I was going to write about this nonsense but I had only gotten as far as: “It is not clear to me that “vibe shift” names anything except the fact that PMC workers feel sanctioned to identify more closely with the parts of themselves that would enjoy going to a dogfight.” Then I got distracted. Anyway, now I don’t have to finish that post bc this does the job so much better.
Someone I know speculated that it wasn't inflation that killed Biden/Harris in 2024 but resentment over COVID restrictions. I think a lot of people forget that that COVID restrictions were really in place well into 2022 especially for things like international travel. In 2022, I ended up being stuck in Paris for two extra weeks because my wife and I caught COVID and it both took us the full ten days to test negative. She did not test positive until about four days after me.
The "vibes shift" I think is partially because of the backlash against what few COVID restrictions the US had. A lot of the stuff that right-wingers started a backlash too started during Trump's first term too.
From Dusterberg's vibe shift substack: "There is truth in this last argument; DSA-affiliated mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s post-election man-on-the-street interviews with disaffected voters in Bronx and Queens are a great example of this and do much to dispel, in the space of three minutes, the pious and vacant post-election soul-searching of centrist anti-Trump discourse. Trump said he would lower prices, raise wages, end wars. Kamala hired celebrities and called Trump a fascist. It’s not just that the Democrats aren’t delivering; they don’t have a platform."
Did people watch the same election I did or am I in an alternative universe? Harris offered plans. Yes, she did this but she also discussed allowing medicare to cover home healthcare which would would be a big fucking deal. She discussed how tariffs would add to the American household. Is part of a vibe shift that actual Democratic messaging gets drowned in a void?
Actual Democratic messaging is confined to places and people that actually care about messages. In other words, nobody who really counts in an election, the actual working and middle class voters that rely far more on ‘affect’ than on messages. Affect is an outcome of both real being in the world and an historical memory that shapes it. The Democratic Party has abandoned the former and denies its contribution to the latter.
Right, the "vibes shift" is advertising for a Trump bubble. That's it. What gives it a sense of something new, a landslide, a vibe shift, is the frame that Musk's new media, social media, X/Twitter, defeated liberal, legacy media in the election; which is true and made up, both, and probably mostly a smart, if untethered, conversation between journalists and media talking heads about the new media landscape. The reason the liberals/Dems haven't managed much of a response, as much as that is even a meaningful observation after only two weeks, is because bigot corporate rule does now, again, have the upper hand in the public square; and the liberals are still trying to figure out work-arounds (Meidas, Wonkette, The Ink, etc). This is also likely why it seems like liberals in gov aren't protesting loud enough, aren't calling out the crimes and abuses of the EO's, because they don't have platforms that want to amplify them. They'd only be raining on the parade of the "vibe shift," and no one wants that, right?! Our leaders appear to be doing what they can with the legal system, such as it is, and they're preparing, legally, I mean, here in Seattle, or appear to be, but that snail-paced stuff can't drive 24/7 news cycles. And, finally, the reason the left isn't in the streets is because, as dumb as they can be, they are not that dumb. Or, more simply, for the same reason they didn't show up at Jan 6. They know a stupid spasm of overwhelming reactionary violence when they see it coming. Stay home! "Stand back and stand by," in Trumper speak. They'll be in the streets soon enough, I'm afraid, when some egregious instance of Trump violence is captured on video, and it won't be pretty. Motivated Trump voters, which isn't all of them but a substantive majority of his base, voted for "forced deportations" above all else, sadly. But, second, and less understood or reported, they voted for the use of violence and force against their political enemies, more Jan 6s, more violent mobs against immigrants, protesters, liberals, etc. Everyone knows this, including street protesters. Some will say 'bring it on,' like the gun crazy Trumpers, but most want to choose their battle, waiting for the first atrocity of the "vibes shift." And they, atrocities, feel inevitable, right? And which ultimately I think is what exposes the "vibe shift" as commercial hype.
