Our annual Top Social Justice Memes considers memes used or created by our movements to challenge the status quo and shape politics and pop culture. This year, democracy — the ideal, the vision, the value — is the thing we are concerned with.

Memes spread meaning through story, via symbols and practices. More than just internet graphics, memes are transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, images, rituals, and other phenomena. Anything that can be a container for meaning of a larger story can be a meme.

While the story of the United States of America is often tied to democracy, for the majority of us the struggle has been building a world that truely does make room for all of our voices. This year’s Top Memes enters the conversation where lower-case “d” democratic values imperfectly, messily, sometimes-contradictorily, animate our movements for justice. The dream that the voices of those impacted by grave decisions, are in the room to make those decisions.

These are the places we saw the meaning of democracy lifted high, containers for the meme-ing of democracy in 2020...

10. “I’m Speaking” • Best Action Logic

One need have no illusions about Kamala Harris’s politics, progressive and otherwise, to welcome the breath of fresh air that rushes in as she spoke in the Vice Presidential debate. “I’m speaking, I’m speaking … I’m speaking.” This plain-spoken sequel to Rep. Maxine Waters’ more process-oriented “Reclaiming my time” resonates as a calm insistence on dignity in the face of misogyny. The same insistence we make with protests, direct action, voting and legislative advocacy. Harris’s pause, words, and cutting smile — her Action Logic — holds space for all of us who must reclaim time, healing and agency from a world bent on mansplaining us out of existence. “I’m Speaking” wins our 10th spot this year, with Best Action Logic!

9. Teachers vs. Billionaires • Best use of the Drama Triangle

What better way to establish the stakes of a conflict, than to pit the builders of our future against the biggest parasites in our society? In elections, grassroots teacher candidates stood up and spoke directly to people whose wealth accumulation relies on underfunding public services and resources. In the fight for sane COVID policies, teachers consistently linked billionaire-driven defunding of public education with the horrifying decisions being faced by students and teachers and families in a time of pandemic. Teachers vs. Billionaires pits the human avatars of exploitation against the people who are building our future by preparing educated, empathetic, members of a democratic society, and we are HERE FOR IT. Teachers vs. Billionaires wins Best Use of Drama Triangle in 2020.

8. Legal Votes • Best (worst) Opposition Meme

It’s good to learn from one’s enemies. This zinger is a good example of effective right-wing meme-making, using a tried and true approach. Some tips on memes from the folks on the right:

Make it familiar, but new. While progressives tend to just add “Cancel”, “Stop” or “End” to the thing we are against, the right has a knack for creating NEW words and phrases like “anchor baby”, or tweaking existing memes, like “illegals” Making a new phrase up, instead of negating an existing one, gives you control over the frame, and it means that, lacking equivalent language, your enemy is likely to repeat your frame over and over again while trying to “cancel” it.
Make people pick sides. When you pick your frame, try to give it an obvious moral valence, good or bad. With that, you set up a conflict with your opponents, and make it clear to your base which side to pick. “Legal votes” is either neutral or positive, all by itself. But it’s brilliance is in the implication that there are illegal votes.
Let it blossom. Frames like legal votes and anchor baby are powerful in that they open space up more than they define an issue tightly. “Legal votes” opens up a broad expanse of worry and concern about all the ways votes could be illegally filed, without ever making a disprovable claim. “Anchor baby” makes a very specific claim, about an immigrant’s intent, but leaves the target audience’s mind to fill in the rest.

This one is deadly. It takes a wack directly at the heart of universal suffrage and the basic ideals of democratic process by conjuring a threat that doesn’t exist, and framing a story that leads directly to “solutions” that make it harder, not easier, for folks to vote.

To confront it, we’ll need containers of meaning that leap forward past this legalistic storytelling, towards the ideals of universal suffrage and direct democracy. Legal Votes wins Best (Worst) Opposition Meme for 2020.

7. Cori Bush • Best Hero

The mythmaking of American democracy leans heavily on our representative system of government — electing a representative is often equated with democracy, as if we the people couldn’t be trusted with a more complicated decision than voting for people to make complicated decisions. Electing representatives, and holding them accountable, is a key mechanic of our democracy — and it shines most when the accountability mechanisms in play are community relationships, rather than campaign finance donations. Watching the rising story of Cori Bush, from her grassroots election campaign to her thrift-shopping stories as she prepares to enter halls of power, we saw a human meme that gives us hope — embodying the value of citizen representation, leadership from the margins, and that leaders ought to earn their positions through struggle with, and accountability to, a community. Cori Bush wins Best Hero and our number 7 spot!

6. Free the Vote! • Best Intervention at the Point of Destruction.

In 2018 Florida passed Amendment 4, expanding voting access in the state to an estimated 1.4 million people with felony convictions. The energy and righteousness of 2020 messages like #FreeTheVote – including sibling slogans #LetMyPeopleVote #WeGotTheVote and #RestoreTheVote — uplift deep and important messages about individual rights in the context of democracy. Voting rights are human rights, and the idea of self-rule requires that even – ESPECIALLY — those punished or constrained by our society are still part of this society. When procedural disenfranchisement is so widespread, messages that insist on the inviolate legitimacy of our individual piece of sovereignty are of vital importance. Free the Vote keeps us grounded in that ideal, wins Best Intervention at the Point of Destruction.

