. “I haven’t actually been persuaded that Kamala Harris is amazing, but she’s an immense relief to me. My enthusiasm, ... it’s for Harris, yes, but it’s also for a human being who can string sentences together and could actually beat Donald Trump.”
Nathan Robinson, founder and editor of the leftist magazine Current Affairs, is largely in agreement with Sitman, although he has a more pessimistic spin. He marveled that, “seemingly overnight,” Harris’s “muddled word salads and platitudes have gone from making her a political liability to being grist for some kind of semi-facetious personality cult.” But he thinks the coconut phenomenon is “kind of a sad sign of how weak the left is, that the best thing we can do is convince ourselves that we can accept having Kamala Harris forced on us without any process if we embrace her with a certain level of irony.”
Perhaps the left-liberal détente will not last forever: Leftist Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu told me that, although “the language of the internet might be obscuring that divide a little bit, ... it will probably become clearer as the election progresses.”
Still, for now, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the left and the liberal center are more unified than I have ever seen them. If love means never having to say you’re sorry, then irony means never having to say you’re serious.
The painfully sincere Biden campaign failed to excite the Democratic base, and it scared off many of the leftists with reservations about his friendly relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his age or his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the euphoric meming around Harris has allowed a wide range of members of the Democratic-leaning electorate to coalesce around her without having to commit to everything she stands for. Irony is playful and capacious enough to permit simultaneous endorsement and ridicule.
In other words, it is the aesthetic required for the emergence of a coalition — a delicate and hard-earned achievement that most certainly does not just fall out of a coconut tree.