Anyway, you're putting up a good fight. Stay strong. Best, Jack
The term “vibe shift” itself repels serious thinking on what we should actually be concerned about, which might better be called a “long-term trend in attitudes”. The outstanding statistic is the long decline of trust in elites, which less measurably seems to go along with a decline of belief in rationality and civility. (See Ezra Klein’s analysis.) Allow me to be autobiographical here. I was solo backpacking in a wilderness area on 9/11, a Tuesday. I learned about the attacks when I came out on Saturday. Frankly, I felt everyone had been driven mad by obsessively watching TV while fearing more attacks. (Years later I met another backpacker who had a similar experience and reaction.) But exactly what had changed? I began to see the answer when the torture camps were reported and nobody did anything, nobody was ever held accountable. Didn’t seem like the America I grew up in, in the 1950s. Trump’s rise in 2016 nailed it down for me. His narrow election was shocking, but as I said at the time, it would have been just as shocking if he had narrowly lost, with so many millions voting for this despicable man. It has subsequently become clear that this is a trend affecting all the Western-civilization nations. To call it a “shift” of “vibes” is insulting, it’s an increasing rejection of reason and the civic virtues and it’s not new.
" Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on."
Bingo. It's bad for my blood pressure, but in these last two weeks, I keep wondering about whether the typical NYT reader has cast their mind back to ten or twelve years ago when there were 44,000 pieces about "cancel culture" and pushy students and activists. It appeared that 9 out of 10 commenters in the NYT were very sure that it was those damn campus upstarts and BLM activists who were driving normal Americans into the arms of Republicans and the alt-right.
And now? Now that we have a "cancel culture" of mammoth proportions, do those folks imagine that, without those pushy leftists, the Trump/Musk brigade would never have launched what is now clearly an effort at "cancelling" everything––free media, the civil service, the independent powers of Congress, the independent operations of of science, education, arts, and even corporations?
If only those 25-year old staffers at newspapers and tech companies had just shown more deference, then all the Alitos, Andreessens, Leonard Leos, Musks, Bill Ackmans would have been perfectly happy with the status quo, right? "The annoying liberals made us do it."
Maybe an important lesson is—money can drive a vibes shift. The vibes shift can be analogized to the food shift. You would think it would be hard to change so much of the way that people eat. But it is not hard if this is the food that is cheap, available, and convenient, and advertised. This central part of life can change substantially. After awhile, people tend to forget what and how they used to eat. It’s all collective, but still driven by certain people and their interests.
But ideas are easier to produce than food, and they’re come about in pretty random ways. Certain people seem very confident they can drive the ideas, and the mob, in the direction they want but they are probably overconfident about that.
Well something certainly happened when we went from "what the hell is going on with the Right?!" in the 2000 oughts to "what the hell is going on with the Left?!" afterward. Perhaps we can chalk it up to the "binary automata" that Kriss uses to explain why we're always wearing the wrong jeans.
"The vibe that carried Trump to power is the inversion of the vibe that preceded it, which stretched too far and is now snapping back like elastic. You might think this is well-deserved; you might think it’s a reactionary backlash; it hardly matters. Nothing the binary automata spit out is complete, none of it actually follows the contours of reality or meets our human needs; they just blanket the world in one particular vibe for long enough that we all end up running for its direct opposite."
Interesting. But I guess I'm doubtful about the "snapping back" pendulum part. The example of cancelling is a case in point.
The conversations about speech and cancelling one's ideological opponents––"what the hell is going on with the Left"––was not conducted in good faith on the right (Chris Rufo expressly admitted as much). As they have now made clear, they are fine with cancellation––of speech, of careers, of free dissent.
It was a real debate in the liberal center, but few if any of those liberals who saw excesses were wishing for a correction or a reaction that would take us to the regime of rightwing cancellation ala Rufo, Desantis, and Trump. The months have pulled off the mask: the right was always in favor of cancel culture vis a vis the left.
So I don't see much explanatory power in a model that would say people got so upset at left cancellations that they began to want large-scale state plans to censor, defund, and oust by fiat. I guess we'll find out soon enough, though.
