Why Elon's Meme Is Completely True
Why Elon's Meme Is Completely True
(For Me At Least)
Yes, we are going to over-analyze the shit out of a meme today. Twitter is currently knee-deep in its analysis. Very serious publications are hilariously missing the point in an effort to brand it as “disinformation,” the current preferred method of making the bad thing go away.
For now, let’s set aside the LOLs to be derived from the Washington Post reporting on a 15-month-old meme as “Elon Musk’s polarization graph” as if he sketched it out by hand. We won’t even dive deep into how the data points and graphs (that they actually DID generate) shift the argument from the intended point of the meme, to trying to prove that the meme is objectively wrong because statistics show that more people strongly identify with the right than they did 15 years ago. That only further supports precisely what the meme is highlighting. They can’t point to a single individual position that the stick figure representation of the right has drastically shifted further right on. Just that in the full scope of the Overton window, more and more people identify stronger and stronger with the right, crowding out the right half of the spectrum. How anyone could miss that that is exactly the thesis of this meme, is beyond me.
But what I’m going to mostly focus on here is the indignation over the idea that the right has stayed relatively static while the left has bolted to the left. That it is preposterous to suggest that someone could have found themselves slightly left of center in 2008 and found themselves to be considered on the right in 2022 without fundamentally changing their principles. I’m here to tell you that Elon is far from alone in that identification.
Let’s start with the one issue that is most responsible for why a lot of people feel this way. Freedom of Speech. The First Amendment. It’s also the entire basis of the current partisan hysteria surrounding Elon Musk. Succinctly put, in 2022 the left thinks free speech is bad and the right thinks it is good. Elon has always thought it was good, which put him on the left in 2008 and the right in 2022.
Now, I’m not a boomer. I don’t need to wax poetic about how this is antithetical to the hippies at Berkley who birthed the free speech movement. I remember the left’s embrace of free speech vividly. I remember Howard Stern being one of the biggest rock stars in the zeitgeist, specifically because he was a persistently offensive free speech hero. I was one of the angsty teens who loved him for it. I remember the valorization of Larry Flynt as a free speech icon when he got the Hollywood treatment. I was excited to rent that VHS as soon as it came to my local video store when I was 14.
I remember the right trying to remove shows like Married With Children from the air. I remember shouting “Fuck the FCC”. I remember the Congressional hearings against the violent video games that I was playing at the time like Mortal Kombat. I remember the right trying to blame Marilyn Manson and Eminem for Columbine and I remember loving Manson’s scathing editorial response in Rolling Stone. I remember reading about Dee Snider and John Denver eviscerating the PMRC in front of Congress and how awesome that was. I remember 2-Live Crew and Ice-T being free speech heroes for standing up against censorious conservatives trying to ban them for their lyrics.
Simply put, in the 1990s it would have been unimaginably uncool to be a young person in support of censorship, let alone by the Government.
Not only was I consuming the very media the conservatives at the time were trying to ban, I would stay up late to watch Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher on Comedy Central and later ABC. I kept watching when it became Real Time on HBO. Most of the DNA of my political identity was formed through watching that show and figuring out which was the side where the people I agreed with most were. Bill is a perfect example of the stick figure people are claiming doesn’t exist. In 2008 he was a veritable avatar of The Left™ and today he’s wondering why the hell the stick figure on the left is pointing at him as a right-wing bigot without changing any of his views.
A frequent Real Time guest was Matt Tiabbi. Back in my college days during the Bush administration, I would nod along to him ripping into Bill Kristol and David Frum in the pages of Rolling Stone over their neoconservative stances. Today, the same people hold the same stances, but Frum and Kristol’s eagerness to get involved in foreign affairs is a standard bearing position on the left while Taibbi is that stick figure being told he’s now on the right without moving an inch.
Another example of that stick figure is Glenn Greenwald who was once praised by the left as “the face of the First Amendment.” Beyond the free speech issue, the government overreach that he highlighted, used to be a concern of the left.
The list of these issues goes on and on. On LGBT issues, I was on the left side of the debate before the Democratic Party was. I disagreed with conservatives at the time who wanted to legally ban same-sex marriages on the libertarian principle that more freedom for more people to do whatever they want, so long as it doesn’t directly harm anyone else, is good. Now to be on the left of that issue means that you have to support giving puberty blockers to children against their parents’ consent and letting biological males dominate women’s sports. Sorry, I’m on the right side of that debate now.
Conservatives a decade ago went hard against marijuana legalization. The same strong principled libertarian stance that prohibition is bad and counterproductive applied here as well. The left hasn’t moved much on this either, but the right has moved far enough left on this that it is no longer a discussion.
Abortion? I was always personally conflicted, but as long as everyone agreed that they should be “safe, legal, and rare”, my principles on personal liberty again pointed me to the left side of that debate, albeit ever so slightly. Not only has “safe, legal, and rare” become “#ShoutYourAbortion”, and the leftward bound of that debate gone from “Maybe we should allow it past the first trimester” to zero restrictions right up until the moment of a would-be delivery, suddenly my moderately left stance has now become the right side of the debate. Full disclosure, this is one topic where I will fully cop to drifting rightward. The two reasons for this are 1) scientific developments making birth viable earlier and earlier during the pregnancy and 2) Becoming a father myself and seeing firsthand each step in fetal development. I probably would have ended up on the right side of the dividing line regardless of the general shift on this one particular issue. But had my position remained static I’d still be here.
Climate change? A decade ago, I held the moderate position that no one on either side wanted to hear that yes, manmade climate change was real and yes it is a good idea to do what we can to decelerate it, but no it is not the existential five-alarm fire worth dropping everything and tanking our economy and standard of living to reverse at all costs. This has since become the pretty standard Republican position. Meanwhile, the left is trying to push through economically ludicrous initiatives like The Green New Deal and crippling the fossil fuel industry to the point that gas prices and inflation are at unimaginable highs.
A lot of people will point to immigration as the one issue the right might have moved further right on, thanks to Trump’s focus on building a border wall. But walls and fences around the Mexican border did not begin with Trump. When Bush tried to expand the border fence in 2006, it was only controversial for not being effective enough. When then-Senator Obama was pushing for immigration reform back in 2005, he said:
We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants. We are a generous and welcoming people, here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
Due process rights of the criminally accused? Laughs in Kavanaugh and Rittenhouse. Is there even a need to elaborate further?
So yes, there are a lot of us who identify with that stick man. It’s not at all ludicrous. What’s ludicrous is that we are all over-analyzing this meme and I have had to use the opportunity to blow the dust off of my cybersquatted Substack account to talk about it at this great length.