Maybe a particularly shrewd meme manager can turn this around, and get the right personalities on board to win a meaningful meme war. But it seems unlikely, because that’s not even how memes work. The beauty of memes is that they’re created, shared and circulated in a decentralised network of users. The ones that gain the most traction often arise spontaneously, or through a quirk in the algorithm. They’re a bottom-up phenomenon, rising up from a swirling soup of content on message boards and social media. This makes them much better suited to circulating ideas among mass movements than helping political institutions claw back a shred of relevancy among their online voters.