The Left cancel culture wasn’t a mirage nor the flirtations with crit theory. Simply because the Right proved to be hypocrites on the subject didn’t invalidate concerns. If we went with that formula we’d ignore debt and deficits. It may not have driven most normie liberals into the arms of Chris Rufo but it may have persuaded enough of them to stay home on Election Day. See Chait’s piece in the Atlantic that seems to demonstrate the gob-smacking cluelessness of Democratic elites.
Big fan of Sam’s. A running theme I see in his work is the absurdity of Idealism - or Idealisms plural - and yet the gravity they hold for our minds. Don’t you think, having read through that piece, that perhaps we ought to be more cautious about reifying this binary vibe shift?
Sure. But I don’t take it too seriously. “Vibe shift” is just the new shorthand for trying grasp what’s happening. Call it phase transition, cyclic, catalysis, etc but we won’t understand it til it’s over and even then we’ll argue about it for years until the next vibe-shift. Right now we’re in the meteorological phase and using “vibeshift” like weather guys enjoy saying “bomb cyclone” and “polar vortex” - new labels for the same old phenomena.
I'm suspicious of any "vibe shift" that doesn't include artists, or, worse, that artists will follow along with the "vibe shift" once the political people have taken over. What this "vibe shift" means, it seems to me, is that political people on the right want to take over and control culture just as they imagine the left does--make their politics into an all-encompassing ideology that explains everything worth explaining and controls everything from your breakfast meal to your evening prayers. (This goes along conveniently with the commodification and monopolization of everything given to us by current capitalism.). You had the same thing happening after 9-11, and it wasn't just a bunch of scared liberals; article after article in the conservative press celebrated the return of traditional values, particularly traditional masculinity, in the face of Demon Modernism. But arguments from Zeitgeist (which is what this is) is endemic to opinion journalism. It's really a way for political types to control people who actually make culture.
You are right. Vibes have a real origin in the balance of power. The ruling class is behind this discussion of trends and moods based on nothing tangible. Those who want to fight back must expose these vibes as you just did in order to reinstate the primacy of reasoning based on reality.
Specifically about how it wasn't just conservatives who "shifted" after 9/11, there was a ton of fiction about the "shift" after 9/11. Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg comes to mind. One of my favorite novelists, Claire Messud, wrote about it in The Emperor's Children, where an Australian named Ludovic Seeley tries to start a lit mag in New York called The Monitor but sees after 9/11 that it is doomed to failure. It was taken for granted that the winds had shifted and the articles in his mag were obsolete, which had me at 16 shrugging and going: but why exactly?
I agree with most of this, but isn't the perception of a vibe shift due to the failures of liberal and leftist culture to have a real political impact compared to the right-wing? (Hence the "where is the Joe Rogan of the left?" outcry.) There are a lot of closeted conservatives out there who are suddenly relieved that they don't have to pretend to like movies about Black and/or LGBTQ people.
If Trump had won the popular vote by 10 points there may be some truth to the imo over hyped ‘the left needs a Rogan’ discourse, but the closeness of the popular vote suggest that whatever political impact the right’s “culture” had was marginal.
This is where Kevin Drum's hack gap comes in. Liberals and leftists are simply not capable of the same lock step as right-wingers. If they here what sounds like a bad idea from another liberal or leftist, they will criticize it and do so strongly. They are almost pathologically compelled to.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was … Joe Rogan. People like that were left-coded as recently as eight years ago. The task isn’t to invent a leftist Joe Rogan, it’s to make being on the right seem establishment and stodgy and to make being left seem cool and rebellious enough that the normies latch onto it again.
And tbh, in that regard I think the rightward turn of the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world actually helps us in the long run.
Not sure I understand. I don't think you can say that left/liberal culture hasn't had a substantial political impact. Certainly the Right thought it did. BTW - they were complaining "where is the Rush Limbaugh of the Left" over 30 years ago.
Which leads me to your latter point. There are a lot of voters - not simply "closeted conservatives" - who simply don't want to be told what they have to like or admire. If we want to measure the impact of left/liberal culture ironically we're seeing it.
