Memetic Histories
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You’re scrolling your news feed late at night. You come across a scorching hot and hilariously edgy take. You laugh to yourself, then share it to your friends and followers. It feels like the cutting-edge of internet culture but you just shared a meme from 1968.
Some years ago, I began to study and theorize the political phenomena taking place over social media. In the early years, my work focused on the posting activity of Gen Z meme makers, ages 12 - 25. Today, I find myself interviewing some of the most prominent voices in our online discourse.
After years of immersing myself in this field, I’ve uncovered that many seemingly silly and innocuous memes are part of a multi-decade propaganda campaign whose underlying philosophies have shaped our very conception of political alignment. In this text we will explore a brief history of two of the most popular online formats and their neoliberal ideological origins.
The Political Compass
The political compass is the most widely used ideological diagram on today’s internet. (If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already extremely online and undoubtedly familiar with this format.) The X-axis maps a spectrum of “Left to Right”, along conventional notions of collective to private ownership. The Y-axis maps “Authoritarian to Libertarian” and indicates the prescribed role of the state. This simple meme, mostly used by edgelord teenagers, has a deep history that is not commonly known.
In the summer of 1968, the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought published a remarkable article; “The Political Spectrum: A Bi-Dimensional Approach”. Responding to a piece from an earlier issue, authors Maurice Bryson and William McDill grapple with the limitations of a traditional “Left - Right” political spectrum. On a two dimensional graph, right-wing ideas like fascism and libertarianism appear visually close to one another while left-wing positions like anarchism and socialism are clustered on the opposite side. A two dimensional spectrum fails to differentiate important distinctions or to indicate supposed similarities. In an attempt to map these various political positions, the authors propose this diagram:
I first stumbled across this article while browsing the archives of the Mises Institute. If you’re not familiar, Ludwig Von Mises is the Austrian economist who wrote Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. In the western canon, this text is widely regarded as the critical work that discredits the feasibility of economic planning (aka ‘socialism sounds good on paper, but doesn’t work in practice’.) Mises was a lifelong theorist and proponent of neoliberalism. He was among the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society in Europe. Today, the eponymous institute exists to educate the public and to spread free market ideology.
In the article, the authors expand upon this diagram and map shifting notions of the political “center” over the course of many decades. From the very beginning, neoliberal theorists understood that powerful ideas could redefine the center of politics. If successful, they could eventually position themselves as the most viable alternative and as a new form of political commonsense.
From these humble beginnings, a drawing published in a niche intellectual journal almost 60 years ago, the diagram has grown to become the most widely distributed political meme of the modern era. Today it exists in almost every country and has been translated into every major language. It now proliferates at a scale that would have been unimaginable to its original creators.
In 1969, one year after the Rampart Journal article, David Nolan, an American libertarian activist, created “The Nolan Chart”, a streamlined and more graphically designed quadrant of political positions. In 1970, Nolan adapted this diagram into a playful multiple choice game called “The World’s Smallest Political Quiz”. The ten step questionnaire would gauge your responses and use these metrics to locate you at certain coordinates along the XY grid. This catchy meme was commonly handed out as take-away literature at libertarian meetups. Fittingly, in 1971, David Nolan became a founding member of the United States libertarian party.
In 2001, the politicalcompass.org website went live and has since seeded this meme into every imaginable online subculture.
In its philosophy of design, the Political Compass is meant to individuate and to atomize quiz-takers. Rather than grouping like-minded people into similar blocs, it has the implicit effect of magnifying the small differences between subjects who are relatively closely aligned. Its purpose is to visually illustrate the minute disagreements between members of any potential coalition and to break apart solidarities among those who might otherwise work together. The organizational unit of this meme is the individual—not the collective. It’s a powerful ideological frame that's been working for more than half a century.
Memes, grids and other political models are all rudimentary tools that seek to impart a basic idea. Their power comes from their ability to reduce complex philosophical problems into simple visual solutions. While they may often appear frivolous and dismissible, their influence should not be underestimated.
“Horseshoe Theory”
The so-called “Horseshoe Theory” of politics periodically resurfaces on the internet. The meme has steadily grown in interest since 2012. Each year it makes new historic highs for search results.
Horseshoe theory is the mistaken idea that the left and right ends of the political spectrum bend inwards toward each other. This model, visualized as a “U” shape, suggests that the far left and far right are ‘not so different from each other after all’. (We all know this type of guy.) It's a catchy bit of propaganda that circulates widely. Like all things on the internet, this meme has rapidly degraded into nonsensical shitposts. Meme makers both parody and endorse its conceptual frame while further propelling the idea to new audiences.
