Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to talk about the meme-ification of politics and the presidential election year now because viral content dominates the political landscape. I obviously am not bringing you anything new by saying that. Memes, and we're going to define memes, are playing an outsized role and an ever-increasing role in shaping American politics.

There's a good article about this in The New Yorker by staff writer Clare Malone, who's going to join us in just a second to delve into the meme-ification of our politics. She explores the way internet culture has helped politicians. They're definitely trying to use it. Observers and the broader public spread their ideas, their misinformation, rally support, or at times create a degree of chaos.

As a result, Clare writes, "The 2024 election seems likely to be waged in a media environment where more and more voters are forming opinions based on the funny video their cousin's husband's sister shared in a group chat." Sound familiar? What's the first image that you have if I say Joe Biden? Maybe not for you, Brian Lehrer Show listeners. For a lot of Americans, it might be what they saw on TikTok of Joe Biden falling off a bicycle or Donald Trump as seen in mugshots.

Americans may have doubts about Biden's age as reflected by that video, but the former president, Trump himself, only a few years younger than Biden, so far, according to Clare, seems less affected by the meme-ification. Maybe that's a good example of the way memes can shape the public's perception, accurate or not. What does this all mean for 2024? Clare Malone's new article in The New Yorker is called The Meme-ification of American Politics. Hey, Clare, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Clare Malone: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Would you start by defining meme for the purpose of your analysis?

Clare Malone: Sure. Meme, for the purpose of my analysis, is usually something these days that goes around on TikTok or Instagram videos or short videos you might see on Twitter. It's usually kind of like a supposed-to-be funny video or visual joke about a topic or a person. In this case, there's a lot of political memes going on about Joe Biden and his age and his supposed feebleness or fragility or sort of doddering nature.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a difference between a meme and a viral moment or viral video or are we talking about the same thing when we use--

Clare Malone: Yes, we're kind of talking about the same thing. Often what happens is someone might take a raw video from, let's say, NBC News and splice it with a funny, jokey video, and that goes viral as sort of a funny meme, or it might just be like a cringey moment, an embarrassing moment that goes viral, but yes, we're sort of smushing those two definitions together here.

Brian Lehrer: How does a political moment become a meme? Is there an answer to that? I wonder if you have an example that explains a pattern for how voters get information based on a funny video that their cousin's husband's sister shared in a group chat as you wrote.

Clare Malone: Sure. Well, I ground my piece with the meme or the variations on a meme that Biden is old and that Biden falls a lot. There's this video of Biden at the Air Force Academy graduation. He falls down on the stage. It's kind of like one of those cringey moments. That video goes viral, both just the raw footage of it and people posting cringe comments on TikTok, and then people splicing together funny videos like Trump hitting a golf ball and it bopping Biden and that's why he falls down.

Let's talk about first why they connect with people. I think the "Biden is old" or the "Biden is senile" meme connects with people because there is a real concern among American voters, Democratic and Republican, that Biden is too old. He's in his 80s. I think if he won, he'd be 86 by the end of his term. We see in poll after poll that people think he is too old to be president. I should note here, Trump is only four years younger.

There doesn't seem to be the same concern, I think, in part, because maybe a polite way to put it is Trump projects a certain vigorousness through things like yelling at a judge during a trial or things that are a bit-- maybe he doesn't act his age all the time. Anyway, these memes get spread in interesting ways. I think the TikTok algorithm is meant to pick up content that it doesn't necessarily have to come from a known creator.

It just sort of, "Oh, it speaks to people." There is a certain element of grassroots virality to memes these days, particularly on mediums like TikTok. I talked to an academic for my piece, this guy, Ryan Milner. I guess you could call him a professional memeologist. He studies the way memes have affected our society. He said that it's probably a combination, these Biden political memes. It's probably a combination of genuine grassroots sentiment. People feel this way. They think the joke is funny.

They share it around, but also there are ways now in professional politics for you to help seed the ground with your memes. Maybe you put it on the right Reddit thread or the right Discord channel. Then I think the real big amplifier, particularly in conservative media, which I think is much more filled with this kind of memes, is you get someone like Ben Shapiro, who's a well-known conservative podcaster, or Steven Crowder. Same thing. A well-known conservative podcaster.

