Memetic Effects

Pondering "The Gulf of America"

When I would raise venture capital for one of my technology startups, a financial term that was invariably imposed by the venture capitalists was a “one-way ratchet”. The one-way ratchet ensured that the venture investor’s holdings were never diluted, no matter which way the startup valuation trended. Their shares were to have this magical property, and it was attached only to the venture investor’s shares - not to the shares of the founder. No matter which direction the startup’s valuation trended, the venture capitalist was insured against any dilution of his share of ownership.

One of the reasons for all of the Progressive melodrama since Trump’s inauguration is that for 75 years, or more, Progressives have enjoyed wielding the political equivalent of a one-way ratchet. It works like this: whenever Progressives are in office, they get to move the goal posts of policy and acceptable discourse leftward. Whenever a more conservative administration is elected, that new administration is allowed only to “conserve” the state of play at its current location. But by no means may a conservative administration actually roll back Progressive cultural or policy gains. Thus the flow of culture and policy only ever moves in one direction — the direction preferred by Progressives.

For decades, many so-called conservatives have acquiesced to their role as toadying custodians of the status quo. They really seem to believe that ‘conservatism’ means presiding over all the earlier Progressive gains. Alas, it is not for nothing that Republicans have been called the “Washington Generals” of American politics.

But Republicans’ tame complicity with the Washington one-way ratchet ultimately led to the rise of Donald Trump. American normies lost interest in playing the role of ‘chump’ in a rigged game. So it finally became untenable for Republicans to keep going before the cameras, year after year, to play Charlie Brown opposite Progressivism’s Lucy. Being Charlie Brown worked for Republicans for a very long time - surprisingly long when you think about it. But eventually voters ran out of patience. Republicans never seemed to mind being reduced to caretakers of the ever-growing Progressive gains, so long as every few years they were allowed to “hold office”again. This allowed the de facto uni-party to present the veneer of meaningful elections, but without all the pesky discomfort that attends any real directional change. Weird, I know. 🤷‍♂️

Part of the horror now being experienced by the political class is due to Trump utterly rejecting these longstanding rules of engagement. A man who knows a thing or two about making deals, Trump seems to be awake to the long-term effects of the one-way ratchet.

This is why his decision to rename the erstwhile Gulf of Mexico is, I think, a very big deal. There is a word that describes what I think Trump is up to with his renaming, and that word is ‘memetics’. The word memetics, taken from the word meme, is the concept that sometimes ideas can act almost like a kind of virus, spreading and infecting cultures and cultural assumptions, behaving akin to a contagion. It may have nothing to do with any overt truth claims the memetics are making. But they can either reinforce or alter the background assumptions people make about their world, changing a society significantly. Memetics are like the cognitive equivalent of an earworm, those catchy tunes or rhymes that sometimes take up what seems like permanent residence inside your head. There’s a famous essay by Mark Twain, titled Punch, Brothers, Punch, in which he describes his own experience with this phenomenon. It is hilarious and I highly recommend it.

I have come to suspect that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf is an example of memetics at work. “The Gulf of America” is acting almost as a kind of memetic vaccine, creating cognitive anti-bodies to the perceived inevitability of the one-way ratchet.

Trump has a genius for memetics, and I don’t know if it is conscious and calculated, or just a behavioral tic that through instinctive use has become an effective tool in Trump’s toolkit. Whichever it is, the renaming of the Gulf is top drawer memetics. Not only does it signal to the left that Trump rejects the one-way ratchet, but it serves as a continuing, visible reminder that voters themselves need not accept the one-way ratchet. The Gulf of America thus becomes a persistent, visible reminder that “the arc of history” can be inverted — that there is no historical inevitability to the Progressive cause.

I suspect the business of renaming is memetic because it is oriented toward some kind of primordial memory we share that naming things is bound up with human agency and the authority choose our own course. Something about the power to name evokes the ancient memory of what Pascal famously called “the dignity of causality”.

Flannery O’Connor once observed that “the moral basis for poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God.” Adam, the first man, was given dominion over the earth and his dominion came with the authority to name things. Parents choose the names of their children. And throughout biblical history, a person’s name was so important that it very often served as both a prophecy and a blessing.

So it is not for nothing that Progressives have been on a binge of renaming things. They know exactly what they have been doing, though they would doubtless say “Who, me?” if confronted about it. They have been energetically engaged in an egregious, years-long, renaming psyop against American normies. The Progressive mania for renaming is of a piece with the tearing down and vandalizing of statues and monuments. It is intended to convince Americans that we lack any claim to civilizational virtue.

The Progressive strategy has been worked in a sequence of steps. First, reconceive American history through an absurd Marxist interpretational lens. Then use government funding to indoctrinate students in this caricatured and morally depraved understanding of the past. Sow uncertainty and doubt about the nobility of American ideals. Manifest this distorted understanding through direct action - tear down the statues and rename the buildings. By all means, undermine the civilizational confidence that is the source of a nation’s willingness to defend itself.

The Progressive renaming binge has been part of a years-long, continuous effort directed at reconditioning normies into believing that we are immoral, powerless, and disqualified from resisting. The very concept of “the right side of history”, so often used by Progressives as a basis for their moral preening, is memetically contrived to convince the rest of us that invisible, vast, and irresistible forces are at work; and they conveniently smile with approval on all the darling Progressives. We are to operate with the assumption that invisible historical forces are in control of events, and there is nothing we can do about it.

I suspect that, given their druthers, legacy Republicans would probably have been happy to leave well enough alone with the whole “Gulf of America” thing. If history is any guide, in the absence of Trump, Republicans would have dutifully preserved their role as guardians of the naming status quo, passively presiding over the decaying ruins, until Progressives were back in power, at which point they could get on with the renaming psyop.

But somehow Trump and his team have evinced an understanding of the power of memetics. The hysteria that now typifies the left’s response is probably a “tell” that something more than the usual Trumpian effrontery is going on. It leaves me suspecting that Trump has done something very shrewd, and culturally affecting, by re-asserting America’s right to name the things in her own front yard.

It might just be the case that, going forward, every time someone sees the words “The Gulf of America”, a tiny new anti-body to Progressive assumptions is being formed.