Bryce Huebner (Georgetown University)
In this talk, I will argue that a memetic perspective offers interesting insights about the forms of moral licensing that commonly emerge in political systems. I will focus on the way that racialized codewords, slurs, and other nearby phenomena can rapidly propagate through a community under the right political conditions. I will also argue that few such patterns stabilize or persist; and I will show how a memetic perspective can explain the role of the cultural factors that enhance and suppress patterns initial of variation, in ways that can yield stable population-level phenomena.