They share the meme or the sentiment on their shows. It blasts out to their listeners who aren't on TikTok or who aren't on Instagram. All of a sudden, we have this information environment that is-- We used to call them political cartoons, right? People are forming their opinions based on these videos and this sentiment that's just in the ether these days of, "Oh, cringe Biden," or I guess on the Democratic side, "Oh, my gosh. Trump and his mugshot." It's both grassroots and I think a purposeful amplification of memes.

Brian Lehrer: All right, listeners, who out there right now has been swayed politically by a meme, maybe shared in a group chat? Tell us that story, 212-433-WNYC, or who out there knows that anybody else in your life has been swayed politically by a meme, maybe shared in a group chat, and you're kind of horrified by it because it's misleading or shallow or whatever?

Tell us your stories. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text for Clare Malone from The New Yorker. What are the political memes you found especially effective, for better or worse, if you have run into them? Do they tend to be more on the right than on the left if the algorithm even gives you both sides? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Clare Malone from The New Yorker, whose new article is called The Meme-ification of American Politics.

Getting back to Biden and how the memes portray him as old and feeble, you write that his main appeal was his old white man blandness. It meant that his supporters wouldn't have to tune into chaotic events. We remember 2020 after four years of chaos with Trump. Plus, it was the pandemic and the post-George Floyd murder period. Talk about Biden's what you call "old white man blandness" and how that's kind of now being used against him.

Clare Malone: Sure. I think it's no secret that one of the reasons why Biden won the Democratic primary and why Biden eventually won the election is he's what we were used to in a president and he's what people thought other people would vote for. Then he ran on a promise of, "Listen, the Trump years have been crazy. If you elect me, I'm going to make things go back to normal."

People did. People did elect him and people did tune out of the daily craziness of political coverage. Statistically, across the media industry, you're seeing that people have been tuning out of news for the past couple of years in particular rates over the past year or two because of the poundingly sad news of wars around the world. We're seeing fewer people reading the news.

Into that vacuum, people don't actually see Biden every day if they're just casually turning on WNYC or whatever TV news they consume. Into that vacuum of, "Oh, what is Biden doing?" stepped conservative media with, I think, quite effective videos of the-- The RNC has this, for instance, six-minute-or-so-long video of Biden looking confused, right? Biden doesn't know which way to go on stage.

I should say here that, actually, there was a political article about this. Democratic insiders were angry at his advanced team, the people who were supposed to tell him where to go, for being inefficient and making him look doddering. Anyway, the RNC has poured efforts into, "Look at this old guy. He doesn't know what he's doing." Biden does have physical stiffness. He has an arthritis of the back.

He has a foot injury, which does make his gait somewhat stiff, clumsy, and so there are actual factual video moments of him doing this. I think in the absence of big exciting news like we were used to with Trump about politics, no one really knew what Biden was doing day to day, in stepped the sleek and funny conservative memes about Biden being old. It helped really define him in a way that spoke to a lot of Americans who, again, were already concerned with the fact that he is too old to be president.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I don't know if we can make this local if your reporting has looked at this at all with respect to the Tom Suozzi-Mazi Pilip race that's going on right now, that special election to fill George Santos's seat. I know you're a New Yorker. We got a text here from a listener that's not about that race, but it makes me think about that race. The listener writes, "Politics is retail and advertisers have been maniacally searching for the viral sauce, forgetting that viral by definition requires an unconscious mass, the public on which to feed and grow. Politicians succeed every once in a while, but the world is lousy with their epic fails," [chuckles] meaning, trying to force things to become memes.

I'm thinking about how in that race, Suozzi has a lot more money than Pilip from what I've read. There's a lot more Suozzi flyers out there and Suozzi advertising on television, Suozzi is doing interviews. The Republican isn't even accepting interview invitations very much. Even though she's the less known one, she's not accepting all but one debate that was accepted precisely at a time that it's going to be as ineffective as possible at reaching people Thursday night only on cable on Long Island when the election's almost over.

They're depending on this kind of Republican voter word-of-mouth network. To me, this is an example potentially of the meme-ification of politics being played out right now before our eyes because it's not before our eyes. One candidate is really campaigning publicly. The other candidate is trying to campaign through what we might be able to call memes.