You said you were working on a thing we wouldn’t like. I think you were referring to this piece. But I like it a lot. In trying to imagine something I wouldn’t like, I imagined you were just going to tell us ‘the vibes have changed, can’t fight the vibes, so shut about the vibes.’ So I am relieved.
"As Reason was in the Age of Enlightenment which we are now definitively exiting, vibes are self-authorizing—viral."
I sincerely hope that Duesterberg is wrong about the Enlightenment, because its fundamental assumption was that NOTHING is self-authorizing. (For a more sustained analysis, see Richard Rorty's posthumous opus "Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism.") One doesn't have to be a Marxist to realize that the current "vibe" has been manufactured by the privileged beneficiaries of American capitalism in a 50-year project stretching back to the Goldwater campaign that is coming to full fruition now. I hope the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Years of Resistance also, because only a sustained mass movement has any chance defeating the fat-cat vibe machine.
Have you tackled Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, Or The Style of Too Late Capitalism? You and Max Read mentioned it a podcast or so ago, and it got me to crack it, and I'm too mid to evaluate the argument, but I keep seeing resonances of it all over. Including here.
Good analogy. Although you can actually go broke shorting a bubble, so even (especially) when there is an obvious Ponzi scheme, the wise move is just to ignore.
At worst if you try to "short" the vibes, a bunch of people will get incredibly angry at you and call you a loser. But there's no margin call, you can just keep being right. It's good if people remember this. Not easy of course unless you're blessed with an ornery and disagreeable personality.
“Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.
As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.””
yeah, not sure I believe there’s been any real shift to speak of, except, as you point out, among our erstwhile consent manufacturers, for whom it’s their job, whether they are self-aware enough to know it and honest enough to cop to it or not. if anything there’s already a backlash forming, largely outside of this bubble, and I’d be surprised if we don’t begin to feel the effects of it very soon
I was going to write about this nonsense but I had only gotten as far as: “It is not clear to me that “vibe shift” names anything except the fact that PMC workers feel sanctioned to identify more closely with the parts of themselves that would enjoy going to a dogfight.” Then I got distracted. Anyway, now I don’t have to finish that post bc this does the job so much better.
Someone I know speculated that it wasn't inflation that killed Biden/Harris in 2024 but resentment over COVID restrictions. I think a lot of people forget that that COVID restrictions were really in place well into 2022 especially for things like international travel. In 2022, I ended up being stuck in Paris for two extra weeks because my wife and I caught COVID and it both took us the full ten days to test negative. She did not test positive until about four days after me.
The "vibes shift" I think is partially because of the backlash against what few COVID restrictions the US had. A lot of the stuff that right-wingers started a backlash too started during Trump's first term too.
From Dusterberg's vibe shift substack: "There is truth in this last argument; DSA-affiliated mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s post-election man-on-the-street interviews with disaffected voters in Bronx and Queens are a great example of this and do much to dispel, in the space of three minutes, the pious and vacant post-election soul-searching of centrist anti-Trump discourse. Trump said he would lower prices, raise wages, end wars. Kamala hired celebrities and called Trump a fascist. It’s not just that the Democrats aren’t delivering; they don’t have a platform."
Did people watch the same election I did or am I in an alternative universe? Harris offered plans. Yes, she did this but she also discussed allowing medicare to cover home healthcare which would would be a big fucking deal. She discussed how tariffs would add to the American household. Is part of a vibe shift that actual Democratic messaging gets drowned in a void?
Actual Democratic messaging is confined to places and people that actually care about messages. In other words, nobody who really counts in an election, the actual working and middle class voters that rely far more on ‘affect’ than on messages. Affect is an outcome of both real being in the world and an historical memory that shapes it. The Democratic Party has abandoned the former and denies its contribution to the latter.
