Unfortunately, it has not yet become standard practice for exit pollsters to ask voters about the vibes. If they did, we might have the hard data to help settle the growing, if still niche, debate about whether Donald Trump’s comeback and the relatively light #Resistance to it this time around signal a broader cultural shift toward the right. Taking the pulse of America—a vast, irregular, many-hearted thing—is, of course, always a bit of a fool’s errand, if sometimes a necessary one. It’s not that the vibes aren’t there or that they don’t shift, but more that they’re always shifting and often in contradictory directions. 

The more interesting question is perhaps why it feels intuitive now to describe the red shift in the 2024 election as part of a vibe shift. It’s this point that James Duesterberg gets at when he writes that it’s not just that the vibe has shifted but that “the very nature of political culture has been radically transformed.” There’s been, in other words, a “shift to vibes” as John Ganz has put it. 

That shift has not taken place only at the level of voters or political commentary. We just endured a presidential campaign based almost entirely on vibes. Kamala tried to “bring the joy” back; Trump danced and raved about Hannibal Lecter and did several laps on the podcast circuit; and the vice-presidential candidates debated who was weirder. The shift to vibes is a shift away from genuine politics or, as Walter Benjamin referred to it in the 1930s in reference to European fascism, an “aestheticization of politics” that turns political figures and movements into vehicles of personal and collective fantasy for alienated audiences.

The right’s victory in the latest battle of the vibe or culture war started with a strategy that took this aestheticization more or less explicitly for granted. In the aughts, Andrew Breitbart took to repeating the dictum that “politics is downstream of culture.” He was wrong to construe this as some kind of eternal principle but right insofar as politics was being subordinated to, if not downright drowned by, culture. Breitbart understood this as a lesson that leftists had long ago taken to heart and that the right needed to internalize and put into action. 

Along with many others, Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s successor at Breitbart News, the incendiary website that fueled the alt-right, followed his lead. Inspired by a delusional and conspiracist understanding of the left’s successes in the second half of the twentieth century—their “march through the institutions”—the right’s culture warriors countered with a march of their own. As part of this project they coopted, transmogrified, and enacted postmodern cultural theory and deployed it in increasingly bizarre yet effective ways. Truth is subordinate to power. Trolling abounds. Signs float free of what they signify. Dizzying doses of irony and post-irony render all attempts at interpretation fruitless. The zone is flooded with shit. And the shits are, once again, in charge. 

What kind of politics is downstream of this culture? Bannon may have a political program, but the politics that have actually emerged can’t break free of the cultural riptide. Trump has instead brought the misbegotten culture war to the core bureaucracies of the government itself and put celebrity disruptors like RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of it, with dangerous and unpredictable results. More generally, he’s governed like a political pundit who makes things happen primarily with a view to the cable news that night. He often can’t resist the urge to call in the next morning with his own take. It’s bad TV come to life, including the prospect of complete breakdown permanently on the horizon.

Meanwhile, it’s worth asking what the real political consequences of the left’s earlier dominance in the culture were, exactly? What has its prominence in cultural and educational institutions—feared and exaggerated to the point of paranoia on the right but undeniable nonetheless—actually produced politically over the last quarter century? In terms of a traditional left-wing agenda—in favor of expanding citizen welfare and workers’ rights, protecting against the exploitation of the environment and the vulnerable, and forestalling the military-industrial complex and corporate capture of the political system—almost nothing. Left-wing political victories, if they can be called that, belong mostly to the cultural realm itself. 

Those victories, of course, weren’t nothing, but the prominence of those issues was in large part due to the symbolic cover they provided for shifting Democratic Party priorities. Cultural issues became compensation for the loss of material politics, as the party’s base shifted from the working to the professional classes. Policy, it was decided, could mostly be managed by economists and other experts beholden to the corporate class. This was not the project of a left-wing vanguard marching through the institutions but a segment of the establishment helping to concentrate political power in particular institutions and industries, including Silicon Valley. In this case, what came downstream of culture was not politics, but intentional depoliticization, of the economy most of all. 

Of course, the strategic calculations and preferences of Clinton- and Obama-era neoliberals were not the only reason for the growing prominence of culture over politics. Material changes to patterns of production and consumption also isolated people, removing them from the communal contexts in which some grassroots political organizing against the rising oligarchy was still possible (as demonstrated by the anti-globalization movement and, later, Occupy). The digital revolution, accelerating exponentially with the universal adoption of the smartphone in the early 2010s, made gig-ified, highly surveilled and atomized work possible, while addicting us to our devices and the new possibilities for shopping, entertainment, and pseudo-socializing they afforded. Symbolic individual gestures on social media in support of cultural causes came to be seen as some kind of political action, especially in opposition to the cultural antagonist in the White House after 2016. 