Clare Malone: That's so interesting. I haven't been following it closely enough to be able to speak super well, but I will say, there is, in recent years, just the idea of how much should you be in-- not just during The Brian Lehrer Show or talking to The New Yorker or talking to CNN, how much you should be doing news like that, but how much should you be doing almost organic campaigning.

I'll bring it back to national. I apologize to the New York audience for not making it about that election. You see Biden trying to compensate in some ways for the fact that he has gone viral for the wrong reasons by seeding these little viral moments on social media. One thing that that campaign has been doing, they don't do as many formal events with the press, which is notable, but they will and have been increasingly doing these little events where they go to a voter's house for dinner.

Biden swings by a middle-class family in a North Carolina home. He eats dinner with them. Their teenage kid films it for TikTok. Then that TikTok goes moderately viral, let's say. It's a heartwarming retail event because, frankly, if you've ever watched Joe Biden actually interact with voters, he's pretty good at it, right? He's been in politics since he was 29. He's been running for office for a very long time.

He has that folksy, "Oh, shucks," thing going on that I think probably does work well in a more intimate setting. How a candidate should seed knowledge about themselves is changing. It's not just through the formal media channels. It's through social media. It's through word of mouth potentially if it's strong enough. I think we're watching campaign communications shift before our eyes.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text from a listener says, "My biggest problem with these memes is that they are often not even actually funny. If you're going to orchestrate comedic PSYOPs, at least do a good job." We're talking about the most serious things in the world when we're talking about politics. We're talking about whether people have enough to eat. We're talking about war and peace in the Middle East. Pick your super-serious issue that politics is really about and then it gets waged on the floor of comedy.

Clare Malone: For better or for worse, yes. It's often not even political satire. I certainly take the listener's point that, often, it might not be particularly funny. It's more on the realm of America's Funniest Home Video physical comedy, right? Somebody falling down is like immature humor. I will say, a lot of times, these memes go viral is because they do speak to just like our-- Particularly in the way American society functions right now, they speak to sometimes the things that people feel like they, "Ooh, can we say that?"

Often, these memes go viral on conservative media because they are a little mean, a little one-dimensional. If most Americans think that Biden is too old to be president, it does kind of "go there," right? It's a mean humor, but it does get at a gut feeling that people have. Whether we like it or not, and I take the listener's point that it's not particularly funny, that is how a lot of people are forming their opinion.

My line is always people or voters often have very idiosyncratic views and views that are more about, I say, like political pheromones, right? You like the way that person is. You can't really put a finger on their policies or tons of their policies, but you just like the way they are. You have a good feeling about them. It goes out into the world in these, I think for a lot of people who pay attention, unsatisfying ways.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, there's nothing new about that in electoral politics. Sometimes people just respond viscerally to a candidate's personality, something about them that speaks trust or identification. This is just the modern technology way that some of that gets shared and spread. Olivia in Farmingdale, you're on WNYC. Hi, Olivia.

Olivia: Hi, Brian. I love your show. I try to listen whenever I can.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Olivia: Just two points I wanted to make real quick. I don't have a meme specifically to talk about, but I want to point out. I do think memes serve one of our more base human reactions of judgment. I wonder how much that ties into what people might really think that they don't want to say. First point, how many polls have been done asking seniors how they feel about Biden being in his 80s as president? Because are we, again, being an ageist society that is excluding seniors from the conversation when there is a lot of wisdom, I think, from elders that we could learn from?

Then point two. This, again, ties into people's judgment with memes that I don't think everybody necessarily wants to admit they have. I'm a woman. I would love to have a female president. I wonder how many people don't want to vote for Biden based on age because they're nervous about then if he's elected and he dies, Kamala Harris becomes president. How many people out there don't want to admit that they're nervous about having a woman and a woman of color as the next president of the United States?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Olivia. That's all fair and good points. On the senior citizens, Clare, I don't know if you remember the Eric Adams line when he was running for mayor in 2021 and he would get knocked a lot on social media. He would say, "People on social media don't decide elections. People on Social Security decide elections because older people vote at such a higher rate than younger people." To one of Olivia's points, who knows of a backlash against what can be perceived as ageism might help Biden, at least with some voters who tend to vote.

