Vibing in the Wrong Direction
More thoughts on Klein's column.
Maybe I am just in intellectual rebellion against vibes-based “analysis,” or maybe I just never thought that there was some real sense that there was some moment in which the broader culture thought Trump was “cool,” but I am finding the Ezra Klein column that James Joyner wrote about today to be more than a bit hollow. I never thought Trump won the 2024 election because he was giving the country what they wanted, save in the sense that he was the one on the ballot challenging an incumbent party that was out of favor. Things like inflation and pandemic frustration were more important than any Trump vibes. I realize that this is a bit reductive, but it is still the basic truth.
If we set aside vibes and talk about the attention economy and the cool social media output of Newsom and Mamdani, it is not a surprise that a president is less popular a year after their election. It is kind of a thing.
Moreover, it is not a surprise that a lame duck president is finding his influence starting to wane. Still, like I (and James) noted the other day, let’s not forget how much damage he has done and will continue to do, vibes or no.
But when we assess where we have been and where we are going, I can’t help but notice that the Vice President, who is vying to lead the party, is out there stoking white grievance.
As is the world’s richest man.
Back to Vance, we also have demonizing and lying about “the left.”
Note to mention xenophobia.
I may be missing Klein’s point, but even if the “Trump vibe shift is dead,” the next stage of American “conservatism,” and therefore national politics, is looking pretty bleak. Maybe all of this collapses in on itself, but when I think about how much open racism there has been in Repulican discourse of late, combined with things like the Young Republicans Nazi chat or things like the following (source), I am quite concerned with where the vibes are going, shall we say.
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Do any of you remember a single instance of anyone apologizing for being white?
@Slugger:
“ My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from a guy who knows a kid who’s going with the girl who overheard someone say it at 31 Flavors last night”
Kleins perspective is terrifying. Many people – moderates and liberals included – believe Trumps tactics are dying out. No, they are not. That are evolving. The torch is being passed to a younger, fresher talent that has mastered the ability to communicate.
I hate any of these assessments of what happened (what went wrong), without loud emphatic acknowledgement that rightwing MONEY and rightwing MEDIA and rightwing MASTERY of social media are now the force majeure in our politics today. It’s hard to get Dem messaging to penetrate through that juggernaut.
This is starkly evidenced in how “wrong direction” this country was at the end of Trump’s 1st term, and how “right direction” this country had become by the end of Biden’s term, in a very real metrics. And yet, the GOP was able to bury the facts with visceral messaging connecting with voters’ innate bigotry. The GOP strategists have “hacked” the human brain, and have boatloads of money to push their strategies. Welcome to Trump’s economy down the hole part 2.
The only cure, apparently, is “hair of the dog that bit us.” Both times, then and now, it is the intrusion of real economic pain that jolts the beguiled out of their rightwing media induced stupor. Somewhat.
@Slugger: Nobody was apologizing for “being white.” Rather, the bad behavior of some white people in specific instances was being acknowledged and criticized. But the “genius” of the rightwing strategy was to blur details and with an economy of words generate anxiety in their target audience.
Speaking as a white guy 7 years Vance’s senior, I don’t recall ever having had to apologize for my race.
(N.B. I mistakenly posted this in the wrong post about “vibes”, but I think it works here, too. It’s just a bit maybe off-topic)
I want to note something that I have observed over the past months.
I have a long-term hobby in the form of tabletop role-playing, which is doing really well these days. There are podcasts and YouTube channels which feature people playing the game. Some veterans, some newbies. Some celebrities from elsewhere, for some TTRPGs have made them famous.
So, looking through a website where various game leaders (we call them GMs for “game master” or DMs – for “dungeon master”, even though we rarely do actual dungeons these days) and there is a smorgasbord of hashtags pronouncing them gay or genderfluid or trans or non-neurotypical. They are plowing ahead as if Nancy Mace or Joanne Rowling didn’t exist.
I saw this during Pride Month, too. All the hate and all the damage being done, and it is real damage is not really going to stop what’s happening. They are just going to make things miserable until we as a country decide we’ve had enough of that and we need to move on. I see that day coming.
If your a trans person – simply existing is a radical act. Not only are you transformed (at least outwardly, yes, I know you have always felt that way), but being out transforms the world as well. In a good way. A very good way.
