A Tale of Two Inauguration Memes
After Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the meme saturating our political discourse was neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the head. Today, it’s Bernie Sanders in mittens, dutifully but joylessly sitting through Biden’s inauguration. It’s a marker of our new political context: white nationalists thankfully don’t occupy the White House anymore, but nobody should cheer the neoliberal status quo.
Much like the Bernie mittens meme, the video and still images of Richard Spencer’s punching were ubiquitous.
The image of a frigid old socialist hunched in a folding chair, wearing brown and white patterned mittens and not looking particularly happy to be there, spread at warp speed across the internet seconds after it was captured at Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of photoshopped versions of the image saturated newsfeeds and timelines, making it near impossible to scroll through any social media platform without seeing Bernie Sanders and his mittens.
Bernie showed up in famous movie scenes and iconic historical moments, alongside A-list celebrities and pop cultural ephemera. An entire genre of art historical works that include Vermont’s junior senator have now sprung up. For days, the zeitgeist was fixated on Cold Bernie.
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