Clare Malone: It's a great point. Eric Adams is right. Older voters are the ones who vote. Olivia, I don't have an answer right off the top of my head about older voters, but these polls do tend to break out their results by age. My guess is that you're probably right that older voters are more sympathetic to Biden. I think to the point about Kamala Harris and people's dislike of her or maybe their unwillingness to explicitly say, "I don't want her to be president," I think that's probably certainly a factor in all of this.

However you feel about it, she is not a popular political figure right now. I'm sure there's some of that at work. Sometimes they say people are-- the term was "shy Trump voters" that they weren't telling pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump. We're not sure if that was true all the time because, actually, a lot of Trump voters liked to say that they were going to vote for Donald Trump. There is certainly that phenomenon that happens within polling where people might not want to say it to a person, but they might feel it in their poll results say implicitly what they really feel. It's an interesting point that she brings up.

Brian Lehrer: We actually talked about this a little bit in another segment on the show recently about how the polling over time since 2016 seems to indicate-- and, of course, there's a lot yet to play out in this presidential election year but seems to indicate that a lot of Trump supporters would not tell pollsters in 2016 because they were embarrassed by it or they thought other people would shame them for it.

Now, regardless of everything that Trump has done, Trump voters tend to have more open pride about being Trump voters and are willing to share it more than they did. We won't really know until after the election, how true that is for 2024. It's one of the apparent possible trends over time, disturbing to some people. Dennis in Brooklyn thinks there may not be as much imbalance in political comedy as some of this conversation might suggest. Dennis, thanks for calling. You're on WNYC.

Dennis: Hey, good morning. How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right.

Dennis: You and your guest were saying that there seems to be more meme-ification on the right on the conservative side. I just wanted to point out that all of the comedy seems to be on the left. SNL, Comedy Central, the late-nights, they all totally make fun of everyone on the right. Look what happened just recently with SNL when the congresswoman from New York questioned Claudine Gay. Claudine Gay obviously messed up. They were making fun of the Republican congresswoman. The meme-ification is just a way of the conservatives and the rights having their SNL and their way of making comedy of the left. It barely balances it out. Barely.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's a good point, Dennis. Thank you very much. By the way, I saw that sketch, and they were making fun of Claudine Gay too on Saturday Night Live that night. He's got a point about where the mainstream late-night-- and even if you go back to the origin of Fox News, it's because there was this feeling on the right that the left had the mainstream networks and there needed to be an alternative. It was an act of defense as much as an act of offense as Fox News is seen now.

Clare Malone: I think Dennis makes a great point. It has been really interesting to watch in the Trump era, a lot of these late-night hosts take up this mantle of liberal politics, right? I think a lot of it when Trump was elected was these feelings of, "Is this going to be an anti-Democratic administration?" I think that there's a lot of people and arguments for, "Yes, he did bring in anti-Democratic norms." The way that comedy has reacted in the past few years has been really interesting to watch.

I think SNL and the late-night hosts of late have gotten a lot of criticism for not making fun of Biden. You'll see in comedy just broadly some of these bubbling-up standup acts where they, again, go there. These comedians will go there and say the things that they feel like are being policed, talking about gender and pronouns, talking about politics. I think there is an interesting backlash in the comedic community. I think, again, yes, Dennis, you have a good point about where comedy is right now.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to run out of time in a minute, but I wonder if it's a better poll than the polls because, what do the networks do for a living? They try to broadcast to as mass an audience as they possibly can. If the late-night hosts, a very important profit center for the major networks, are finding it in their interest-- if the networks are finding it in their interest to choose late-night hosts who are going to make more fun of the right than make fun of the left and that's building their audience, it's kind of a poll of Americans, isn't it?

Clare Malone: That's interesting. Money talks, right? I would also suspect there might be some-- Listen, this is not an informed or a reported-out thing I'm about to say. Maybe if Colbert makes fun of Biden and then your CBS News side wants an interview with him, you might get some pushback from the Biden White House saying, "You guys were mean to us on one of your most popular programs. What's up?" I think it could be both. It could be both, as you say, Brian, like a public poll, but also then the behind-the-scenes strategizing and politicking in addition to the fact that I think a lot of these late-night hosts in their writers' rooms are liberal.

Brian Lehrer: Clare Malone, whose new article in The New Yorker where she is a staff writer is called The Meme-ification of American Politics. Thanks a lot, Clare.

Clare Malone: Thanks, Brian.

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