Are Memes the Political Cartoons of the 21st Century

As I was curled up watching T.V. with my daughter this week, I was struck by all the memes and political advertising that were occurring ahead of the November vote, and I couldn’t help but reflect on how political cartoons and modern memes are similar. We all know the infamous meme of Senator Bernie Sanders sitting cross-legged at a presidential inauguration, bundled in a parka and oversized mittens, escaped the internet's leash which occurred in January 2021. Within hours he had been pasted onto the moon, into famous paintings, and onto a park bench in just about every city on Earth. Nobody drew it. Nobody edited it. Millions of people simply made it. So, in my mind, the main question worth asking is are memes simply the 21st-century version of a tradition that's been mocking the powerful for five hundred years? For the most part, the answer is yes. However, the more in-depth answer is more complex.

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Political cartoons were born alongside cheap printing. In 1521, Lucas Cranach the Elder produced the Passional Christi und Antichristi, a woodcut booklet that set humble scenes from Christ's life beside images of a lavish, grasping pope. Many Germans couldn't read Luther's arguments, but they could read a picture. The Reformation spread partly on images like these.

In 1754, Benjamin Franklin printed "Join, or Die" in the Pennsylvania Gazette: a snake chopped into pieces, each labeled with a colony. Often considered the first American political cartoon, colonists will revive it a decade later to protest the Stamp Act. Notice how an image created for one fight was reused for another.  In Britain, James Gillray turned caricature into a blood sport. His 1805 print The Plumb-Pudding in Danger shows Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon carving up the globe like a holiday dessert. Across the Channel, Honoré Daumier drew King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, a giant swallowing the taxes of the poor. The French government sent him to prison for six months in 1832. Cartoons were dangerous because they worked and preyed upon public concerns.

No one proved that better than Thomas Nast. In the early 1870s, his drawings in Harper's Weekly hammered New York's corrupt Boss William Tweed. Tweed reportedly complained that he didn't care what newspapers wrote, because his voters couldn't read, but they could see the pictures. Nast also gave us the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant as lasting party symbols. In the 20th century, Herbert Block, known as Herblock, coined the word "McCarthyism" in a 1950 Washington Post cartoon. A drawing named an era. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe ideas that spread and mutate from mind to mind. That's a fair description of most political cartoons and memes.  Both compress a complicated argument into a single image you can understand, in under two seconds. They both rely on exaggeration, irony, and a shared vocabulary of symbols. Nast's audience knew a bloated man with a diamond stickpin meant Tweed; today's audience knows exactly what a "Distracted Boyfriend" concept is saying before reading the labels. Both are at their sharpest when they aim upward, puncturing holes in those who think themselves too important.

The differences matter, though, especially when considering authorship, alterations and speed. A Nast cartoon had a name signed in the corner and an editor who approved it. Someone was accountable. Most memes have no author at all, and they don’t pass through a gatekeeper before reaching millions of people. Memes can also be altered instantly. A cartoon was finished when it left the printer. A meme is never finished; anyone can change its meaning. Pepe the Frog began in 2005 as a mellow character in Matt Furie's comic Boy's Club. By 2016, after years of remixing by online extremists, the Anti-Defamation League had added a version of him to its database of hate symbols. Furie never consented to any of it.

Then there's speed. Nast's campaign against Tweed unfolded over years. A meme can rise, crest, and die all within a single afternoon, and often with no one verifying whether its claims are true.

So what is the verdict: are memes the political cartoons of our century? In spirit, absolutely. But if you want the closest historical match, skip past Nast's polished, edited, signed work in Harper's Weekly. Go back to the Reformation, when anonymous woodcuts and broadsheets flooded Europe faster than any authority could control them. Those images were crude, partisan, endlessly copied, and wildly effective. Memes aren't something new, but rather they are a continuation of the history of political cartoons. Modern day memes are truly a return to the rowdy beginnings of Reformation political cartoons. The tools have changed from woodblocks to smartphones, and when people want to take the powerful down a peg, they reach for a picture and a punchline.