I love the first meaning of a ‘meme’ as an idea that swims in our collective consciousness. They survive if you think about them. They propagate if you share it with someone else, who then remembers it. A good meme punches your buttons, and is easily spread — communicated — to other people.

I know it’s not a new idea. My favorite recent example was “We support our troops.” On the surface it’s nothing, a silly bit of nonsense George W. Bush stuttered out. The idea was to smear the opponents of his Iraqi war policy as disloyal to the country.  On the surface, it’s obvious hogwash. Dissent isn’t treason. It was meant as a wedge issue to give Bush a quick, short-term boost in the polls.

As a meme, though, with all those wonderful, dog-whistle undertones, it had the juice. If you said it, you felt righteous. People preened. As it got older, having the bumper sticker gave a certain category of voter a feeling of tribe and exclusion; that little endorphin rush of superiority. And it propagated for years. Logically, it didn’t make any more sense at the end than the beginning, and yet I’m sure that repeating that argument in wrong place could trigger a bar fight.

And our lives got a bit poorer. We trusted each other a little less. We had slightly less empathy for those other people. The wedge worked, fraying the fabric that holds our society together. And nobody really remembers who started it. Hell, even I had to look it up.

Republicans have become wedge issue experts, and no, it’s not something every party does to the same level. “Welfare queens”, swift-boating, “God Bless America”, and of course, “Crooked Hillary”, “Lock her up” and “Fake news”.

I doubt it’s any grand conspiracy. I think that it’s just been a string of hungry politicians, each looking for a little short-term lift. Good or bad, wedge issues are easy to work. You don’t need Machiavelli. And it works like a small, evil charm. Drive a new wedge and you get a few percent boost in the next poll. Sure, the fabric of our community frays just a little bit more, but it’s not much, and nobody will connect it with you.

Think about that rush for a second. Not the rush from some supporter shrieking “Crooked Hillary!” I mean the rush the candidate gets when his polls jerk up. The boost starts out quick and hard, but then it fades, leaving nothing behind but the memory. Before you know it, he needs another little boost. And so politicians would do it again, and again, and again. Not the same way each time – you can’t keep jamming that needle into the same spot – so you have to spread the damage as much as you can. And for all our kvetching, attack ads leave surprisingly bad feelings in the long-term.

These memes aren’t benign, and they don’t go away. The fester inside us, eating at the soft parts: our sympathy, our kindness, and our empathy. Each wedge weakens our connection to other people, leaving us less trusting, and more certain that someone, somewhere, is just looking to take advantage of us.

They’ve been hollowing us out as a society.