Siloed Symbols

Those Memes, Images and Sayings that ONLY Appeal to Your Side

Good morning political world. We have to chat about something that’s been bugging me and continues to gnaw at my sense of government and politics. You see, none of y’all know how to actually appeal to people outside of your own groups.

Everyone talks about how polarized we are as a society and how sharply divided it is, but I disagree. The ACTIVISM in our politics is what’s divided and they seem to be the only people cable news and the internet listen to; MOST of the country looks at both of these sides and tends to gravitate towards the one that bothers them the least.

Just take many of our political symbols of performative outrage for instance. To be fair, we’ll pick one from each side: from the MAGA Right, the stupid “Let’s Go Brandon” chant, and from the MeToo Left, the protesting handmaids.

Let’s Go Brandon; In fact, let’s not.

The Let’s Go Brandon chant began soon after Biden was inaugurated as President. In the fall of 2021, “Fuck Joe Biden” started being crassly chanted at College Football games, mostly in the southeast. Then in October, 2021, following a NASCAR race at Talledega Motor Speedway, NBCSports reporter Kelli Stavast was interviewing the winner of the race, Brandon Brown, when again, the chant started happening. Clearly audible in the background, Stavast (whether she heard it differently or was trying to prevent an FCC violation on a live broadcast) commented, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’” And of course, it was a big joke of the weekend. People on the right thought of it as some sort of witty catchphrase, but in reality, it was just someone either ignorant of what was being said or being intentionally obtuse for professional reasons.

Except, as always, MAGA supporters with their constant need to provoke and push things way too far, turned “Let’s Go Brandon” into a meme, subtly pushing the message, “Fuck Joe Biden.” Conservative talking heads and more partisan right wing politicians began retweeting and propagating this dumb line. Flags, signs, T-Shirts, Hats—the saying became a crass marketing phenomenon. Almost two years later, it still persists.

To be sure, this line appeals to nobody outside of the initiated. Soon after it started, the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that the chant "reveals a moral bankruptcy of those who chant it even in church.” To the right, its some status symbol to show the world one’s dedication to MAGA, but to everyone else, it just screams “I’m a jerk,” even among many Republicans. It appeals to absolutely zero people outside of the Republican Party.

A Handmaid’s Tale

Back in the early ‘90s, as a Political Science Major, I was assigned to read Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” for my Women in Politics class.¹ It was a fascinating read and a real page turner. The dynamics, classes, roles and characters depicted in the book conveyed a social structure that was both very imaginative and frighteningly real in some respects. For those who have never read the book, the "Handmaids" to which the title refers live in a dystopian political world, where the women who are handmaids are forced to serve as birthing surrogates to the wealthy and elite where the wives are barren.

There was an ‘80s movie of it that I saw some time later on some channel. It was OK. It may have just been dated to me, but didn’t quite have the same impact as the book.²

However, in January 2017, perfectly timed to capitalize on the peak of the MeToo movement and the Inauguration of Donald “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump, a new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale came to Hulu as a series. The series became an instant hit. Whereas the ‘80s film softened some portions and abbreviated others for time, the series played up the emotional intensity of the novel and didn’t leave anything out (in fact, since it was stretched out for a television season, it incorporated additional material into it). The first season was a visionary success.

Now, politics and pop culture often meet. The day after Trump’s inauguration (coinciding with start of the series) was a “Woman’s March”³ on DC. Among many of the protesters were groups of women dressed up as the "Handmaids" on the show; red outfits, white trim with a white bonnet shielding their faces. Admittedly, that first time, it was pretty clever and received a lot of attention. Since then, the Handmaids regularly show up for pretty much every liberal leaning protest march, especially for women's issues. It comes across as just another overperformative group of activists that people prefer to tune out.

Much like the “Let’s Go Brandon” chants, it was a witty one note joke that quickly became worn and passe and the people who push it fail to recognize its time has come and passed.

Failing to Convince the Uninitiated

But what the Let’s Go Brandon chanters and the Handmaids really have in common is that they utterly fail at trying to convince anyone to come to their side who are not already on their side. Nobody hears “Let’s Go Brandon” and says, “You know what, you convinced me!” Nobody sees a Handmaid⁴ and says, “Wow, I need to support climate change or else I may be subjugated to become a surrogate mother for the country's elites!" It doesn't work like that.

Instead, if you are not in either of these groups, you recoil from the sight and sound of them. They don’t convince you to JOIN them, they test how far your patience extends before you go AGAINST them out of spite.

And that is a problem with our politics today. Too much of the time, we focus on the activists ramming visual and auditory political symbols at us instead of paying attention to the issues and officials that matter. That means softening the tone of the messages to appeal to the purple middle of this country instead of directing attention to the hardcore left and right, blue and red of the the activist bases.

Eventually, these symbols “jump the shark” meaning they lose their appeal. I have no doubt these both will soon. The “Let’s Go Brandon” chant is losing its luster, particularly after Joe Biden co-opted and joked about it at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner as “Dark Brandon.”⁵ The Handmaids are slowly waning in number as well as the Hulu series winds down; as the series has continued it has lost viewers and is not as popular as it once was.

And so it’ll go until the next dumb meme/symbol/saying is adopted by the two activist cores of the parties again, and we go through this again.

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Footnotes and Parting Thoughts

Let me know what you think of the page. Please share and comment!

1. Back in the 1990s at my college, we had a “minority requirement” which meant that in order to get your degree you had to go to a number of classes geared toward women and minorites. I didn’t mind it and it did open my eyes to certain ideas and issues I hadn’t and probably wouldn’t have considered. Yet today, for some reason, classes like these are depicted as indoctrinating youth. Please. All they do is expose students to issues outside their comfort zone and expand their understanding of the world. You know, what college is supposed to do.

2. It should go without saying that in most cases, the book is always better.

3. Despite what Trump claims and Sean Spicer rants about, the Woman’s March was a protest larger than Trump’s Inauguration crowds.

4. Or any real “Performative protester.”

5. It feels weird that a dumb mantra was coopted into yet another dumb mantra. It’s like “Repellant Meme part II”