come-together
Explanation
The Joke
This is a promotional comic for the book "Soonish" by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. A politician announces that "the world has become too politically polarized" and that people are "less and less able to communicate with each other." His solution: a new law that immediately eliminates all differences by banning political parties, religions, and requiring everyone to have the same number of kids. The strip suggests that this forced homogeneity will produce "the wisest and most productive generation in history." The final panel undercuts this by showing the result is a nuclear mushroom cloud, with someone exclaiming "DAMMIT!"
The comic satirizes the naive belief that eliminating all differences between people would solve political polarization. While polarization is a real problem, the proposed solution -- totalitarian forced conformity -- is both absurdly extreme and historically recognizable as the logic behind some of humanity's worst political movements. The mushroom cloud punchline shows that forcibly erasing human diversity leads to catastrophe, not utopia.
The Humor
The humor lies in the escalation from a reasonable diagnosis (polarization is bad) to a comically authoritarian prescription (ban all differences), delivered with the calm confidence of a politician who thinks he has found a simple fix for a deeply complex problem. The mushroom cloud serves as both a darkly comic punchline and a pointed reminder that totalitarian "unity" tends to end badly. The comic also works as a satire of technocratic solutionism -- the idea that every social problem has a clean, top-down fix.
References
This strip is part of a series of bonus comics promoting "Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything," a 2017 book by Zach Weinersmith and Kelly Weinersmith about futuristic technologies and their potential consequences.