Government doesn’t lead people, it follows them. Our government is built to be conservative in the small ‘c’ sense, resistant to change. It is a “low-pass” filter, as we might say in engineering terms. That said, it can’t stop a pervasive social change.
Be careful with this stuff. People like Turning Point and JD Vance, etc, are very very interested in making it look as though they are fronting a groundswell of opinion, and there are an avalanche of people who agree with them. That’s what the audience at these conferences expect and desire, that’s what the photo-ops rely on.
At any time in the last 90 years you could have found people espousing these views. The internet gives them an unprecedented opportunity to look bigger and scarier. (We should always have taken them seriously.)
Don’t be scared, be brave, that’s what I’m saying. But not to Steven so much, who already is out there with this blog.
Steven:
“Maybe I am just in intellectual rebellion against vibes-based “analysis,” or maybe I just never thought that there was some real sense that there was some moment in which the broader culture thought Trump was “cool,” …”
I believe that Klein was mistaking ‘cool among the punditry’ for plain old ‘cool.
@Jay L. Gischer:
https://outsidethebeltway.com/shifting-vibes/#comment-3020961
@Kylopod: I was a white kid during the Civil Rights era and I’ve never felt compelled to apologize for being white either. OTOH, I find myself wanting to apologize to non-whites for JD Vance a lot these days
I don’t see a way out doesn’t involve all of this collapsing in on itself. So, as you and other commentators, such as EddieInCA have noted, the outlook is bleak, yet the only way out is through that bleakness. I tend to see the openness in Republican discourse to racism (or fascism, authoritarianism, cruelty, you name the retrograde philosophy) as useful. Sunshine remains a disinfectant. It’s better than the dog whistling.
@EddieInCA: Pretty much anything I say here is going to be heard by you as dismissive of your fears. That I do not want. Your fears are real, they come from somewhere, not just imagination.
Maybe all I can say right now is that those fears are exactly what MAGA wants you to feel. And having us feel helpless is also part of their game plan.
I saw something a couple weeks ago that echoes @EddieInCA’s linked comment.
Here is the study, “Estimating the Ideology of Political YouTube Videos“.
I find a lot about the paper interesting. They used an NLP model to make inferences about engagement of YT videos.
Usual methodological questions aside, several of the charts seem relevant to this discussion if they are reasonably accurate. I got rate limited trying to find a way to link the other charts of interest, so I’ll focus on the one I can easily link.
Figure 2: Subreddits arranged by ideological score.
The placement of the r/collegerepublicans is disturbing. It is well to the right of the defunct r/The_Donald. The latter had to find a new home after Reddit banned it for numerous instances of toxic behavior. r/republicans overlaps with r/The_Donald, and is ever so slightly to the right of r/conservative.
Three RW subreddits, collegerepublicans, thenewright, and counteveryvote cluster and are way too close to r/white_pride for anyone to feel comfortable.
Also note that the placement of the ‘far-left’ progressives (~-0.5). The subreddits with scores around 0.5: r/libertarian and r/classical_liberals. One cluster mentioned above, republicans, The_Donald, and conservative, are around 0.75.
I would love to hear thoughts. There are definitely other points of interest in that chart, especially in light of the seemingly ubiquitous notion that Reddit is a hive mind of Leftists. For one thing, two general news subreddits are about as far to the right(~0.25) as r/liberal (0.25) is to the left. r/neutralnews is barely on the positive side.
But also, if you look at the paper, Figures 3 and 6 stand out. I have thoughts, but need to do a little more thinking about them and also read the rest of the paper.
@Jay L. Gischer:
On groundswells of opinion and avalanche of people:
Has this not been descriptive of the GOP since the Nixon years?
I recall a quote about Goldwater winning, it just didn’t happen until 1980. Nixon may have leaned on the silent majority rhetoric, but that framing carried through 80s. Then Gingrich seems to have kicked off the transition from silent to (ob)noxious.
@Jay L. Gischer: Thank you for writing that; I feel the same way. I’m not saying things are good, or that bad things aren’t happening. But MAGA isn’t winning, no matter how loudly they say they are. There aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t very competent. Germany in the 1930s is very different from the USA in the 2020s.
We may not end up in a great place, after this, but it’s not going to be where MAGA thinks it will be.
I think what Vance meant was “We don’t have to apologize for being assholes anymore”. Make Assholishness Gratifying Again.