Vibe Drift

On the politics of believing in belief

In June of 2021, Sean Monahan, one of the founders of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (of “normcore” fame) who now writes a newsletter called 8Ball, coined the term “vibe shift” to refer to an emerging cultural transformation, one whose contours were at the time hazy but that has since come into focus: a rejection of the background left-liberal consensus, a political shift to the right, and a new cultural decadence and nihilism. When he wrote at the tail end of the pandemic moment, the reference point for “the vibe shift” was the micro-neighborhood in downtown New York referred to as Dimes Square, known mostly to trust-fund skateboarders, artists, and the people (like Monahan) paid to market their tastes to large corporations. Three years later, the term “vibe shift” was being used by Very Serious People—people living inside the Beltway, people who write for the Times and the Post—to describe the historical significance of Donald Trump’s comeback, and the Canadian government was enacting tax holidays to stave off what the Deputy Prime Minister referred to as a “vibecession.” According to Niall Ferguson—author of Civilization: The West and Rest and a Harvard professor who describes himself as “a sixty-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders”—after Trump’s election “the vibe shift…immediately [went] global.”

I can understand why Becca Rothfeld is exasperated with vibe talk. There is a maddening vagueness to this discourse; one would like to simply mute it. What are vibes? Show me the vibes. If, as critics, we are supposed to judge them, we need to see them. Vibes seem tailor-made for the armchair commentator: invisible, unquantifiable, unfalsifiable, you can route them along whatever narrative lines you like. “The vibe shift” is shorthand for whatever it is that seems to have happened to our culture and politics in recent years—something that germinated in 2016, was fertilized by the events of 2020, and, over the last nine months or so, has come to fruition. The concern is that by calling it “vibes,” we fall prey to the kind of fundamentally vague, associational way of thinking that the term, born in the 60s counterculture, evokes, and that we thereby give up on real cultural and political analysis: citing evidence, offering reasons, constructing a narrative. Another claim is that, to the extent that a “vibe shift” has occurred, it is primarily among commentators themselves: that this supposedly widespread phenomenon is actually confined to the highly online types who do live in a world of commentary and takes, cultural analysis and political prediction. This vibes-based community, let’s call it, is out of touch with the reality-based community, the hypothetical Real People—Rothfeld’s “dentist in Vermont” and “architect in Arizona”—who, we imagine, don’t care about DEI and Critical Race Theory, about sedevacantism and the Second Vatican, about microplastics and hormone disruptors—or even about masculinity and birthrates and neopronouns. What matters are issues like inflation, healthcare, wars, Israel. The Democrats have failed to offer solutions to any of these; this led to enough frustration that enough marginal voters were willing to vote for Trump not out of any profound shift to the right on culture or politics but simply as an alternative to Biden, in an ironic reversal of the Democrats’ favored ‘strategy’ over the last 8 years.

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.

But here I think we start to see the deeper truth in “vibes,” a truth that this dismissal risks obscuring. Writer John Ganz put this neatly in the early days of the vibe discourse: what we are seeing is less a “vibe shift” than a “shift to vibes.” The important thing is less the “normalization,” by podcasters and memers—and now national politicians and billionaires—of a nebulous set of reactionary opinions and tendencies. The important thing is the collapse of belief in “norms” as such. The very nature of political culture has been radically transformed. Trump may have promised to end wars and lower prices, but does anyone really believe him? If they do, it has nothing to do with any plans or strategies he articulated and everything to do with the free-floating cultural energy he so expertly channels. What he has shown is that it is no longer necessary (or even advisable) to provide a believable political platform, and to argue for why we should try to achieve it. That’s a sucker’s game. Politics has become directly libidinal.

Sentiment, mood, “animal spirits” have always, of course, been central to politics and economics. Carter’s “malaise speech” from 1978, at the dawn of the neoliberal era, was an early indicator that sentiment was starting to come out of the shadows. What has changed is that emotions and affects are no longer seen as unconscious forces that need to be mediated by conscious reflection, regulated by collective debate, and transformed through political action. Trump dismissed Bitcoin in his first term but his recent, aggressive alignment with crypto is not just a matter of having been paid off. $TRUMP is as good of a bet, and just as legitimate, as the man himself. The logic of the memecoin is the logic of MAGA; sentiment is not the driver but the destination. To the moon, to Mars: out of this world, back to the future, to somewhere ‘great’—somewhere that is, precisely, nowhere in particular.

It is a funny sort of nihilism that believes in nothing except belief itself. But it would be a mistake to say that this pomo nihilism is confined to the hyperonline, to those whose minds have been destroyed by Twitter—whether they are incel crypto-trader white-nationalist shitposters or the Beltway quiet luxury commentators who obsess over them. As Reason was in the Age of Enlightenment which we are now definitively exiting, vibes are self-authorizing—viral. Whether you believe or not is precisely beside the point: vibes are belief, relieving you of the burden of believing in anything yourself. And we all depend on them now: not just the dentist in Vermont but the peasant in Burma. The world economy now runs on vibes: on the perpetual, exponential growth of US capital markets, and on the fantasy of artificial general intelligence which feeds it and which is itself the purest expression of the memetic logic of an intelligence freed from self-conscious reflection.

Right now, the left has bad vibes. Brat, Trump derangement syndrome, “this is not normal”: this is not only no vision, but self-blinding—an evasion of the responsibility to offer a vision at all. Essentially, non-politics. The right, by contrast, is not so much nonpolitical (as it claims to be) as actively, aggressively, anti-political—vibes-only; come along for the ride. As a whole, the political situation feels at once truly dire and radically open. This is something the right has been anticipating for a while. In a remarkable article in the FT, Peter Thiel begins by reminding us that the Greek word apocalypse means unveiling. He casts “the internet” as the agent of history, and thus of apocalyptic unveiling, something that will, whether we like it or not, reveal “the ancien regime’s secrets.” Thiel—an evangelical, yes, but more importantly a believer in the technological singularity, when humans will become fully fungible with vibes—has been talking along similar lines since at least 2004, when he sponsored a conference at Stanford on “Politics and the Apocalypse.” There he delivered a paper with similar themes, arguing a reckoning was coming that would collapse the distance between transcendent truth and secular politics. “We are the exceptional generation that has learned the truth of human history for the first time."

Vibes, in the end, are just us: the human capacity to have ideas and to act on them, alienated and abstracted into a mystical force that we cannot know and that we do not control. A god that, killed by man, has come back to haunt him as an uncanny ghost, with no qualities, no meaning, no substance. Vibe-world is “apocalyptic” in that everything that happens appears as revelation: an immediate, direct unveiling of a reality that—because it is neither under our control nor distinct from us—can never be changed.

Any sort of leftist response to this strange moment would have to begin by conceiving of it in different terms. The notion of crisis, while itself emptied out by overuse over the last few years, could perhaps be a start. The Greek term krisis means decision, not just inflection point: the point is that to bury your head in the sand—to wait for the moment to pass in the hope that the old world will come back—is already to have made a choice. The vibes-based right accepts this, and affirms its non-decision—its fealty to the vibes. If the left (or anyone) wants something else, it would need first to acknowledge that we now live in a world where vibes are king, and then start planning an exit.