This essay was reprinted from Brian Beutler’s site Off Message. Subscribe here .

Most Democrats don’t know how to fight culture wars, let alone win them. Their instinct when confronted with a culture-war provocation is to either change the topic or disengage altogether.

But the social web is still bursting with reminders that, for a brief moment, just about a year ago, they almost figured it out. The evidence is in this picture, and the millions of variations that have been generated since.

The baby-faced J.D. Vance memes that float across your screens, and that may have prompted customs officials to detain and remove a Norwegian tourist earlier this year , have origins in this Twitter thread , which included the prompt “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a pr

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