Right, the "vibes shift" is advertising for a Trump bubble. That's it. What gives it a sense of something new, a landslide, a vibe shift, is the frame that Musk's new media, social media, X/Twitter, defeated liberal, legacy media in the election; which is true and made up, both, and probably mostly a smart, if untethered, conversation between journalists and media talking heads about the new media landscape. The reason the liberals/Dems haven't managed much of a response, as much as that is even a meaningful observation after only two weeks, is because bigot corporate rule does now, again, have the upper hand in the public square; and the liberals are still trying to figure out work-arounds (Meidas, Wonkette, The Ink, etc). This is also likely why it seems like liberals in gov aren't protesting loud enough, aren't calling out the crimes and abuses of the EO's, because they don't have platforms that want to amplify them. They'd only be raining on the parade of the "vibe shift," and no one wants that, right?! Our leaders appear to be doing what they can with the legal system, such as it is, and they're preparing, legally, I mean, here in Seattle, or appear to be, but that snail-paced stuff can't drive 24/7 news cycles. And, finally, the reason the left isn't in the streets is because, as dumb as they can be, they are not that dumb. Or, more simply, for the same reason they didn't show up at Jan 6. They know a stupid spasm of overwhelming reactionary violence when they see it coming. Stay home! "Stand back and stand by," in Trumper speak. They'll be in the streets soon enough, I'm afraid, when some egregious instance of Trump violence is captured on video, and it won't be pretty. Motivated Trump voters, which isn't all of them but a substantive majority of his base, voted for "forced deportations" above all else, sadly. But, second, and less understood or reported, they voted for the use of violence and force against their political enemies, more Jan 6s, more violent mobs against immigrants, protesters, liberals, etc. Everyone knows this, including street protesters. Some will say 'bring it on,' like the gun crazy Trumpers, but most want to choose their battle, waiting for the first atrocity of the "vibes shift." And they, atrocities, feel inevitable, right? And which ultimately I think is what exposes the "vibe shift" as commercial hype.
Anyway, you're putting up a good fight. Stay strong. Best, Jack
The term “vibe shift” itself repels serious thinking on what we should actually be concerned about, which might better be called a “long-term trend in attitudes”. The outstanding statistic is the long decline of trust in elites, which less measurably seems to go along with a decline of belief in rationality and civility. (See Ezra Klein’s analysis.) Allow me to be autobiographical here. I was solo backpacking in a wilderness area on 9/11, a Tuesday. I learned about the attacks when I came out on Saturday. Frankly, I felt everyone had been driven mad by obsessively watching TV while fearing more attacks. (Years later I met another backpacker who had a similar experience and reaction.) But exactly what had changed? I began to see the answer when the torture camps were reported and nobody did anything, nobody was ever held accountable. Didn’t seem like the America I grew up in, in the 1950s. Trump’s rise in 2016 nailed it down for me. His narrow election was shocking, but as I said at the time, it would have been just as shocking if he had narrowly lost, with so many millions voting for this despicable man. It has subsequently become clear that this is a trend affecting all the Western-civilization nations. To call it a “shift” of “vibes” is insulting, it’s an increasing rejection of reason and the civic virtues and it’s not new.
" Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on."
Bingo. It's bad for my blood pressure, but in these last two weeks, I keep wondering about whether the typical NYT reader has cast their mind back to ten or twelve years ago when there were 44,000 pieces about "cancel culture" and pushy students and activists. It appeared that 9 out of 10 commenters in the NYT were very sure that it was those damn campus upstarts and BLM activists who were driving normal Americans into the arms of Republicans and the alt-right.
And now? Now that we have a "cancel culture" of mammoth proportions, do those folks imagine that, without those pushy leftists, the Trump/Musk brigade would never have launched what is now clearly an effort at "cancelling" everything––free media, the civil service, the independent powers of Congress, the independent operations of of science, education, arts, and even corporations?
If only those 25-year old staffers at newspapers and tech companies had just shown more deference, then all the Alitos, Andreessens, Leonard Leos, Musks, Bill Ackmans would have been perfectly happy with the status quo, right? "The annoying liberals made us do it."
