Abraham Lincoln would've dismissed political memes immediately.
For approximately one week.
Perhaps less.
Imagine trying to explain them.
"Mr. President, people now communicate political ideas using pictures."
"Political cartoons?"
"Not exactly."
"Editorial illustrations?"
"No."
"Campaign pamphlets?"
"No."
"They're usually accompanied by two lines of text."
Lincoln blinks.
"They're shared millions of times."
"I see."
"They're often anonymous."
"Interesting."
"They're frequently ridiculous."
"Understandable."
"And occasionally they influence national elections."
Now Lincoln pauses.
"...show me one."
The first few would've horrified him.
Poor spelling.
Terrible grammar.
Pictures of cats.
Dancing frogs.
An inexplicable number of raccoons.
He would've quietly concluded that American democracy had finally collapsed.
Then someone would've shown him a genuinely clever one.
Not cruel.
Not vulgar.
Simply devastating.
One image.
Twelve words.
An entire political argument compressed into something impossible to forget.
Lincoln would've leaned forward.
"Wait."
"So..."
"This is merely the political cartoon..."
"...after being placed on a strict diet?"
Exactly.
Lincoln would've smiled.
Because he'd seen this before.
Not the technology.
The strategy.
Most Americans remember Abraham Lincoln as impossibly serious.
The Great Emancipator.
The wartime president.
The author of the Gettysburg Address.
The solemn guardian of the Union.
All of that is true.
What many people forget is that Lincoln was also one of the funniest politicians America has ever produced.
His law partner, William Herndon, remembered him as constantly telling stories.
Cabinet meetings frequently dissolved into laughter because Lincoln simply could not resist a good anecdote.
Visitors sometimes became frustrated.
The country was fighting for its survival.
Why was the President telling frontier jokes?
Because Lincoln understood something many politicians never do.
Humor lowers defenses.
People who would reject an argument often accept a story.
People who ignore lectures remember jokes.
Lincoln didn't use humor to escape serious questions.
He used humor to answer them.
When criticized for telling too many stories during the Civil War, he supposedly replied,
"If I did not laugh, I should die."
Whether those were his exact words hardly matters.
The sentiment appears everywhere in Lincoln's life.
Humor wasn't a distraction.
It was survival.
Political survival.
Personal survival.
National survival.
It also happened to be remarkably effective.
Lincoln had another gift modern audiences sometimes overlook.
He understood compression.
Consider the Gettysburg Address.
Roughly 270 words.
Edward Everett spoke before Lincoln that day for more than two hours.
Everett was one of the greatest orators in America.
Almost no one remembers what he said.
Lincoln needed barely two minutes.
He understood that powerful ideas become memorable when stripped to their essentials.
Not simplistic.
Simple.
That distinction matters.
Modern memes operate according to exactly the same principle.
Reduce complexity.
Expose contradiction.
Deliver instantly.
Move on.
Lincoln would've recognized the technique immediately.
Technology changes.
Rhetoric evolves.
Human psychology remains stubbornly familiar.
Political cartoons already dominated nineteenth-century politics.
Newspapers regularly published exaggerated caricatures of public figures.
Faces became larger.
Noses longer.
Arguments simpler.
Hypocrisy funnier.
The goal wasn't realism.
It was recognition.
Thomas Nast would soon become America's greatest political cartoonist, helping destroy Boss Tweed's political machine with little more than ink, paper, and merciless ridicule.
Tweed reportedly complained,
"Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can't read—but damn it, they can see pictures."
Lincoln would've loved that story.
Because it perfectly illustrated something he already understood.
Images travel differently than arguments.
People remember pictures.
They repeat jokes.
They share ridicule.
Political persuasion has never depended entirely upon careful reasoning.
Sometimes...
One excellent cartoon accomplishes what ten editorials cannot.
The internet did not invent that.
It merely made it much faster.
Lincoln also knew what it felt like to become the target.
Opponents called him a tyrant.
A buffoon.
An ape.