These technological changes joined and reinforced the already existing tendency on the center-left toward a fusion of technocratic managerialism and cultural progressivism, with both sides of this unholy union reaching their apogee during the pandemic. Professional-class progressives working comfortably from home—with their material needs met by invisible gig workers forced to expose themselves to harm—took to posting “follow the science” on their Twitter and black squares on their Instagram.

The increasing dominance of symbolic cultural issues has transformed the understanding of what politics is on both the left and the right. It’s true, as has been said time and again, that politics has become a matter of “tribal” identities and not solidarity—defined by who hates me and who I hate. But, more saliently, culture-choked politics moved to a new level of alienation and fantasy. Political change, when it happens, is concrete: a person votes, a law or policy is enacted. Those who busy themselves with grassroots political change quickly come up against the friction of the real world: their beliefs are challenged and revised; they’re exposed to real conditions they didn’t know about; and they’re forced to make compromises and form imperfect coalitions. Cultural change, on the other hands, is more amorphous, more sudden—more vibey. It’s therefore more amenable to fantasy, acts of projection, and delusions of control or “impact.” On the left, at its worst, this eventually manifested itself in the efforts to “change the culture” by sheer coercion that have so alienated voters.

The right-wing cultural extremism, now apparently ascendant, has developed versions of all the same pathologies, albeit with a harder, more retrograde, and more apocalyptic edge. New-right types like to discipline the perceived moderate elements on their side by saying they “don’t know what time it is.” “Normy conservatives” don’t realize, in other words, that this is a hinge moment in history where all ordinary political norms should be suspended to address the crisis that is the left-wing takeover of the institutions. It is not a time to be reasonable, measured, cooperative. Whereas on the left a vision of history as a Harry Potter march toward progress became prominent, the right sees it as Terminator-style apocalypse where the moment to save the world from utter disaster must not be missed. The full-throated entry of the “tech broligarchs” into Trump’s coalition promises a politics driven even more explicitly by sci-fi delusion.

The reduction of politics to culture also manifests itself in political commentary overwhelmingly focused on labels, categorization, and historical analogies, rather than on the accumulation and exercise of power. We are treated to long-running debates over whether something Trump has done is, strictly speaking, fascist. Biden is, in one minute, FDR, in the next, the reincarnation of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Historians grapple with the question of whether we are living through the Gilded 1890s, the totalitarian 1930s, or the stagflating 1970s. 

Of course, calling things by their right name is important and historical comparisons can be useful. But the overwhelming purpose of these debates is not to clarify things so we can act politically with the right framework in mind; they are an end in themselves. The pundit’s goal is simply to have the “right” interpretation, to read the culture correctly. These debates increasingly have the character of an argument over whether Tony died at the end of The Sopranos. The political commentator is increasingly a tastemaker, giving the audience at home the language, analogies, and posture with which to relate to the news. We need to know not just what movie to watch tonight but what movie we might be living in. Is it Schindler’s List or Idiocracy? Fight Club or Gaslight?

Whether or not we should call what just happened a “vibe shift” is an argument of the same kind. On the one hand, it’s hard to deny that an already well-established exhaustion with symbolic activism on the left—felt on the left itself as much as anywhere else—hurt the Harris campaign. But whether it extends to a widespread embrace of right-wing cultural views—like that seen among members of the Manhattan art scene, segments of the tech industry, trad Caths, and male Gen Zers—is far more difficult to say. And the right measure for whether the vibe has shifted is not reality. The “vibe shift” is the vibe shift.

Still, it’s easy to overestimate its salience—and even the salience of the shift to vibes—for ordinary middle- and working-class voters who pay only intermittent attention to the news, and who are always put off by cultural vanguardism in any case. And vibes certainly matter less to the powerless in our political system who either don’t vote or tend to identify less strongly with political parties or movements. On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the breathtaking speed with which major players in the tech industry have changed sides in the culture war suggests that the vibes also may not be as important to those actually able to apply power in our political system.

Both the “vibe shift” and the discourse about it are reflections of an aestheticized political sphere that is both turning further inward and intensifying. But this ratcheting up of activity in the superstructure to dizzying levels of polarization, drama, and confusion corresponds to stasis in material politics (with both conditions harboring the possibility—if not inevitability—of their own different kinds of disasters). Vibes are compensation for this depoliticization and stasis. Despite pent-up desire for material change, the vibe, it seems, is the only thing that can shift, and so it must.

But Democrats and the left should resist the temptation to read their loss as a vibe shift that they must correct by, for example, finding a Joe Rogan of their own. It would be more productive, and more accurate, to see the voters’ rejection of Biden and Harris as a rejection not of their vibe per se—as awful as it was—but of the shift to vibes, in general. They should work to develop an ambitious vibe-free pro-worker agenda that makes it clear that it’s not voters’ perceptions that need to be managed but their reality that needs to be improved. Such an agenda would include provisions to end the unchecked influence of money on political campaigns and governance, universalist programs like Medicare for All, and measures to make unionization easier. It might go some way toward rehabilitating not just the left but politics itself.