Maybe an important lesson is—money can drive a vibes shift. The vibes shift can be analogized to the food shift. You would think it would be hard to change so much of the way that people eat. But it is not hard if this is the food that is cheap, available, and convenient, and advertised. This central part of life can change substantially. After awhile, people tend to forget what and how they used to eat. It’s all collective, but still driven by certain people and their interests.
But ideas are easier to produce than food, and they’re come about in pretty random ways. Certain people seem very confident they can drive the ideas, and the mob, in the direction they want but they are probably overconfident about that.
Well something certainly happened when we went from "what the hell is going on with the Right?!" in the 2000 oughts to "what the hell is going on with the Left?!" afterward. Perhaps we can chalk it up to the "binary automata" that Kriss uses to explain why we're always wearing the wrong jeans.
"The vibe that carried Trump to power is the inversion of the vibe that preceded it, which stretched too far and is now snapping back like elastic. You might think this is well-deserved; you might think it’s a reactionary backlash; it hardly matters. Nothing the binary automata spit out is complete, none of it actually follows the contours of reality or meets our human needs; they just blanket the world in one particular vibe for long enough that we all end up running for its direct opposite."
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/a-universal-absolute-and-infinite?
Interesting. But I guess I'm doubtful about the "snapping back" pendulum part. The example of cancelling is a case in point.
The conversations about speech and cancelling one's ideological opponents––"what the hell is going on with the Left"––was not conducted in good faith on the right (Chris Rufo expressly admitted as much). As they have now made clear, they are fine with cancellation––of speech, of careers, of free dissent.
It was a real debate in the liberal center, but few if any of those liberals who saw excesses were wishing for a correction or a reaction that would take us to the regime of rightwing cancellation ala Rufo, Desantis, and Trump. The months have pulled off the mask: the right was always in favor of cancel culture vis a vis the left.
So I don't see much explanatory power in a model that would say people got so upset at left cancellations that they began to want large-scale state plans to censor, defund, and oust by fiat. I guess we'll find out soon enough, though.
The Left cancel culture wasn’t a mirage nor the flirtations with crit theory. Simply because the Right proved to be hypocrites on the subject didn’t invalidate concerns. If we went with that formula we’d ignore debt and deficits. It may not have driven most normie liberals into the arms of Chris Rufo but it may have persuaded enough of them to stay home on Election Day. See Chait’s piece in the Atlantic that seems to demonstrate the gob-smacking cluelessness of Democratic elites.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-meeting/681548/
Big fan of Sam’s. A running theme I see in his work is the absurdity of Idealism - or Idealisms plural - and yet the gravity they hold for our minds. Don’t you think, having read through that piece, that perhaps we ought to be more cautious about reifying this binary vibe shift?
Sure. But I don’t take it too seriously. “Vibe shift” is just the new shorthand for trying grasp what’s happening. Call it phase transition, cyclic, catalysis, etc but we won’t understand it til it’s over and even then we’ll argue about it for years until the next vibe-shift. Right now we’re in the meteorological phase and using “vibeshift” like weather guys enjoy saying “bomb cyclone” and “polar vortex” - new labels for the same old phenomena.
I'm suspicious of any "vibe shift" that doesn't include artists, or, worse, that artists will follow along with the "vibe shift" once the political people have taken over. What this "vibe shift" means, it seems to me, is that political people on the right want to take over and control culture just as they imagine the left does--make their politics into an all-encompassing ideology that explains everything worth explaining and controls everything from your breakfast meal to your evening prayers. (This goes along conveniently with the commodification and monopolization of everything given to us by current capitalism.). You had the same thing happening after 9-11, and it wasn't just a bunch of scared liberals; article after article in the conservative press celebrated the return of traditional values, particularly traditional masculinity, in the face of Demon Modernism. But arguments from Zeitgeist (which is what this is) is endemic to opinion journalism. It's really a way for political types to control people who actually make culture.
You are right. Vibes have a real origin in the balance of power. The ruling class is behind this discussion of trends and moods based on nothing tangible. Those who want to fight back must expose these vibes as you just did in order to reinstate the primacy of reasoning based on reality.