The Horseshoe Theory diagram retrofits the familiar “Left to Right” spectrum, mapped along an X axis, over an unlabeled Y axis of “Individualism to Collectivism”. The power of the Horseshoe Theory meme is that it posits radical individualism as the reasonable center, while casting both right and left-wing groups as a form of fringe political extremism. This unlabeled Y axis is a clever bit of graphic design, but when visualized on top of the Political Compass, the true “center” of the horse shoe becomes unmistakably clear:
Horseshoe Theory attempts to take radical libertarianism as its reasonable and commonsense center. It seeks to collapse important distinctions between the different collectivities proposed by the left and right.
Right-wing collectivities, such as the nation, are idealist. They are drawn from myths and metaphysics. The nation, as a proposed historical subject, is a memetic and highly transmittable idea. Right-wing collectivities first attempt to create a narrative consensus and then seek to mobilize real world material forces to reify this mutually agreed upon fiction.
Left-wing collectivities, i.e. class, are grounded in the concrete world. The working class is the source of society’s wealth and the true force that moves history forward. Whether or not these workers agree on cultural narratives does not impact their role as the creators of value. There are workers without nations but there are no nations without workers.
Importantly, these theoretical frameworks are incompatible and mutually exclusive. (You can choose one but you can’t have both.) The genius of the Horseshoe Theory meme is that it slyly conflates these ideas and stalls viewers from differentiating their underlying concepts.
As an alternative, liberal political philosophy posits its own historical subject; the unique individual. While discussions around this meme tend to focus on the alleged similarities between right and left, they tend to omit its most important claim; Horseshoe Theory frames libertarian individualism as its “center”. The seed of this idea was planted over 80 years ago.
Friedrich Hayek was a founding theorist and economist behind the political ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism begins in the 1940s with the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin society in Switzerland. At that time, liberals faced the actually-existing threat of European fascism and Soviet communism. Neoliberals sought to safeguard market freedoms through an international order of private property. In their vision, the property rights of sovereign individuals would supersede all state authorities and collectivities.
The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, is widely regarded as Hayek’s masterwork. In this canonical text, he argues that centralized forms of government necessarily lack the decision making power of decentralized markets. For Hayek, prices represented the sum total of human intelligence—they calculate the irreducible complexity of all human wants and needs. His foundational claim is that the market cannot ever be “out-thought” because no economic planner could have access to all the world’s information.
In Hayek’s radical view, any centralized entity, including Soviet-style central planning, fascist nationalization of industry, or even meager social democratic welfare states, would unavoidably result in severe economic crashes when they attempt to intervene in the market. Hayek argues that in order to maintain power, these states would inevitably be forced to conscript citizens into involuntary labor and ultimately into servitude. In The Road to Serfdom, we find the origins of this familiar Horseshoe Theory argument; any hierarchical social formation, whether from the left or right, must inevitably lead to the very same undifferentiated authoritarianism.
The Horseshoe Theory meme is a comedic restatement of Hayek’s 20th century vision that has been reformatted for today’s social media. It is an attempt to discredit and collapse the distinctions between left and right collectivities to further an underlying neoliberal philosophy. It's not a new idea that just popped up on the internet—it’s some old school pre-boomer propaganda.
Some Conclusions
The purpose of analyzing these popular images is to better understand the ideological frames that shape today’s political discourse. Often, posters on the left will attempt to remix and spin off these familiar meme formats with the hopes of branding new political movements. But if we choose to accept these underlying neoliberal frameworks, we have already conceded to the dominance of their ideas. What would a memetic diagram that took the working class as its “center” look like? I have some of my own ideas but I’d like to see yours as well.
The great irony of our political era is that the global victory of neoliberalism has demonstrated the exact opposite of what mid-century theorists sought to advance. Rather than a planetary-scale system of prices and markets, today’s largest and most efficient corporations deploy economic planning on a scale that is geographically larger and more productive than the height of the Soviet Union. Transnational entities such as Google, Amazon and Walmart have realized a synthesis of the Cold War dichotomy in a way that must have Mises rolling in his grave. In a cruel stroke of poetic justice, capitalism sounds good on paper but doesn’t work in practice.
If our political imaginaries are constrained by neoliberal diagrams, if we keep posting their old memes and thinking within their philosophical bounds, we may never escape their ideology. If you want to send me your original designs and diagrams, I will collect them for a future post.
JREG just fell to his knees in an Ikea parking lot
It's tragically laughable when ideological preachers can't comprehend flaws in their favored theory. The part about Hayek's belief that prices represent the sum total of human intelligence, had me almost fall out of my chair with frustration at such an absurd claim. People like Hayek seem to forget or are unaware that abstract concepts like prices are human made and humans hold irrational and self-centered behaviors that compromise any utopian plan.
Any political system has oversights and flaws and will face some form of moral or economic compromise if it wishes to maintain dominate power over a region, plus with the passing of generations comes different people that may hold drastically different views of how to maintain an economy or a political office. Look at any example of a polarizing new leader or regime change taking control and you'll see that revolutionary promises can't guarantee universal prosperity.
I really appreciated this insightful look into how people seem to regurgitate the same limited lenses of explaining the divide of political thinking. Thank you and I look forward to more of your work.