The vibe of things is the heart of things

On the shifting sands of public opinion

A vibe, Aristotle might say, is said in many ways; Becca Rothfeld, in her self-described “rant” against the term “vibeshift,” mentions a few. It can refer to a style or disposition, the way someone cuts through the air or the atmosphere of a street, square, or room. “The vibe is off,” we might say of a person or place, and make our exit; anybody listening would know what we mean. This is “vibe” in an aesthetic sense; the more interesting uses of the term, however, are political. One sense refers to the arrangement of elite priority, the goals aimed at by powerful institutions and people and the way they are articulated publicly. The vibe after 9/11 was patriotism, in 2020 antiracism and “We’re All In This Together”—regardless of what some parts of the public may have thought. Which brings us to the third, and perhaps most important sense of “vibe”: the texture and arrangement of public opinion, the things that “ordinary people” think and feel about the world they inhabit. The “vibe” might be the general sense of things as they appear to many, or it might be a minor but nonetheless definitive countercurrent working against the mainstream. In this sense, we might justifiably characterize the national mood after 9/11 as fearful and bellicose, despite high levels of street-level opposition to the invasion of Iraq; or we could characterize the mid-20^th-century as an “age of anxiety,” despite American postwar triumphalism and the optimistic spirit of liberal internationalism.

(Of course, this division is a bit too clean, and political and moral judgments are themselves often matters of taste. Reason and passion make a mess of each other in the human soul; and in our confusion about justice, beauty, expedience, and the boundaries between them, we often demand from one domain the good belonging to another. Art must be just, politics beautiful, and the goal of our efforts at understanding must be some kind of “impact.” I leave aside this problem for now, and direct the reader instead to the psychological investigations found in Rousseau’s Second Treatise and Republic of Plato.)

Nonetheless, I believe that in every one of these respects, America has undergone what might fairly be called a “vibe shift.” Stylistic changes are happening at all levels of cultural production: a renewed vigor for non-NYT-friendly “alt lit” writing from writers like Tao Lin, Jordan Castro, Bud Smith, and others; the decidedly post-2020 film “American Fiction” being made at all, let alone being nominated for a flurry of awards, followed the next year by Coppola’s messy and ambitious “Megalopolis”; TikTok making moody guitar-rock bands like Deftones and Duster more popular than ever and sending a 30-year-old Pavement B-side platinum, while the longstanding wall separating Nashville from the rest of the music industry gets pulled down brick by brick. But perhaps the most interesting and consequential shift in media consumption—and the one that, however obvious, has yet to be fully understood—is the widespread abandonment of music and television in favor of podcasts and YouTube. The strongest shift pertains to the news: roughly 20% of Americans, on both sides of the partisan aisle, primarily get their news from podcasts and social media; among those under 30, it’s nearly twice that. Joe Rogan and Theo Von, two of the most popular podcasters in the country (even among Rothfeld’s hypothetical Vermont dentists, Nebraska schoolteachers, and Arizona architects), may have had more sway over the 2024 election results than MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times combined. Indeed, Rogan and Von—whether they know it or not—have joined fellow heterodox liberal journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi in becoming a new kind of media elite. And as part of this vibeshift—not just the level of the elite’s priorities but at the level of its very composition—Rothfeld notes that American tech elites have either cozied up to or become part of the Trump coalition, with at least five of the country’s most powerful CEOs joining the president on his dais for the inauguration. It's hard to remember that less than a decade ago, many of these figures launched rainbow-flag versions of their company logos in the wake of Mike Pence’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” in 2015, and contributed to the tidal wave of tech censorship (Hunter Biden laptop shenanigans, Amazon book bans, and so forth) that followed Trump’s first election in 2016; a blink of an eye later, they’re orating about the importance of free expression, guzzling supplements, and training in martial arts. Bill Kristol and the Cheneys have joined the Democrat coalition, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. the Republicans. The elites they are a-circulatin’.

But it’s the last of these senses of “vibe shift,” the drifting of the sands of public opinion, that’s the slipperiest, vaguest, and nonetheless the most consequential. Social scientists of a hard materialist bent are constantly frustrated by the divergence between the “hard facts” of the economy and economic agents’ perception of things; it turns out that opinions about the economy do not always align with economic reality, and the opinions are ultimately what matters. And when public opinion shifts rapidly and intensely, it is never “mere,” especially in a democracy where things like congressional seats and legislation are lying downstream: recall how extensively George W. Bush traveled the country persuading voters to support the Iraq invasion.

For what it’s worth, I don’t live in New York, DC, or Los Angeles; I don’t spend time in these places; I pay only the dimmest attention to the “scene reports” and can-you-believe-it handwringing that make the rounds every few months. I think—though I may be wrong—that I have a different purview into the “vibe shift” than the megalopolitan scene mavens who drive this particular discourse. They posit a unidirectional “shift to the right” by “the culture” taken generally. New Atheism is dead, and religion is cool; even normies are avoiding seed oils. Both of these things are true, even from my purview. But things are, of course, far more complex.

I live in New Orleans, a gregarious city where conversation with strangers—even about things like politics—is part of the normal course of things. I’m an academic, but New Orleans is almost all town, no gown; it’s hard to be “in an academic bubble” in a city with a spirit and identity as strong as this one. But even on my campus, I’ve heard a surprising number of people admit relief at the results of the election, albeit quietly and in private; whatever Trump’s victory boded for the country at large, they whisper, it at least means a rebuke of the academic status quo, which over the past few years has grown intolerable. (Even before the election, Tulane had renamed its “Presidential Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to one “on Equity and Tulane Values”; I’d bet money on another rebranding soon.) And off campus, most days involve some encounter with a stranger offering a comment, sometimes with shocking frankness, about the state of things: crime, immigration, local political corruption, and among fellow parents at the playground, the state of education for their kids. The pandemic continues to weigh heavily on the minds of many, whether because the government did too little or too much. Complaining about politics is normal, but the register of exasperation is not. (If I had a dollar for every “I don’t like Trump, but…”) Only St. John the Baptist Parish—Louisiana’s version of counties—saw gains for the Democrats since 2020; even the incredibly liberal Orleans Parish, where I live, swung gently toward the GOP. At the same time, and no less surprisingly, most of members of my family—all of whom live in other uncool middle American places—are undergoing sudden and unexpected transformations of belief, largely in the other direction: former Bush-era Republicans are posting pro-Antifa memes on Facebook while erstwhile Obama liberals dabble in communism on TikTok. Everything’s all topsy turvy and it’s unclear how to talk to anyone anymore. If those why deny the existence of the “vibe shift” are free of this problem, I envy them.

None of this, of course, is an entirely novel experience for Americans. “America is a land of wonders,” Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, “in which everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement.” This constant flux, he wrote, keeps “the minds of the citizens in a perpetual state of feverish agitation, which admirably invigorates their exertions, and keeps them in a state of excitement above the ordinary level of mankind.” Which is to say, maybe America itself is just one big ongoing “vibeshift.” But this would make the denial of such a thing even less plausible. And if politics is (in Aristotle’s phrasing) the “art of the possible,” then anyone looking to act politically, or even just looking to understand what’s going on, will need—so as to know what the possibilities even are—to pay close attention to the shifting of the vibe.