Specifically about how it wasn't just conservatives who "shifted" after 9/11, there was a ton of fiction about the "shift" after 9/11. Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg comes to mind. One of my favorite novelists, Claire Messud, wrote about it in The Emperor's Children, where an Australian named Ludovic Seeley tries to start a lit mag in New York called The Monitor but sees after 9/11 that it is doomed to failure. It was taken for granted that the winds had shifted and the articles in his mag were obsolete, which had me at 16 shrugging and going: but why exactly?
I agree with most of this, but isn't the perception of a vibe shift due to the failures of liberal and leftist culture to have a real political impact compared to the right-wing? (Hence the "where is the Joe Rogan of the left?" outcry.) There are a lot of closeted conservatives out there who are suddenly relieved that they don't have to pretend to like movies about Black and/or LGBTQ people.
If Trump had won the popular vote by 10 points there may be some truth to the imo over hyped ‘the left needs a Rogan’ discourse, but the closeness of the popular vote suggest that whatever political impact the right’s “culture” had was marginal.
This is where Kevin Drum's hack gap comes in. Liberals and leftists are simply not capable of the same lock step as right-wingers. If they here what sounds like a bad idea from another liberal or leftist, they will criticize it and do so strongly. They are almost pathologically compelled to.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was … Joe Rogan. People like that were left-coded as recently as eight years ago. The task isn’t to invent a leftist Joe Rogan, it’s to make being on the right seem establishment and stodgy and to make being left seem cool and rebellious enough that the normies latch onto it again.
And tbh, in that regard I think the rightward turn of the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world actually helps us in the long run.
Not sure I understand. I don't think you can say that left/liberal culture hasn't had a substantial political impact. Certainly the Right thought it did. BTW - they were complaining "where is the Rush Limbaugh of the Left" over 30 years ago.
Which leads me to your latter point. There are a lot of voters - not simply "closeted conservatives" - who simply don't want to be told what they have to like or admire. If we want to measure the impact of left/liberal culture ironically we're seeing it.
You said you were working on a thing we wouldn’t like. I think you were referring to this piece. But I like it a lot. In trying to imagine something I wouldn’t like, I imagined you were just going to tell us ‘the vibes have changed, can’t fight the vibes, so shut about the vibes.’ So I am relieved.
"As Reason was in the Age of Enlightenment which we are now definitively exiting, vibes are self-authorizing—viral."
I sincerely hope that Duesterberg is wrong about the Enlightenment, because its fundamental assumption was that NOTHING is self-authorizing. (For a more sustained analysis, see Richard Rorty's posthumous opus "Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism.") One doesn't have to be a Marxist to realize that the current "vibe" has been manufactured by the privileged beneficiaries of American capitalism in a 50-year project stretching back to the Goldwater campaign that is coming to full fruition now. I hope the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Years of Resistance also, because only a sustained mass movement has any chance defeating the fat-cat vibe machine.
Have you tackled Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, Or The Style of Too Late Capitalism? You and Max Read mentioned it a podcast or so ago, and it got me to crack it, and I'm too mid to evaluate the argument, but I keep seeing resonances of it all over. Including here.
Good analogy. Although you can actually go broke shorting a bubble, so even (especially) when there is an obvious Ponzi scheme, the wise move is just to ignore.
At worst if you try to "short" the vibes, a bunch of people will get incredibly angry at you and call you a loser. But there's no margin call, you can just keep being right. It's good if people remember this. Not easy of course unless you're blessed with an ornery and disagreeable personality.
""...probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-meeting/681548/
“Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.
As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.””
Not annoying at all.
yeah, not sure I believe there’s been any real shift to speak of, except, as you point out, among our erstwhile consent manufacturers, for whom it’s their job, whether they are self-aware enough to know it and honest enough to cop to it or not. if anything there’s already a backlash forming, largely outside of this bubble, and I’d be surprised if we don’t begin to feel the effects of it very soon