5. Count on Us • Best Imagery

The story of this election is us! Despite the obstacles, we voted in enormous numbers for democracy, for care, for justice, and for each other — we’re not going back to business as usual. That’s the meaning encapsulated in a series of images and GOTV campaign from We Make the Future. #CountOnUS, along with #OurTimeNow and #ForwardTogether, reminds us that the what of candidate choices is less important than the why of democracy and representation. Count on Us centers the voting public as heroes and de-centers candidates, the nominal stars of the show. And when the votes are counted? The wins made by us are ours to celebrate, and the lessons and next steps are ours to decide! In particular, we love this illustration, which makes it clear that picket signs and ballot envelopes are vehicles for the people’s voice — Count on On Us wins Best Imagery!

4. JoyToThePolls • Best intervention at the Point of Assumption

Gerrymandering and systemic voter suppression escalated in 2020 with widespread threats and fears of violence at polling places. Right-wing groups gnashed their teeth, moving with rage and anger at the world changing around them, and encouraged by the president, promised violence and obstruction on Election Day. #JoyToThePolls erupted in response, organized at the grassroots through groups like #ElectionDefenders and Working Families Party, and joined by celebrity endorsements. Pushing back at a climate of fear and intimidation, thousands organized music and dance in the streets to bring joy and celebration to one foundation of democracy, and a site of struggle for civil rights ongoing for decades. Joy to the polls offers us a true holiday spirit of celebration: celebrating the people’s power, and wins Best Intervention at the Point of Assumption.

3. Oklahoma is a reservation • Best Psychic Break?

When the Supreme Court ruled that Eastern Oklahoma is governed if not owned, by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, headlines declared a “vindication” for the tribe, and “Native sovereignty” after the court turned half the state into a reservation. The headlines reminds us that democracy and land are inextricably tied, that dispossession is incompatible with self-determination, and that sovereignty is, among other things, a relationship with the land. This decision means tribal courts have jurisdiction, and that for “serious” crimes, the federal, not state courts, have jurisdiction — this is a powerful #ShowDontTell on the sovereignty of Native peoples and reinforces the sacredness of promises and treaties, legal events relegated to the dustbin of history by American imperialism but present and relevant every day for Native communities living on un-ceded and colonized land across North America. Maybe it’s the popping sound of jingoistic politicians’ bursting blood vessels, but this meme has us excited and hopeful for futures of land reparation and indigenous sovereignty! Definitely the Best Psychic Break of the Year.

2. Seed the Vote • Best use of Foreshadowing

Status quo democracy relegates voting to the end of the story —after the campaign, after the debates and the doorknocking, after the civic-minded perseveration at the kitchen table, the careful vetting of candidates and local measures. This is the vote as last-step, as footnote — simultaneously the most invested-in part of the story and the one with the least nuance. Yes or no, for or against, our votes reduce the vast human conversation about our collective future to a series of binary choices on a sheet of bubbles. Seed the Vote flipped the script this year. All the work to win an election was still taking place, but the story was now the vote as beginning — foreshadowing the immediate future. With this frame, the act of voting is a precursor to collective action, and election day a beginning instead of an end. As a movement meme, #SeedTheVote resets the relationship between mobilizing and organizing, reminding us that the true work of democracy is building the relationships necessary to make “rule by the people” a reality. #SeedTheVote wins Best use of Foreshadowing for connecting a tactical call to action to a bigger dream of just futures.

1. Defund the Police • Best use of Making the Invisible Visible

Some looked around at mass uprisings this summer, at seething streets, choked with tear gas and the smoke from burning buildings, and wondered if our democracy would survive such chaos. Division — the opposite of a mythical unity supposedly necessary for democracy — was a bad sign. But for millions of us, uprisings in response to the police murders of #GeorgeFloyd and #BreonnaTaylor are a heart-bursting expansion of grassroots democratic willpower. Budgets may be where the democratic rubber hits the proverbial road — where money is spent or withheld determines many life and death outcomes as a society. To reach, as our movements have this year, past elected officials, through the haze of monied interests and bureaucracy to demand specific budgetary changes en masse is a bold and righteous move. #DefundThePolice is as grounded, focused, and specific as #BlackLivesMatter is expansive, visionary and emergent — and it forcefully makes visible the budgetary power so often obfuscated by the less-than-democratic systems that permeate all scales of our government. It wins Best Use of Making the Invisible Visible, and the #1 spot on our list of 2020 Top Social Justice Memes!

The Top Memes Tradition

Rooted in nominations from the CSS community, to be considered for the list a meme must meet these criteria: it must challenge the status quo, shape politics and culture and have a viral “it” factor, reaching significant scale.

With this list, our goal is to build the capacity of change agents, ourselves included, for understanding what memes travel far and wide with the most impact. Where a meme lands on the list is more art than science. Awards highlight how each of these interventions exhibits key principles of Story-based Strategy. If we know our work is to #changethestory, how do we deploy increasingly-effective memes that shape politics and culture towards the justice we all so desperately need?

Top Memes 2020: The Meme-ing of Democracy!