A backwoods fool hopelessly unqualified for office.
He was caricatured constantly.
His height.
His face.
His voice.
His clothes.
Nothing escaped ridicule.
Lincoln almost never responded with outrage.
He responded with better jokes.
When critics accused him of being two-faced, he replied,
"If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?"
That is meme humor.
One sentence.
Immediate.
Self-deprecating.
Impossible to improve.
Lincoln instinctively understood something the internet often forgets.
The strongest joke is frequently the one made at your own expense.
Disarm the audience.
Then make your point.
He did it constantly.
Which is why one suspects Lincoln would've become alarmingly good online.
Imagine giving him image-editing software.
The first week would be respectable.
Inspirational quotations.
Historical photographs.
Perhaps a tasteful American flag.
The second week...
Slightly sharper satire.
The third week...
Secretary Stanton quietly confiscates the President's laptop after discovering Lincoln has produced a reaction image of Jefferson Davis captioned,
"When you start a rebellion and it immediately becomes everyone's problem."
History takes unexpected turns.
There is another reason Lincoln would've understood memes better than most people.
He loved ordinary language.
Unlike many nineteenth-century politicians, Lincoln did not speak to impress educated audiences.
He spoke to be understood.
His greatest speeches sound almost conversational.
The Gettysburg Address contains no elaborate vocabulary.
The Second Inaugural is astonishingly direct.
Lincoln trusted plain English.
He trusted ordinary people.
That combination made him unusually persuasive.
Memes succeed for much the same reason.
Not because they are sophisticated.
Because they are immediately recognizable.
You understand the joke almost before realizing you've read it.
Lincoln would've admired that efficiency.
He would've worried about it too.
Because every powerful rhetorical tool cuts both ways.
Political cartoons can expose corruption.
They can also spread lies.
Satire can challenge authority.
It can also become cruelty.
Lincoln would've recognized the danger immediately.
He spent his presidency watching newspapers publish stories that were not merely unfair...
...but entirely fabricated.
Fake news is considerably older than Wi-Fi.
He would've warned that ridicule works best when directed toward pretension rather than humanity.
Toward hypocrisy rather than weakness.
Toward power rather than suffering.
Lincoln's greatest jokes almost always punched upward.
They embarrassed arrogance.
Deflated vanity.
Exposed foolishness.
He rarely mocked ordinary people.
That moral instinct made him unusually funny without becoming unusually cruel.
Modern political culture occasionally forgets the difference.
Lincoln probably would've found social media exhausting.
Everyone shouting.
Nobody listening.
Arguments conducted entirely in capital letters.
People responding to headlines they clearly hadn't read.
He might conclude the Republic required mandatory walks outdoors.
Perhaps with fewer smartphones.
Almost certainly with more trees.
But the meme itself?
He would've embraced it.
Not because it was new.
Because it wasn't.
It was simply the latest chapter in one of democracy's oldest traditions.
Political satire.
Compressed.
Accelerated.
Democratized.
The cartoon escaped the newspaper.
The pamphlet escaped the printing press.
The joke escaped the tavern.
Now it traveled the world in seconds.
Lincoln would've found that extraordinary.
He also would've found it dangerous.
Which, in his mind, usually meant it was important.
There is a tendency to think democracy advances only through constitutions, elections, and legislation.
Lincoln knew better.
Democracy also advances through conversation.
Stories.
Laughter.
Shared experiences.
The ability to make millions of strangers recognize the same absurdity at the same moment.
That is no small political achievement.
He would've closed the laptop.
Thought quietly for a moment.
Then offered one final observation.
"I confess..."
"I do not entirely understand why so many of these pictures involve raccoons."
"But I understand this."
"If a single image can make a nation laugh..."
"...it can also make a nation think."
"And if it can do both at once..."
"...that is not merely entertainment."
"That is politics."
Then, after another pause, Lincoln would've added one final sentence.
"I should like to meet the fellow who invented this."
"I suspect he would've made an excellent political cartoonist."